CANADA LIFTS OFF

60 years ago, a launch helped establish our space credentials

When people think of the space race of the 1950s and ’60s, what usually comes to mind is the enmity between the United States and the former Soviet Union. But while the rival superpowers rushed to assert their extraterrestrial dominance, Canada was quietly laying the groundwork for its own aeronautics research program, a key development in which occurred 60 years ago. By the mid-1950s, the Americans and the Soviets were working on self-guided longrange missiles that could be fired over the North Pole. The Americans wanted to see how their missiles’ electronics coped with the Arctic atmosphere, which is frequently buffeted by intense solar winds that can play havoc with radio communications. Cold-weather equipment tests were already being done on the Canadian military base at Fort Churchill in northern Manitoba, so in 1956, Canada gave the U.S. Army permission to construct a rocket-research facility there. The first rocket was launched from Churchill in October 1956, and subsequent launches ( above) collected valuable data on the Arctic atmosphere, such as cosmic rays and fluctuations in Earth’s geomagnetic field. By 1959, Canada had become an active participant in the research and developed its own rocket, the Black Brant, which NASA and the Canadian Space Agency still use today. The United States withdrew its financial support for the Churchill facility in 1964, but Canada continued to test rockets there well into the 1960s, by which time it had its own satellites in orbit and was well positioned to play a leading role in the coming era of human spaceflight.