From food products to space: the AetheraTM story

2023-10-31

In 2018, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) awarded a contribution worth $1.5 million to a small Halifax-based company called Aethera^TM Technologies. This Announcement of Opportunity (AO) was the first to include a dedicated section for small businesses, a strategic decision to help diversify Canada’s space sector and help small firms scale up to space readiness.

Aethera^TM is a radiofrequency (RF) engineering company, whose products include solid-state RF generators that are used in a number of fields including food and mass timber. The Aethera^TM team saw the AO as an opportunity to branch out their technology for space. They successfully proposed a project to adapt it to operate in the vacuum of space and to be integrated into Ad Astra Rocket Company’s Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR®) for advanced in-space electric propulsion.

The CSA‘s Space Technology Development Program team supported Aethera^TM throughout the contribution and advocated for the CSA to give them additional time to complete their project during the pandemic. This eventually paid off: their technology was tested successfully per the mandate received by NASA and will now be on Ad Astra‘s rockets to become a possible candidate for NASA‘s NextSTEP program.