Space agency gets first female president

The Canadian Space Agency is getting its first female president.

Longtime public servant Lisa Campbell has been tapped by the Trudeau government to take the agency's reins, the first woman to head the organization since it was founded in 1989.

Campbell succeeds Sylvain Laporte, who has been president of the space agency since 2015, and arrives from Veterans Affairs Canada, where she has been a senior executive for about two years.

Yet it is the three years she spent managing some of Canada's largest and most expensive military projects while at the federal procurement department from 2015 to 2018 that will be most relevant to her new position.

That is because the federal government is currently looking at ways to renew Canada's extraterrestrial expertise.

Among its plans are finding ways to protect Canadian and allied satellites from attack, expanding Canadian industry's expertise and involvement in space, and contributing to the U.S. government's plan to establish a small space station around the moon.