The rocket launch from Cape Canaveral is scheduled for 2:35 p.m., and anyone with a vested interest—heck, anyone geeky enough to get excited about space—would be forgiven for being a tad nervous. Besides the weather, which can thwart a launch mere moments before liftoff, extraterrestrial travel, even when unmanned, is risky business.
“In the 1990s, space was about big money and big robotic arms, and projects took decades to develop,” says Germain, whose CV includes work on multiple Space Shuttle missions, the Canadarm and satellite projects with the likes of Spar Aerospace in Toronto and EMS in Montreal. “Then in the mid-2000s, we saw the miniaturization of tech,” he says, waving his iPhone in the air. “You could finally do something useful with something small.
As seen from 500 kilometres above the Earth’s surface, there was one particular image that stood out. Its urgent message was simple: Turkmenistan, you have a problem. That, basically, was what GHGSat wanted to convey to the central Asian nation when, in 2019, the company’s constellation detected a methane emission larger than anything it had ever picked up before.
This is what has piqued the interest of external investors. Tom Ingersoll, a managing partner with New York–based Space Capital, which invests in space technology companies at the early stages, was an adviser to GHGSat and an early member of the board of directors. “I worked with Stephane sometime around 2016 or 2017 on securing Series A funding,” he says.