MDA Space

Recognized under Tier 8 — Robotics, MDA Space is a Canadian space robotics company carrying the heritage of the original Shuttle-era Canadarm and the ISS's Canadarm2 and Dextre. The company holds a roughly $1 billion Canadian contract from the Canadian Space Agency, awarded in 2024, to design and build Canadarm3 for NASA's lunar Gateway, with work running through 2030. In August 2026, following Artemis II, the CSA announced it would repurpose Canadarm3-derived investments to support lunar surface robotics, a move MDA's CEO publicly welcomed by pointing to the arm family's flight heritage across roughly 90 Shuttle missions. MDA's Skymaker technology is also being used by the Lunar Outpost-led Lunar Dawn rover team under NASA's Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services program. Few companies can point to an unbroken robotic-arm lineage running from low Earth orbit to lunar Gateway to the lunar surface — the same progression a Mars program will eventually need to repeat.