30 Canadian experts join global move to establish world’s 1st space college

Thirty of Canada’s top space brains – academics, students, industrialists and bureaucrats – have joined an international thrust to establish the world’s first space university.

Hoping to school students in the technology, arts and sciences of man's final frontier, the multi-million-dollar venture brought together delegates from around the world at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this weekend.

"We intend to make this thing fly," Bob Richards, a Toronto educator who is associate administrator of the co-ordinating group developing the school, told The Star in a telephone interview from Cambridge, Mass.

Canada’s role in the university – which will begin operation as on annex of MIT next summer – will be “world class,” a U.S. delegate said.

About 100 delegates from Canada, the United States, Europe, India, Japan, China and the Soviet Union spent the weekend planning the university.

It will “act as a beacon” to attract the world’s students to the peaceful development of space, Richards said. “Students of today grew up with the Apollo program and there is now an element of anger that they are not involved in the space program.”

McGill University in Montreal can offer the best research on space law, while firms like Spar Aerospace and Canadian Astronautics offer the technology needed to conquer space, he said.

Among Canadians speaking or attending the conference were Mac Evans, Canada’s director of space policy and programs; Dr. Nicholas Matte, director of the Institute of Air and Space Law at McGill University; Chris Trump, vice-president of Spar Aerospace of Toronto; Jim Pocklington, vice-president of Canadian Astronautics; Ted Wisz, director of Ryerson’s Faculty of Technology for the International Space University Project.

The university will conduct summer school classes for 100 students at a different university around the world each year for the next five years, when it will begin to offer full-year courses for a larger number of students in time for 1992, which is International Space Year.

McGill University will probably host the university for one summer session, planners say.

- By Kevin Donovan Toronto Star

• History

• History
• Article by Dr. Rod Tennyson
• Article from Toronto Star

• Sponsors/Affiliates and Links

• AUCC
• Bristol Aerospace
• COM DEV
• CSA – ASC
• DND - Défense Nationale
• ISU
• MDA
• OCE
• SSHRC – CRSHC

• Alumni

• CAISU