Regretfully, there is no Canadarm waving you in as you approach MDA Space’s MDA-T new head office in Brampton, Ont.
In fact, there doesn’t seem to be much cool space stuff at all yet—certainly nothing akin to the rocket abutting the front door at SpaceX’s soon-to-be-former California home, or the lunar lander hulking over the lobby of Blue Origin’s headquarters in Washington state. Just a trio of perfectly nice, not-quite-finished buildings amid the constellation of low-rise offices and warehouses now proliferating in this placid corner of suburbia.
Then you have to move your car because you’ve accidentally pulled into a spot reserved for NASA.
It’s one subtle signal of many that MDA is quickly positioning itself at the vanguard of a whole new space race. In the past five years, the stalwart 55-year-old developer of satellites and space robotics has wrangled itself out of foreign ownership, gone public, launched a fleet of industry-leading commercial products, earned a string of blockbuster contracts, doubled sales, hired thousands of employees, and repositioned itself on a dizzyingly sharp growth trajectory.
The man behind it all is CEO Mike Greenley, a sharp and enterprising architect on a mission to take Canada’s largest and most venerated space business to infinity and beyond. “We have a legitimate chance to be one of the top three to five global space companies—that’s for real,” he says with measured, but undeniable, excitement during a conversation in his sun-filled, frill-free corner office. And he’ll be damned if MDA doesn’t chase that opportunity full-throttle.
WHen Greenley came aboard as the new CEO of MDA in January, 2018, he quickly embarked on a mission to take Canada’s largest and most venerated space business to infinity and beyond.
When engineer John Spencer MacDonald and physicist Vern Dettwiler first hung up a shingle in 1969—at the very peak of global space mania—they did so in part to offer top-tier Canadian scientists, engineers and mathematicians the type of hard, interesting problems that would keep them from gravitating south. Over time, that ethos helped turn MacDonald, Dettwiler & Associates from a Vancouver basement operation into a globally respected fount of incredible space technology, with a brag book full of such government-backed big swings as the development of the Canadarm robotic arm and the RADARSAT synthetic aperture radar satellite series.
While the quality of MDA’s work was always steady and strong, its ownership history became a game of cross-border hot potato. In 1995, it became a subsidiary of Virginia-based Orbital Sciences; six years later, a syndicate of majority Canadian investors (including the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan) brought controlling ownership back north. Fast-forward to 2017, when MDA acquired satellite imagery company DigitalGlobe and rebranded as Maxar Technologies. A year later, it moved its headquarters to Colorado. It was in this context that, in January 2018, Greenley came aboard to run the MDA business.
Greenley had never worked in the (non-aero) space business before, but a scan of his CV indicates why he was a shrewd choice for the job. He was trained as a scientist, earning a Master’s degree in psychomotor behaviour (that is, the ways in which we think and learn) from the University of Waterloo. He forged his technical chops providing design support on complex information systems for clients in defence, nuclear power and aerospace, while simultaneously sharpening his entrepreneurial instincts as the CEO of Greenley & Associates, a consultancy he sold to CAE in 2004. He then upped his executive experience over a decade-plus climbing ladders at the likes of CAE, General Dynamics and L3 Technologies. It all produced a leader with an uncanny knack for mobilizing smart people to figure out solutions to important problems. “Once you conquer the systems engineering process and how it works, I find you can adapt it anywhere,” Greenley reasons.
So, upon getting a glimmer of what might be possible at MDA, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to apply his unique set of skills to something big. About as big as it gets, actually. “I came here because it’s space,” he explains, “and because it’s important for Canada.”
The cosmos have always triggered a certain profound ambition among us Earthlings, providing the canvas for—among other things—geopolitical territory-marking, billionaire vanity projects and seemingly unfathomable tests of human achievement. Plenty of that is still going on, but in the past decade, we’ve started thinking differently about space. Specifically, a lot more of us have started to see it as a way to make money.
In a globalized world facing a growing spectrum of competitive, environmental and security threats, more and more businesses—from Uber to Apple—are finding it strategically beneficial to stake commercial claims in the sky. McKinsey & Co. expects the global space economy—comprising technology like satellites and robots, as well as the spectrum of revenue-generating activities made possible by that tech—to reach US$1.8 trillion in 2035, nearly triple its size in 2023.
These are the kind of numbers that set folks dreaming: Witness Elon Musk evangelizing about cities on Mars or Jeff Bezos pegging our economic future to giant orbital industrial parks. And while there’s certainly an element of the far-out in all of this, there’s tangible value in helping organizations address far more immediate terrestrial challenges, like tracking deforestation, patrolling illegal fishing, fostering communication in rural and remote areas, and offering more reliable eyes on matters of sovereignty and security.
“Space is so involved in things that I think Canadians care about, and that are important to our future,” explains Brian Gallant, the CEO of Space Canada, an industry association Greenley helped create and whose board he chairs. “Mike so obviously recognizes this. He understands the moment that space finds itself in.”
Moreover, from the start, Greenley recognized the specific value MDA could bring to the new commercial frontier. “We’ve always participated in the space economy, but it was spotty,” he reports. A ream of data points—more countries creating space agencies, more venture capitalists investing in the sector, more corporate giants developing strategies for extraterrestrial expansion—told him that was changing.
Furthermore, consultations with clients told him that MDA’s experience and track record—with its 100% success rate over more than 450 space missions—could be a differentiator in commercial applications. “It became clear that there’s a new economic zone opening up, and it’s persistent,” he explains. “Once you feel that, and see how we can connect into it with our world-leading innovations, you get the confidence to say: ‘We’ve got this. We can grow this business.’”
Greenley is an arresting conversationalist. He is thoughtful, deliberate and bracingly good at distilling complex ideas into concise, complete sentences. As he speaks, his gaze often locks on the middle distance, as if he’s mentally assembling the logical mainframe for what he’s about to say, yet he’s never less than fully present and engaged. He is quick to share strong and well-articulated opinions on everything from the perils of groupthink (“I really value independent thought”) to Canada’s productivity crisis (“We need more head offices here”). He comes across as not just a guy who knows what he’s talking about, but a guy you want to follow. Which may help explain his efficacy in the monumental effort of repositioning MDA.
After MDA’s relaunch as a standalone entity, the company started to double down on launching commercial products in each of what are now its three core areas of focus: communications satellites, Earth and space observation, and space exploration and infrastructure.
Greenley’s first imperative after taking the job was to build a runway. His vision required the kind of investment and operational agility that would be tough to drum up operating as a subsidiary—especially one with a U.S. parent. Moreover, he felt compelled to repatriate MDA to its country of origin. “We needed to become a standalone company so that we had the freedom to focus on the things where we could really grow,” he explains, “And also we could use our cash and our profits to invest in ourselves, instead of sending it to a head office.”
So, in early 2020, as he puts it, “we caused ourselves to be sold” from Maxar, via acquisition by a consortium of Canadian private equity investors led by Northern Private Capital. A year later, MDA completed its IPO on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
It was a lot of manoeuvring, and a lot of adjustment, in a relatively short period. But Greenley’s suitability for the role was immediately evident, according to Columbus Capital Corp. CEO Brendan Paddick, who was part of the investor group that bought MDA from Maxar, and who now chairs its board. “He has the ideal mix of character and skills,” says Paddick. “He is charismatic, has strong interpersonal skills, and displays decisiveness in his decision-making abilities, even when under intense pressure.”
The months surrounding MDA’s relaunch as a standalone entity provided ample opportunities to test that assessment. Over the years, the company had accrued much of the operational bloat you’d expect from a legacy corporation, with nine lines of business, multiple ERP systems and 250 overlapping software applications at the time he took over. “We had a messy house,” Greenley admits, “and you can’t grow a messy house.”
He launched a multiyear initiative, called One MDA, to streamline things, collapsing divisions into three core business lines with the clearest potential, selling off some non-space businesses and getting rid of what he calls blockers: processes and personalities that impede progress. As a man with a default toward entrepreneurial action, none of this was his favourite part of the job. “To me, it takes very little energy to get a billion dollar contract,” he says, “but I find it takes a lot to work inside operations and cause them to become systematic and efficient.”
Since he knew effective execution of the former would not be possible without the latter, his approach to internal recalibration was characteristically direct and decisive. “Once you focus on where you’re strong, then you can really grow operationally,” he says. “So I’ll make the changes that line everything up against where we’re going.”
“We have a legitimate chance to be one of the top three to five global space companies — that’s for real.”
– Mike Greenley,
CEO of MDA Space
As soon as the house was in better order, the building really began. The company started to double down on launching commercial products in each of what were now its three core areas of focus: communications satellites, Earth and space observation, and space exploration and infrastructure (that’s the one with the robots). Its work has been ambitious, unrelenting and remarkably successful, and conversations with the folks who work closest with Greenley help explain how his particular go-to-market approach made that possible.
“Mike is the ideal captain you’d want on your team when you’re faced with a significant challenge or a market opportunity,” says Holly Johnson, the company’s vice-president of robotics and space operations. This year alone, her team has secured a $1-billion contract to complete the design and build of Canadarm3, the Canadian Space Agency’s contribution to the NASA-led Gateway lunar space station program, and launched the Skymaker suite of space robotics, which applies Canadarm tech for commercial use. “Mike has this knack of consistently finding a way to rally stakeholders, often with diverse views and different backgrounds, behind a common goal,” she adds.
“I call him a realistic visionary,” asserts Minda Suchan, MDA’s VP of geointelligence, who joined the company in 2020 after years at U.S. aerospace and defence giants. She says Greenley won her over by offering her the chance not only to run a full value chain—from designing satellites to selling their data—but also to grow it into new commercial markets, which her team is now doing with MDA Chorus, a constellation of radar-based Earth observation satellites currently scheduled to launch on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket next year. “Mike has a lot of great ideas that are challenging, yes, but they are all very achievable,” she says.
Luigi Pozzebon is blunter in his assessment. Pozzebon is VP of the company’s satellite systems business—the team behind what is now known as the MDA Aurora digital satellite—which became a Tier 1 supplier in 2022 via a contract to supply 17 satellites to Apple-backed Globalstar, and which earned a landmark deal to provide 198 units to Telesat’s Lightspeed low-Earth-orbit constellation. In his view, Greenley’s deep understanding of both the market and the technology’s capability to address it enables a type of velocity that’s impossible under more measured leadership styles. “Mike’s not the type of guy to say, ‘Okay, let’s innovate,’ and then, in the next sentence, say, ‘Hold on, where’s my business case?’” says Pozzebon, a 34-year veteran of the company. “I’ve seen CEOs come and go, and Mike just gets it.”
For MDA chief technology officer Cameron Ower—a nearly four-decade veteran of the company—adding a more proactive product-based development cycle to a more reactive program-based one has been both significant and exhilarating. “Commercial intention is there right from the beginning, rather than building something that maybe some commercial entity could buy later,” says Ower. “An innovation isn’t just a cool idea, it’s something that actually gets adopted—and used—and has an impact at scale. And now our engineers are thinking about that.”
Under Greenley's leadership, MDA’s sales in its last fiscal year were $808 million, nearly twice its pre-IPO revenue, and they’re on track to double from 2023 levels in the next couple of years.
By now, there is sufficient empirical evidence to suggest that Greenley’s plan is working. MDA’s sales in its last fiscal year were $808 million, nearly twice its pre-IPO revenue, and they’re on track to double from 2023 levels in the next couple of years. Since 2021, the company has consistently hovered around a 20% adjusted EBITDA, and is forecasting 19% to 20% for 2024. Investors are decidedly into it: After a post-IPO drop, MDA’s stock started a steady climb at the end of 2022, reaching a then-record high in early October and topping $25 a share a month later.
“We see MDA as a long-term growth story,” says Konark Gupta, a director of equity research at Scotiabank, where he leads the bank’s transportation and aerospace sector coverage. “The opportunity set is very high. I think the sky’s the limit of where things can go for space participants, and MDA can be a very, very major player if they keep doing what they’re doing.”
Which brings us back to Greenley’s ambition. It should, by now, come as no surprise that for all the company’s recent wins, he’s not at all interested in resting on laurels. A self-described “what’s next?” kind of person, he’s already looking beyond his immediate goal for the company to complete what he calls the “second double” of sales in the next couple of years. “We’re definitely a globally relevant participant in the space economy now, but maybe we’ll transition into a globally relevant leader in the space economy,” he says. And his moonshot? “Today, if you ask someone about the big space companies, they’d probably say SpaceX and Blue Origin. Maybe someday they’ll be saying SpaceX, Blue Origin and MDA.”
It’s not a modest goal, nor even one with much precedence. But it’s not unrealistic. And as long as there’s a clear path to growth, and as long as his team has the ideas and talent to capitalize on it without compromising performance, Greenley will pursue it with the velocity of Han Solo on the Kessel Run. “We need to lean into it,” he says. “Let’s lean into the future, in the lanes that make sense, where there’s true customers. Let’s just get after it, and let’s not be afraid.”
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