NGC Aerospace Ltd.

NGC Aerospace Ltd. (NGC Aerospatiale) is a Canadian company based in Sherbrooke, Quebec. It designs, develops, validates and delivers guidance, navigation and control (GNC) and attitude and orbit control (AOCS) software that lets space, aerial and ground vehicles operate autonomously. The name is an acronym for navigation, guidance and control. Jean de Lafontaine, now President, founded the company in 2001 after early work on the European Space Agency's PROBA-1 satellite. NGC grew from one person in 2001 to eight by the end of 2004. It set up NGC Aerospace France in 2009 for its European business and in 2016 consolidated its offices and laboratory at a single site in the Sherbrooke Technopark. The company says its GNC software has accumulated more than 50 years of combined successful operation in orbit.

NGC's space-exploration robotics work covers planetary landers and rovers. Its Lander Guidance, Navigation and Control (LGNC) solutions cover cruise, de-orbit, descent and touchdown, including state estimation from optical, IMU, radar and star-tracker inputs, real-time trajectory optimisation, and attitude and trajectory control. Its Hazard Detection and Avoidance (HDA) software combines lidar range data, camera images and lander motion to build a real-time hazard map of slope, roughness, illumination and the propellant cost of reaching each candidate site, then proposes the safest landing spot a few hundred metres above the surface. A motion-compensation function corrects scanning-lidar distortion caused by the lander's own movement. NGC demonstrated the system in 2010-2011 in the Autonomous Landing Flight Experiment (ALFIE), which it describes as the first real-time, full-scale flight demonstration of lidar-based HDA, flown on a helicopter.

For terrain-relative navigation NGC developed Crater-Based AbsNAV. During descent it extracts craters from camera images, approximates each one as an ellipse, and matches them against a stored crater database to estimate the lander's position relative to the Moon. A relative-navigation (optical velocimetry) filter can process absolute and relative measurements together. Under the Canadian Space Agency's Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program (LEAP), the system flew as a demonstration on Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission 1, which landed on the Moon on 2 March 2025. NGC was selected for that mission in 2020. For rovers, NGC offers vision-based navigation using stereo image processing, visual odometry, sensor fusion and calibration, plus a lidar-based localisation system that matches reconstructed terrain to a digital elevation map. Both ran on the Artemis Jr lunar prototype rover built with Neptec Design Group during the 2012 field campaign for NASA's RESOLVE volatiles experiment. NGC partnered with Canadensys on Canada's Lunar Rover Mission in 2022 and is on Canadensys's team for the Canadian Lunar Utility Rover study.

Outside exploration, NGC's AOCS software flies on ESA spacecraft including PROBA-1, PROBA-2 and PROBA-V, Sentinel-3A and 3B, and the Proba-3 formation-flying pair launched in 2024. NGC president Jean de Lafontaine has said seven ESA satellites are controlled by NGC software. In aerial systems, NGC supplies autopilot, flight and vehicle management software, detect-and-avoid, and lidar-based landing-zone assessment. This software has flown on Laflamme Aero's LX300 tandem-rotor helicopter drone and on a Beta Technologies platform. In 2026 NGC qualified for all five streams of Canada's Defence Drone Initiative marketplace. It also offers co-development, training, simulators, and test and validation environments.