[BRIEF NOTE] Atlantic Canada in Space?

I was surprised to read this in the Toronto Star this morning.

Cape Canaveral's got competition.

Cape Breton is going to enter the space race.

The Toronto Star has learned that Nova Scotia has signed a "team agreement" to provide 300 acres of land — and perhaps even some funding — for a massive orbital launch facility that will involve industry giants and could eventually be on scale with huge NASA operations.

"We're basically building a private manned space program for Canada," says Chicago's Dr. Chirinjeev Kathuria, chairman of the PlanetSpace firm that lit the fuse for this deal.

"The facility will see orbital flights, similar to the Kennedy Space Center."

Nova Scotia, which confirmed the agreement late yesterday, could not be happier.

Like New Mexico, which is making a huge investment in a spaceport for commercial use, it envisions virtually unlimited economic spinoffs as private enterprise goes to space.

"This is a huge opportunity for the province," says Mark James, business development executive, Defence and Aerospace, for Nova Scotia Business Inc. — a development agency that promotes economic growth in the province.

Cape Breton is on roughly the same latitude as the ex-Soviet Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. This relatively northerly position would normally weight against the location of a spaceport in Cape Breton, since the farther a rocket is from the equator the more fuel it takes to overcome the Earth's pull and reach orbit with a given mass: The Kennedy Space Center in Florida or the French/European Centre Spatial Guyanais in French Guiana have decided advantages. Cape Breton's advantages lie in the island's location on the eastern seaboard of North America, allowing launches directly to the International Space Station but ensuring that rockets, launched in easterly directions so as not to work against the Earth's rotation, would crash if they crashed in the safely uninhabited Atlantic Ocean.

I'll be watching this. I'm mildly disappointed that it couldn't be located in PEI's Kings County if only because of the likely sociological impacts of a spaceport there, as the enlightening discussion at james_nicoll suggests.

UPDATE (2:35, 22 August 2006) : A commenter explains the advantages of equatorial locations for space launches better than I did:

"The reason for launching from the equator is that the Earth's rotation gives you a starting speed of 1038 mph (if you are launching Eastward). That translates into needing less fuel to reach orbital speed. Because Cape Breton is nearer the Earth's axis of rotation its speed is less, about 734 mph."

[REVIEW] Colm Tóibín, The Blackwater Lightship

Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship begins quietly enough with a party and its aftermath, thrown in the pleasant suburban Irish home of Helen O'Doherty. Life is good for her, with her promising career in education, her husband and her sons, and her well-constructed if circumscribed life. It's only the next day, when a friend of her brother Declan drives up and tells her that Declan is desperately ill with AIDS, that she's forced to deal with the mother and the grandmother she has been trying to distance herself from for years. The various characters thus all trapped in the frame of Declan's decline, The Blackwater Lightship uses them to explore the question of what it is to constitute a family, even in the face of all of the differences--of sexual identity and memory and gender roles--that so complicate families.

I couldn't help but note certain haunting similarities between the civilization described by Tóibín and the civilization that I experienced growing up, the place names and family names and social structures and cultural norms and families that exist(ed). I can't guarantee that these similarities didn't influence my reading of The Blackwater Lightship unduly, although I am willing to say that I found Tóibín's sparse prose to be remarkably evocative in describing the pain of Helen and Declan's family as they try to fumble towards some sort of tolerable conclusion to their various miseries. Any novel with characters so hurried by their painful lives is bound to be a sad novel, but it's to Tóibín's credit that he makes it a good one.

[BRIEF NOTE] Migration's winners and losers

I thought that the table at the end of this article from The Guardian regarding the effects of migration on European populations (not enough to do more than slow down population declines, in case you're wondering) deserved reproduction here.

Migration: population gainers and losers

The gainers (Listed as country, population (net migration)):

United States 299,112,000 (1,005,016)
Italy 58,990,000 (294,950)
Spain 45,511,000 (282,168)
United Arab Emirates 4,937,000 (264,623)
United Kingdom 60,473,000 (223,145)
Canada 32,582,000 (214,715)
Australia 20,575,000 (112,751)
Russia 142,336,000 (106,183)
Malaysia 26,894,000 (100,315)
Germany 82,387,000 (98,864)

The losers:
China 1,311,416,000 (-563,909)
India 1,121,788,000 (-523,512)
Mexico 108,327,000 (-411,643)
Indonesia 225,465,000 (-315,651)
Iran 70,324,000 (-281,296)
Pakistan 165,804,000 (-198,965)
Philippines 86,264,000 (-189,781)
Sudan 41,236,000 (-123,708)
Egypt 75,437,000 (-90,524)
Tanzania 37,858,000 (-68,144)

The size of the influxes into the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia is perhaps not as much commented upon as it should be, as is the volume of the emigration from Indonesia and Tanzania.