When astronaut Chris Hadfield blasts off in a tiny Soyuz capsule for the International Space Station this week, it will be the latest accomplishment and one of the loftiest in Canada's 50-year-old space age.

Hadfield's goals are clear over the next six months, particularly when he becomes the first Canadian commander of the station in March, but much less certain is the country's future in space in the coming years.

Wednesday's launch from the Russian cosmodrome in Kazakhstan comes less than a month after a review commissioned by the federal government found that Canada's space industry has been lacking direction and falling behind other countries for the past decade or so.

Even smaller countries such as Belgium, Israel and Luxembourg spend more of their GDP on space than Canada does, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

At the same time, the federal aerospace review suggests that the significance of space is growing, extending beyond spacewalks and high-tech rovers to everything from national security and economics to digital communications via satellite.

For example, satellites up to 100,000 kilometres above Earth have become increasingly significant in everything from monitoring weather, crops and climate change to telecommunications, national defence and sovereignty.

For industry players such as Iain Christie, president of Neptec Design Group Ltd., an Ottawa-based space engineering company, Canada's space policy is at a crossroads.

"We have been a space-faring nation for a long time and we're used to thinking of ourselves as being in the top tier of space nations," he said in an interview. "But we do run the real risk of losing that status if the kind of decay that we've been seeing in the last little while isn't stopped."

The review, led by former cabinet minister David Emerson (a Liberal who crossed the floor to the Conservatives in 2006), urges Ottawa to boost spending on the development of space technology, and to establish 10-year, five-year and one-year priorities for the Canadian space program at the cabinet level.

"Canada was a pioneer in space," Emerson said in an email statement to CBCNews.ca.

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What is Canada's future in space?