Personally, I’m all for the (well-regulated and reasonably safe) private exploitation of space (for tourism anyway… I’ll wait until we start mining operations to get worried…). Anything that pushes us further into space (and lets face it, NASA and the CSA don’t have the influence to push anymore) is a good thing, imho.

Plus, the article doesn’t say that the pad will ONLY be used for tourism. It will also be used for missions to the ISS, and probably (hopefully) other future space stations as well. Personally, I’d love to see the next generation of manned vehicles (post-shuttle) taking off to repair the space station, or rotate in a crew from a ground station in Nova Scotia. I’d also like to think that such a station might spur us on to actually putting a Canadian in space ourselves. Only three countries have put people in space (the U.S., Russia, and China) and I’d love to see Canada be the fourth (before the ESA puts someone up).

Anyway, as I said I’m a big proponent of space exploration, so you’ll rarely see me objecting to any money for space-related exploration. Still, I think objectively that this is a good thing for Canada. There are worse things we could spend Lockheed martin’s money on, imho!