OTTAWA — Six years ago, Daniel Sax decided to stuff his career as a real estate investor and take up something that felt as though it really mattered: mining the moon. Now he has government funding behind him, a growing startup and an interim goal of powering the Arctic with tiny nuclear reactors.

These are pie-in-the-sky ambitions for his Canadian Strategic Missions Corporation (CSMC, for short), and Sax sells them with zeal.

“We are streaking the quad,” Sax said, seated at a picnic table outside the Cansec military trade show in Ottawa at the end of May.

He was talking about the 2003 movie Old School, a Will Ferrell flick about grown men going back to live as frat bros. At one point, Ferrell strips down at a kegger, rallies everyone to run through campus starkers and takes off by himself.

Sax said the Canadian space industry, like Ferrell, is trying to get a party going.

“We are out there drunk, running into the streets, buck naked, as a private company and the private sector,” he said. “We are saying, ‘Come with us, we’re going streaking!’ We need the government to take off their clothes and join us, so we can pull in the capital and everything else.”

The government has at least unbuttoned its collar.

CSMC’s broad strategy is to earn government backing for technologies that could be deployed on the moon and apply them profitably on Earth; the Canadian Space Agency and Department of National Defence take Sax seriously enough to have funded CSMC with million-dollar development deals. Most recently, the space agency announced two $500,000 contracts on June 9 for CSMC to conduct studies on generating power and extracting resources on the moon.

The Alberta government is funding an experimental reactor project, a $10-million joint effort between CSMC and the University of Alberta in Edmonton to build an unfuelled prototype, which is to be used to train nuclear engineers while validating CSMC’s designs.

The company is working with venerable Canadian communications company Telesat, too; at the Cansec show, the companies announced a preliminary agreement to use Telesat’s satellite network to oversee CSMC nuclear generators in remote areas.

CSMC’s nuclear power effort grew out of its moon-mining plans, which were a product of what Sax calls a personal crisis. 

That struck in early 2020, very shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic did, and consisted of “me reflecting on my career working in real estate, that none of it had ever meant anything for the world,” he said.

Amid everything else afoot at the time, the U.S. began publicizing proposed rules for moon mining and other commercial activities in space. Sax was enthralled.

Whereas Will Ferrell’s character and his buddies dealt with their ennui by becoming over-age frat bros, Sax started making calls to whoever might be able to connect him to anyone who knew anything about the prospect of extracting resources from the moon.

He was startled by the difference between the space sector and what he’d come to expect in commercial real estate, where “everyone is a complete fucking savage,” he said. “Like, no one is going to help you out at any point in that game. Strangely, with the space thing, everyone I called wanted to help.”

The first hire at what Sax initially called the Canadian Space Mining Company was Marc Donato, a former executive at MDA Space, who immediately lent CSMC some credibility. Donato was, Sax said, “some great grey hair who had a ton of experience.”

Building a team from there was easier than Sax had expected. “To be honest, I was shocked that people were wanting to join, you know? I was just some schmuck who didn’t know what I was doing,” he said.

Sax had worked on projects like housing developments in Alberta and cannabis production sites, not moon bases. But his real estate experience was surprisingly transferrable. In that world, you start with a piece of dirt and a vision. You bring people with technical skills together and find financing and sell your vision to others, and at the end you have a building people can use.

CSMC realized early that mining on the moon would take energy—to run mining equipment, obviously, but also to provide oxygen for anybody working there.

The options are few for generating the kind of power a moon mine will need. Nobody’s delivering diesel for the generators, and anyway, you need to make oxygen, not burn it. There’s no wind to turn a turbine. The moon gets a lot of sunlight but its nights last about two Earth-weeks, and its extreme temperature ranges are hard on solar panels.

“For a couple years I didn’t really know who to tell about developing a nuclear reactor for the moon,” Sax said. “I felt kind of strange about it, communicating it in any way.”

Now, he’s yelling about it as he runs down Main Street. Besides making the Telesat announcement, Sax was at the Cansec show to make the case for powering Canada’s planned expansion of its military presence in the Arctic with CSMC microreactors.

Developing them for the moon is one thing; deploying them in the North is where the real market could be.

There, governments and the military bring in diesel by air and sea, at huge expense, to run dirty generators. “It is an environmental nightmare. It is a health-care nightmare. It is a logistical nightmare,” Sax said.

If Canada wants to multiply its military and industrial activities in the Far North, it’s going to need another way to power it all, he added.

Micro-scale nuclear reactors aren’t brand-new technology, though they aren’t widespread. Submarines have run on them for decades, and they power a handful of aircraft carriers. Canadian-controlled Westinghouse is working on a civilian model with the same general intention as Sax’s—powering remote communities and industrial sites such as mines. So are other nuclear companies.

Success seems within reach, but nobody has quite grabbed it yet. A plan to build a microreactor at Canada’s marquee nuclear research site in Chalk River, Ont., is officially paused because the developer went bankrupt. Its assets were sold to a U.S.-based microreactor company, Nano Nuclear Energy, which branded its Canadian operations as True North Nuclear. At this point, CSMC is Canada’s most mature microreactor company, Sax said.

A U.S. maker has turned a microreactor on for testing, though. President Donald Trump instigated a program in May 2025 aiming to activate three of them by July 4 this year.

In Canada, Sax said with irritation, “we’re talking about doing feasibility studies.” Having the federal government designate a site for a microreactor—a Canadian Forces base, maybe—would help get the location-centric licensing process moving, he said.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine kicked Europe into motion in key sectors, but Canada is still lagging—watching the streakers, not joining in. Said Sax: “We have clear ways to accelerate for Canada, and we want to be unchained.”