The Toronto Star reports this morning that PlanetSpace has signed an agreement with the government of Nova Scotia to develop a spaceport in the province for the company’s planned orbital vehicle. As reporter Scott Simmie writes:

…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.

There are a lot of big claims there: “massive orbital launch facility”, “industry giants”, and “on scale with huge NASA operations”. However, the evidence to support that in the article is pretty weak—perhaps simply because the agreement hasn’t been formally announced yet, but nonetheless enough to raise questions among skeptics.

For example, the article claims that the company has “also been in talks with the U.S. space agency, which is very interested in their Silver Dart design.” (So interested, it seems, that the company did not make the cut in the first round of the COTS evaluations.) Company chairman Chirinjeev Kathuria told the Star that the company “in discussions with NASA to sign a space act agreement with one of the NASA centres to build a cargo and crew vehicle for the International Space Station.” This sounds like a typical Space Act agreement where NASA facilities are provided for testing, or other assistance, with no exchange of funds. In other words, if PlanetSpace is going to build a “cargo and crew vehicle” for the ISS, it will have to raise the money elsewhere to do it.

Perhaps that’s where the “industry giants” come in. No names were mentioned in the article, but Mark James, an official with Nova Scotia Business Inc., the province’s business development agency, said that “industry leaders from Canada and the U.S. are on board”.

The size of the proposed facility seems a little small: it’s less than half a square mile, whereas Spaceport America in New Mexico will have access to nearly 50 times the land. (James also says that New Mexico is spending “over $500 million for a facility similar to this”; that’s two to three times what the state plans to spend on the spaceport, even when converting from US to Canadian dollars.)

One space tourism-related item not covered in last week’s report about the company: PlanetSpace is still planning to develop and operate the Canadian Arrow suborbital vehicle, but not from the Nova Scotia spaceport. Instead, Kathuria said Canadian Arrow will operate from a “Midwestern state”. However, there’s not much in the way of options there: Oklahoma’s spaceport is inteneded for horizontal takeoff and landing vehicles, not VTOL vehicles like Canadian Arrow; New Mexico, while most likely able to support such launches, is not typically considered a “Midwestern” state. Maybe Spaceport Sheboygan would be an option…