When you bring leaders from different communities together, magic happens. That was the theme at Founders & Physicists at the Tannery Event Centre on February 24. The event was the latest in the Founders & series, presented by Communitech and hosted by Communitech’s Nabil G. Fahel.

In a room packed with a Nobel laureate, venture capitalists, Waterloo Rocketry students  and engineers who "trap atoms" for a living, the night served as a celebration of human reach, potential and achievement, but also a reminder of our limitations. 

Nordspace CEO and founder Rahul Goel was scheduled to join Fahel on stage, but world events had other plans. Goel and his wife are expecting their first child in June, and had taken a quick babymoon vacation to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. 

Through a video message, Goel explained, with a mix of apology and disbelief, that an international military operation to take down a drug lord had turned his short tropical getaway into a war zone. It was a grounded, messy reminder of the earthly friction that usually keeps our grandest ambitions tethered to the ground.

The irony wasn't lost on the room. A group gathered to discuss sovereign launch capability and the mastery of space was momentarily thwarted by a grounded flight in Mexico. But in Waterloo, innovation doesn’t wait for a flight clearance. 

Hugh Kolias, founder of Canada Rocket Company, was already set to attend the event and joined Fahel on stage alongside Dr. Katie Mack, the Hawking Chair of Cosmology and Science Communication at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Mack knows the friction between ambition and reality well. Though she is now a world-renowned cosmologist, she told the crowd her original dream was to be an astronaut.

“The problem is that I was too much of a theorist for NASA,” Mack said. “They need people who can take the rocket apart and put it back together. They don’t necessarily need people who can tell you how the stars work.”

It was the perfect setup for a conversation on how to put high-level theory together with the gritty reality of building a rocket.

Even though the evening had begun with a reminder of how easily plans can be disrupted, Fahel focused the conversation on what’s needed to move great Canadian ideas forward. Smile co-founder and CTO Bill Curtis asked Kolias to translate the "software mindset" to the launchpad to understand how a rocket company manages its long-term vision when prototypes aren't just lines of code, but massive pieces of hardware.

Kolias gave U.S.-based Firefly Aerospace as the benchmark for any company working to achieve orbit.

“Firefly did it in about four years $160 million USD in funding and about 100 to 150 people. So if we bring in the right people and have the necessary capital, we should be able to do it in the same amount of time. The caveat is that Canada has never done something like this before, and therefore there's going to be a lot of unknowns along the way,” Kolias said.

Kolias gave the crowd a ten-year roadmap for the Canada Rocket Company’s goals—four years to achieve "light lift", followed by another four-year push to "medium lift," which is the capacity required for true Canadian sovereignty in space.

Meeting those milestones takes talent and capacity, two things Kolias said Canada can deliver if we approach them differently. He added that companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are built up industry knowledge that is not found anywhere else on Earth. Training the next generation of Canadian talent coming out of university means bringing some of that experience here.

“That's our focal point and differentiator,” Kolias said. “There's a certain magic where you can marry the old space culture with the new space culture, bring in the folks who have seen it and done it before and then build up our knowledge base. Ultimately, that overflows to the rest of the Canadian economy—which is very important.”

For Kolias, it is a chance to replicate the success of the PayPal and SpaceX “mafias” that have developed in the U.S. 

“Shopify has done that in Canada. BlackBerry, too. If we could do the same on the aerospace side, then that helps us with industrial diversification,” he said.

While Kolias focused on the industrial changes needed to deliver the future, Mack took the audience on a tour of the intellectual bedrock that makes those industries possible. As a theoretical cosmologist, Mack’s work deals with timescales that make a 10-year rocket roadmap look like a heartbeat, yet she argues that this "blue-sky" thinking is the ultimate driver of innovation.

“All of the amazing technology we have today comes from somebody at some point asking an extremely esoteric question that nobody cared about the answer to except them,” Mack told the audience.

She offered a technical analogy to explain why funding "purposeless" discovery is crucial to innovation. In computer science, an algorithm called a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is used to find the best solution in a complex field. To find the highest peak, the computer is told to "bounce around" randomly. If you only tell the computer to climb the nearest hill, it will never find the massive mountain across the valley.

“If you tell someone, ‘you’ve got to make this car go faster,’ they’re never going to invent a rocket,” Mack said. “You have to give people the freedom to explore all over the place and look in the corners where nobody else is looking.”

For Mack, the "magic" Nabil referenced at the start of the night is the "random walk" of human curiosity. She pointed out that while her day job—studying the ultimate destruction of the cosmos—doesn't have an immediate commercial application, it is the same spirit of inquiry that eventually led to the satellites and sensors Kolias and Goel intend to launch.

The conversation eventually turned to the profound perspective gained by looking at the end of everything. Mack shared a story about a "polluted" white dwarf star that had consumed its own planets, leaving behind only chemical "blips" in its spectrum.

“We have a small space of time in this universe,” Mack said, bringing the room's high-tech ambitions back to a human scale. “We can do amazing things with it. Making meaning out of existence, finding what makes us passionate... that’s what makes life worth living.”

It was the perfect story to end the night. Between geopolitical chaos, economic uncertainty and the cold physics of a dying star, a group of builders, researchers and innovators had gathered together to talk about what we can do with the time we have on this pale blue dot in the cosmos.