It’s the first time a Canadian astronaut will fly on a commercial spaceflight, a move that could open many doors for the country’s space economy, says the astronaut preparing for the trip. Joshua Kutryk is set to travel to the International Space Station as part of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission next month. He is one of four astronauts who will take part in a six-month mission to conduct research and orbital maintenance. “We are flying on a private company’s rocket, SpaceX’s Dragon and their Falcon 9 rocket. That’s the first time the Canadian Space Agency is doing this,” Kutryk told BNN Bloomberg. “In a wider sense, that just indicates how space is changing.” He says Canada’s involvement comes as private companies like Space X are being relied on by governments to solve the difficult problem of “going to and from space.” “Historically, if you look at any technology, we see the big steps forward only when commercial entities start to get involved,” says Kutryk. Huge opportunity for Canadian scientists He says the mission is a huge opportunity for Canadian scientists. “We’ll be doing research for investigators from Canada, of course, but also from all over the world.” He explains that the current mission will focus on two things: studying how long-duration spaceflight affects the astronaut’s body, and advancing healthcare on Earth. He explains astronauts face prolonged exposure to microgravity and radiation, which create health challenges that need to be understood better for future space missions. “Being in space is bad for the astronaut,” Kutryk said. “It’s not good for me because it’s kind of like taking normal aging processes that everybody suffers from on Earth and putting them into super fast forward.” But those same conditions can also create a unique laboratory for studying diseases and health conditions on Earth, he says. “It makes it an exceptionally good environment for studying science,” says Kutryk. ‘These sorts of things fundamentally change the world’ He compares the current stage of the space industry with the early development of aviation and ocean exploration when the eventual commercial applications of new technologies were difficult to predict. “But we know in hindsight that these sorts of things fundamentally change the world”, says Kutryk. “There is strategic opportunity to do with energy and with computing, of course, with communications and internet, to do with science and making discoveries that we know we can only make in space, to do with exploration, to do with resources, even on the moon and in other worlds in our solar system.” Canada’s rapidly growing space industry The Canadian space sector generated $5 billion in revenues in 2024 and contributed $3.8 billion to the country’s gross domestic product, according to a Canadian Space Agency report. The sector’s contribution to real GDP has grown more than 15 per cent since 2019. Employment has also jumped. The report shows 14,622 were directly employed in 2024, up four per cent from the previous year and 24 per cent from 2019. From those employees, 72 per cent were STEM and 41 per cent were engineers and scientists. A rapidly growing part of the industry has been space systems manufacturing where revenues jumped 50 per cent in 2024 to $903 million, according to the. State of the Canadian Space Sector Report 2025. “I am an astronaut, not an investor. But certainly, when I look to space, I see just opportunity in the purest sense of the word,” says Kutryk.
