Canadian City Asks SpaceRyde To Stop Loud Rocket Motor Tests
A Canadian city of 13,000 wants a rocket startup to stop testing its engines there.
Residents of Trent Hills, an Ontario town about two hours east of Toronto, ask privately funded SpaceRyde rocket ship company to halt engine testing in the region, and the municipality has sought legal advice to help achieve that outcome, according to local reports.
“The noise can be heard for miles and can startle anyone in the vicinity. Horses can run wild and pets are upset. Wildlife is disturbed,” claims one petition (opens in new tab) n Change.org which was signed by more than 700 people on Tuesday (November 8).
“People’s safety is at risk as the startling noise could cause anyone riding a horse, bicycle, motorbike, working on a ladder or on the roof to temporarily lose concentration as they process the alarming sound,” the petition adds. up.
SpaceRyde’s head of marketing, Jen Scholten, declined to comment on the petition and the reports on Monday (Nov. 7). “A lot has happened since its publication,” Scholten said, but did not provide further details.
Related: Nova Scotia spaceport project aims to launch clean-tech missiles
In early October, the City of Trent Hills referred the situation to legal counsel, asking “the owner and occupant of the site [for] a commitment to voluntarily stop testing rocket engines at the site,” local newspaper Trent Hills Nu (opens in new tab) wrote.
The council alleges that SpaceRyde did not disclose its plans to test the engine in its planning application to place a facility on the site, which is near two state roads. The allegations have not been proven in court, and SpaceRyde has said in reports (opens in new tab) that testing the rocket engine was an additional use of the property.
In a comment to Trent Hills Nu (opens in new tab) in September, Sohrab Haghighat, co-founder of SpaceRyde, noted that the 100-decibel engine test noise is brief, rare and equivalent to a large truck running its engine briefly on a road.
SpaceRyde always informs local residents before testing, Haghighat said, adding that a local man told him the sound is “the sound of progress. It’s the sound of Canada that one day (with) his own rocket into space.”
SpaceRyde opened a 2,300-square-foot facility in Concord in June, inviting both the media and the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. The privately funded company has about 30 employees, according to media reports, and was founded in 2018. It aims to create a three-stage rocket that would fly aboard a balloon to the stratosphere before firing its engines.
The city’s dispute with SpaceRyde takes place as Canada rapidly expands its rocket industry. The Canadian government is considering a spaceport in Nova Scotia that wants to start suborbital launches next year. Several companies in the Toronto area are ramping up production for missiles after years or decades of making parts for US companies.
Canada’s small space industry is also growing as larger community projects take place, such as the Canadian Space Agency‘s commitment to attract astronauts and hardware Moon missions like NASA Artemis 2which aims to send humans on a trip around the moon by 2024.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why am I taller? (opens in new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book on space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or facebook (opens in new tab).
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