Chris Gainor's Space
Friday 10 November 2023
Asteroid (20041) Gainor
Wednesday 2 August 2023
Canada World Youth, 50 years later
Tuesday 18 July 2023
Peter Armitage, NASA Engineer worked at Avro Canada 1929-2023
Thursday 6 April 2023
Artemis II Is Far From NASA's First Lunar Flight With Canadian Content
Officially, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen is part of the crew of the upcoming Artemis II flight around the Moon thanks to an agreement between NASA and the Canadian Space Agency which will see Canada build Canadarm 3 for the Lunar Gateway space station that is part of the Artemis program.
I also like to think of Hansen’s participation in Artemis II as being a belated recognition of Canada’s role in helping NASA get the Apollo astronauts to the Moon more than half a century ago.
While Canada did not play a formal part in Apollo, the Canadian government’s decision in 1959 to cancel the CF-105 Avro Arrow jet interceptor program led to NASA hiring 31 of Avro’s top engineers to join Project Mercury, which put the first U.S. astronauts into space in the early 1960s. The Avro engineers also played prominent roles in the Gemini spaceflights that followed Mercury, and Apollo itself. Some of the former Avro engineers went on to work in the Space Shuttle program and one worked on the International Space Station. Seventeen of the engineers had come to Avro Canada from the United Kingdom, one was from Poland, and 13 were Canadian.
Two of the most important members of the Avro group came from Canada. James A. Chamberlin had been born in Kamloops B.C. and raised in Toronto. When the Arrow was cancelled in 1959, he was the 43-year-old chief of technical design at Avro Canada, and once at NASA, he was named head of engineering for the Mercury spacecraft. Not long after President John F. Kennedy challenged NASA to send astronauts to the Moon, Chamberlin began designing a new two-man spacecraft called Gemini that would prepare astronauts and flight controllers for the challenges of Apollo’s flights to the Moon.
By the time Gemini got its official start in late 1961, NASA officials were engaged in a heated debate about how Apollo would get to the Moon. There were three concepts, starting with a direct flight in a single spacecraft to the lunar surface and back to Earth. A second proposal involved launching the spacecraft in parts using two or more Saturn V rockets, assembling the parts in Earth orbit, and then heading for the Moon. A third concept, called lunar orbit rendezvous, involved launching two spacecraft atop a single Saturn V rocket. The crew would spend most of the trip in a mother ship, and a second smaller craft would descend from the first craft in lunar orbit to the Moon’s surface, and then return the astronauts to the mother ship for the return trip home.
At first, most NASA officials charged with the lunar flight favoured a direct flight, in part because it would avoid the complexities of rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit or of assembling a spacecraft in Earth orbit. An engineer from another part of NASA named John C. Houbolt, campaigned within the agency for lunar orbit rendezvous, which he had concluded would save a massive amount of weight, fuel and cost because most of the spacecraft, such as the Earth landing system, would not have to be lowered to the lunar surface and then launched back to Earth. One of the first people to agree with Houbolt was Chamberlin, who quickly drew up a daring plan to fly a Gemini spacecraft to lunar orbit, along with what he called a “bug” that would carry a single astronaut to the surface and back to the Gemini. While NASA rejected Chamberlin’s idea of flying Gemini to the Moon, his proposal helped change minds at the space agency to favour flying Apollo to the Moon with lunar orbit rendezvous.
Another Canadian from Avro, Owen E. Maynard, a native of Sarnia, Ontario, had been involved in the Apollo program from its beginning in 1960. Maynard quickly began designing a two-man craft that became known as the lunar module or LM. Along with his drawings, Maynard travelled with other Apollo experts to NASA installations to sell lunar orbit rendezvous to the whole agency. NASA officially opted for lunar orbit rendezvous in July 1962, and in November, Grumman Aircraft won the contract to build the lunar module.
Maynard worked with Grumman’s engineering team under Tom Kelly on the LM, and in 1964 he was promoted to head the systems engineering division, where he was responsible for making sure that all of the components of the Apollo spacecraft worked in concert with the Saturn V rocket and the systems on the ground. Two years later, Maynard was moved to the top job in Apollo mission operations. There he was responsible for designing missions and for setting the sequence of Apollo test flights that led to the first lunar landing attempt on Apollo 11.
The fire that killed Apollo 1 astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee during a launch pad test in 1967 led to many changes in Apollo, including a management shakeup that saw Maynard returned to his previous job as head of systems engineering. He played a key role in the missions that led to the lunar landing, notably Apollo 8, which orbited the Moon 10 times in December 1968 with three astronauts on board. During the flight of Apollo 11, Maynard was one of the managers working in the Mission Control Center in Houston. In the time leading up to Apollo 11, Chamberlin served as a trouble shooter for NASA management.
Several other engineers from Avro Canada also made their mark on Apollo. Bryan Erb, an Albertan, helped develop the Apollo command module’s heat shield and then managed the laboratory that handled the returned lunar samples. When the Apollo 11 crew returned to Earth, the first person who greeted them on board the recovery helicopter was a Canadian physician, Dr. William Carpentier, who joined NASA after an upbringing in Alberta and B.C. Two natives of Saskatchewan worked on spacecraft systems – Leonard Packham on communications, and Richard Carley on guidance and navigation. Robert Vale of Toronto helped develop the experiment packages that the Apollo astronauts deployed on the lunar surface. British engineers who worked at Avro Canada had leading roles in Apollo, including John Hodge, Rod Rose, Peter Armitage, Morris Jenkins and Dennis Fielder.
Apollo 11 and five other Apollo missions took astronauts to the surface of the Moon. Each lunar module descent stage and its landing gear included four legs and struts that extended and supported the legs. Most of the landing gear, except for the bottom parts of the legs and the landing pads, were precision made at Héroux Machine Parts Limited (now Héroux-Devtek) in Longueuil, Quebec.
I had the privilege of meeting most of the Avro engineers who worked for NASA while writing my book, Arrows to the Moon: Avro’s Engineers and the Space Race (Apogee Books: 2001).
By the time Apollo was wrapping up in 1972, NASA was negotiating with the Canadian government to make Canada a formal partner in the Space Shuttle program by contributing the Space Shuttle Remote Manipulator System or Canadarm to the shuttle. In 1983, at NASA’s invitation, Canada selected its first astronauts and Marc Garneau became the first Canadian to fly in space in 1984.
Now Jeremy Hansen stands to be the first Canadian to fly around the Moon, following in the footsteps of other Canadians who worked in the design suites, meeting rooms and control centres of Apollo, and his Canadian astronaut colleagues who flew on board the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station.
Canadian Astronaut Jeremy Hansen (NASA).
Monday 8 August 2022
Book Review: Wonders All Around: The Incredible True Story of Astronaut Bruce McCandless II and the First Untethered Flight in Space
Wednesday 13 July 2022
The First Images From the James Webb Space Telescope
Friday 24 June 2022
Book Review: Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age
Diversion Books, 2022
ISBN: 9781635767735
This review appears in issue 29:2 of Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly.
Spaceflight and particularly human spaceflight have gone through some major changes in this third decade of the 21st century. In 2020, the first crews flew aboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and the Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station, and since then Dragon’s flight manifest has included the first purely private flights of humans into space.
The rise of SpaceX to its commanding position in the space business of course owes a great deal to the drive and vision of Elon Musk and the team he assembled, but it also got a crucial assist from NASA when it overcame its traditional way of doing business by putting the private sector at its heart.
Arguably the person at the center of this major change at NASA is a woman who wasn’t even born when the first American rocketed into space in 1961, Lori Garver. After serving for nine years as the executive director of the National Space Society, Garver went to NASA in 1998, serving for three years as Associate Administrator under Administrator Daniel Goldin and President Bill Clinton.
Out of office in 2001 and 2002, Garver gained public attention from her attempt to become the world’s first “Soccer Mom” to fly to the ISS, an effort that ultimately fell short. During that decade, she advised the John Kerry, Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama presidential campaigns on space issues. Under President Obama, she served as Deputy Administrator of NASA from 2009 to 2013.
During those four years, Garver championed private sector solutions to the difficult spot NASA found itself in as the Space Shuttle program neared the end of its run. That left the agency without a viable replacement to get astronauts into space and back home aside from hitching rides aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
SpaceX had been saved from financial ruin by short-term support from NASA in the final days of the George W. Bush administration, but Garver moved to strengthen this support through a Commercial Crew Program that was opposed by many in NASA and in the old-line aerospace contractors that had lost their way under inefficient and expensive cost-plus contracts.
In contrast to the growing library of books on Elon Musk and the rise of SpaceX and other new firms, very little has been written about the NASA side of this story until the recent publication of Garver’s memoir, Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age. Like the author, this book will inspire a whole variety of reactions among readers, depending on their viewpoints.
The recent successes of the new commercial spaceflight providers such as SpaceX and Blue Origin have inspired many people to take credit for these advances, including some unlikely candidates who are more strongly associated with longtime military and NASA contractors. Garver’s account gains credibility from the controversy that followed her in the days when the successes of today were far from assured.
Garver is not afraid to call out people with whom she locked horns, including the Obama era NASA administrator she served under, former astronaut Charlie Bolden, and today’s NASA administrator, former senator Bill Nelson. In spite of her association with Democratic administrations, I found that her account handed out both praise and criticism on a bipartisan basis.
Once the urgency of Apollo had passed, Garver accurately argues that NASA had become focused on preserving jobs in favored congressional districts at the expense of exploring space in an efficient manner. Many national defense programs suffer from the same problems that have troubled NASA, she says, and so taxpayers get little security for their money. Other social priorities such as public health suffer while the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned of continues to grow.
“Government policies should incentivize individuals, nonprofit organizations, and corporations of all sizes to drive innovations that will respond to today’s challenges, instead of spending massive public resources to prop up outdated infrastructure and weapons systems aimed at fighting past enemies,” Garver concludes.
I found this book to be especially valuable because so little has been written about the political history of U.S. space programs since the beginning of the Clinton administration. Many of Garver’s assertions will spark controversy and disagreement, but this reviewer hopes that they will inspire others – including the targets of Garver’s criticisms – to write about the policy initiatives of the last 30 years that have transformed today’s space programs.