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Crumpled Metal, Wires, and Waste

Canadian interest in space began long before Dave Williams went aloft in the spaceship Endeavour. In fact, since the beginning of recorded history, human beings have looked at the awesome beauty of the night sky and wondered about worlds beyond the stars. Our early ancestors revered the heavens, feared the heavens, and used myth and memory to deal with what they saw. In a sense, what we call astronomy today may well have been our earliest science. It just took us a while to give it a suitable name.

We know that the study of the heavens was important in Babylonia, ancient China, and India. Two thousand years before Christ, wise men from those, and other, areas of the world looked at the sun and moon and predicted eclipses. They also counted the stars, noted their brilliance, and gave them names. They mapped the skies, recorded what they saw, and systematically, painstakingly, and somewhat accurately, set down a legacy of learning for those of us who have followed. Early Greek astronomers determined that the Earth was round, centuries before the astronauts of today looked down from their capsules and took pictures of the Blue Marble, as the Earth was dubbed in the first pictures of it taken from space.

Farmers, fishers, and sailors of old looked at the skies, and from what they observed, knew when to plant, fish, or head for the shelter of shore. Native peoples of every race had among their number respected elders who studied the clouds, made rudimentary predictions of what they portended, and, by word of mouth, passed the wisdom of their age to those who followed. Today, we do the same thing, but now we record, with ever-increasing accuracy, what we have seen and learned.

Because astronomy is “the study of the universe and its contents beyond the bounds of earth’s atmosphere,”¹ the heavens were first studied in Canada long before it became a nation. In the early 1600s, explorers in the far north saw comets in the night sky, and eclipses that darkened the moon. Explorer Samuel de Champlain, and others of his time, knew wind and weather, but they also knew the stars that guided their ships in the face of that wind. Jesuit missionaries from France came here to spread the Christian gospel, and also made note of what they saw in the sky — including a lunar eclipse on a specific date: October 27, 1632.

We know that the first astronomical observatory existed, for a time, at Louisbourg, the French settlement on the coast of Cape Breton Island, even though all traces of the structure are long gone. Still, astronomy, its appeal and its value, was recognized elsewhere, and groups of like-minded individuals sought to advance studies in the field. This was particularly true later on, in Quebec City, Montreal, Kingston, and Toronto. An early observatory was built in Fredericton, at the University of New Brunswick, but the first recognized department of astronomy came into being at the University of Toronto in 1904. From that time on, interest in the science led to the establishment of permanent facilities elsewhere across the country.

An early reason for the particular emphasis on, and use for, astronomy in Canada came about because the north magnetic pole is located here. That, and the proclamation of two International Polar Years, resulted in increased interest in the north. During the second of these, beginning in 1932, scientists noted that radio waves “were bouncing off a layer of charged particles high in the Earth’s atmosphere, and these waves were affected by Earth’s magnetic field.”² This observation led to further examination of the skies with telescopes and weather balloons. Since the beginning of the Second World War communication in Canada has become increasingly important. As anyone who has driven in mountainous terrain knows, radio reception in a car is often problematic. Signal strength rises and falls depending where you are: high on a promontory, low in a valley. A similar type of situation occurs in Arctic communities. For that reason, pioneers in Canadian radio realized that if they were going to give remote northern settlements a means to communicate on par with what was available in the south, workable techniques had to be found.

The quest led scientists to the realization that if they could somehow bounce radio waves, not off the ionosphere as they had been doing, but off something beyond it, the result could be improved communication anywhere on Earth. By the mid 1950s the idea of a man-made satellite was widely discussed, and its potential worth debated at length. Of course, at the time the problem lay in the launch. Just how would it be possible to shoot some kind of a payload beyond the atmosphere and into an orbit around the Earth? To accomplish that end, rocketry became far more important than ever before.

Experimentation with rockets of various types and sizes had been going on for years, in Canada and elsewhere. In this country, the bulk of the work took place near Churchill, Manitoba, and involved both American and Canadian personnel. The Bristol Aerospace Company in Winnipeg was heavily involved and operated in conjunction with an Ottawa-based organization called the Defence Research Board. However, rocketry had its origins much earlier and elsewhere, and almost always with connections to the military.

Indian and Chinese armies shot rudimentary rockets at their enemies a thousand years ago. In 1232, Chinese troops drove back invading Mongols with something called “solid-fuel fire-arrows.”³ In the late 1700s, Indian armies were using rockets that would fly for up to two miles. However, perhaps the best known rocket use is familiar to us, but in another context entirely.

During the War of 1812, an American military establishment called Fort McHenry, Maryland, was fired on by a British naval fleet. The attack, on the night of September 13–14, 1814, was staunchly defended and after a night of shelling the American flag still flew. A young Washington lawyer named Francis Scott Key witnessed the firefight, and even wrote a song about it. One hundred and two years later, Woodrow Wilson, the then President of the United States, designated Key’s “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the official anthem of the United States. One of the lines of the composition refers to “the rocket’s red glare.” We have all heard it.

There have been several individuals in a number of countries who were important to the early development of rocketry, and the advances that led to artificial satellites and the space programs that we are familiar with today. Some of the more notable names from the past are: Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, Hermann Oberth, Robert Goddard, Wernher Von Braun, Sergei Korolev, and John Herbert Chapman.

Tsiolkovsky was the Russian who became his nation’s “Father of Cosmonautics.” He was responsible for scores of achievements, but will be remembered for his 1883 theory that rockets would work in the vacuum of space. As we know, he was right. Tsiolkovsky was also a bit of a dreamer, and some of the ideas he advanced came long before it would have been possible to bring them to fruition. For example, his “cylindrical spin-stabilized space habitat with artificial gravity and a space greenhouse with a closed ecological system”⁴ was an idea he described in 1903! That was the same year the Wright Brothers flew their flimsy aircraft from the sand dunes at Kitty Hawk. Up until then, of course, no plane of any kind had flown, let alone a spaceship.

Hermann Oberth and Wernher Von Braun were both German, but the latter ultimately became an American after he was brought to the United States at the end of World War II. He was a highly skilled, inventive, determined man who had a major role in the design of the Saturn rockets that ultimately led to the successful American landings on the moon. But even with that great historical achievement, he would also be remembered as the man whose V-2 rockets wrought death and destruction on London, Paris, and elsewhere during the Second World War. On May 2, 1945, he surrendered to the Americans, who quickly put him to work on rocket development at their White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico. His new country chose to overlook his checkered past.

Robert Goddard was an American, Sergei Korolev a Russian, and John Chapman a Canadian. As is often the case, far too few of his countrymen have ever heard of Doctor Chapman, yet his contribution to space flight and space flight technology is unparalleled in this country. Today, the magnificent Canadian Space Agency site at Longueuil, Quebec, is named after him. He was a remarkable man.

The John H. Chapman Space Centre, headquarters of the Canadian Space Agency near Montreal.

Born in London, Ontario, on August, 28, 1921, the soft-spoken, quiet young man served overseas during the Second World War. At the time, radar was cutting edge technology. As a military officer, Chapman worked with radar at a time when its use was becoming increasingly important. The basic tenants of the science had been around, in theory, since 1864, but before Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, there were only five radar stations in the United Kingdom. Since radar could detect approaching enemy aircraft its use increased dramatically during the war. The device was particularly valuable during the Battle of Britain, when waves of German planes swept in from the English Channel, their bomb bays full.

Canada contributed much to the Allied effort in the field, and even built a Royal Canadian Air Force radar station at Clinton, Ontario. There, hundreds of men and women were trained in the use of radar prior to being shipped overseas to put their skills into practice. Clinton was chosen as the school site in part because the terrain around it was roughly comparable to coastal areas of Southeast England. The cliffs that border the Channel in Britain are much like the cliffs that overlook Lake Huron, near the Ontario towns of Goderich and Bayfield. Because John Chapman was from nearby London, he was quite familiar with such locales.

When the war ended, the young veteran returned home, and elected to stay in the field he knew so well. He obtained a degree in physics from the University of Western Ontario; then went to McGill for postgraduate work. In Montreal, his doctoral thesis was on “ionospheric radar echoes.” In fact,“much of his research in the 1950s dealt with ionospheric physics.”⁵

With his background, Chapman was ideally suited to assist when it became vital for Canada to pursue satellite research. In due course he went to Ottawa, where he became involved in ever-increasing leadership roles at what was called the Defence Research Telecommunications Establishment. He was working there when a landmark event in humanity’s reach for space took place.

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union placed a satellite in orbit, and from that date forward, “the cause of human history was forever changed.”⁶ Now that rocketry existed to launch them, satellites sent aloft could, and would in time, become vital for telecommunications, weather forecasting, forestry, farming, ice mapping, and in countless other ways. They could also be used as weapons of war.

The possibility of satellites for weaponry was what had the most immediate impact in many world capitals — but none more so than in Washington, D.C. After all, the launch was at the height of the Cold War, and the satellite in the skies was Russian. The thing was called Sputnik, a shiny metal ball, less than two feet in diameter and weighing 184 pounds. It circled the Earth every ninety-six minutes, doing so 1,440 times before falling out of orbit and disintegrating. It made a “bleep, bleep” sound and had a flashing light: two things that surely irritated not only scientists and military planners, but most citizens of the United States who always assumed, and had been assured by their politicians, that their country was far ahead of Russia in technology.

Because the fear mongers of the time claimed that if they wished, the Russians could now put a nuclear bomb on a Sputnik and drop the thing on any part of the United States, ordinary Americans became deeply concerned. In fact, as one newspaper remarked more recently, Sputnik was “likened to Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 terrorist attacks — events provoking a national response to new dangers.”⁷

Americans were also humiliated, and said so. Senator Henry Jackson, a crusty, blunt-spoken hard-liner from Washington State called the launch of the satellite “a devastating blow to the prestige of the United States as the leader of the scientific and technical world.”⁸ In fact, on the very day that Sputnik was launched, a prestigious scientific conference was winding up at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. At the gathering, which included a handful of Canadians, a Vanguard rocket was on display. The thing garnered a lot of attention, and the “wholesome, eager-looking, and stridently self-confident” Americans who were displaying it assured conference delegates that the Vanguard “would be the first object made on earth to reach space.” That was “beyond question.”⁹ No wonder they were chagrined — and shocked — when, later that same day, the Russians launched.

Yet, putting something like Sputnik into space was not exactly unexpected. For that matter, a hundred years earlier a visionary Frenchman imagined much more than just the launch of a satellite. A young lawyer, turned writer, named Jules Verne published a widely-read science fiction novel in 1865, in which he envisioned a rocket that would carry humans far beyond the atmosphere of Earth and, ultimately, to the moon. The book, one of many by the same author, was even called From the Earth to the Moon.

The writer, who is often referred to as the father of modern science fiction, was amazingly prescient. The rocket he wrote about was called Columbiad; it launched from Florida, went to the moon, and came down in the Pacific on its return to Earth. The work engendered as much admiration for its presumed precision as it did for its storyline. The former was not particularly unusual though, as the author spent long periods of time calculating in what direction, and how far and fast, his spaceship would have to travel. To ensure accuracy, he “even went to astronomers to have his calculations checked.”¹⁰

Perhaps it is not surprising then that when the Americans went to the moon in July 1969, “Neil Armstrong named his Apollo 11 command module Columbia, after Verne’s Columbiad.”¹¹ He, and the two men with him, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin, had been given lots of advice about what to call their spacecraft, and they rejected hundreds of suggestions. However, because all three had read the Verne novel, their decision on the name was not really that unexpected.

But while the world was impressed, and the Americans shocked, by the Sputnik launch, another equally memorable one soon followed. This time, it was not just a satellite that bleeped and flashed as it circled the globe — a living creature was on board. On November 3, one month after Sputnik 1 was in orbit, a second rocket lifted off the pad at Baikonur. The living creature strapped inside was a doomed dog named Laika.

Before being placed aboard the spaceship, the little brown and white pooch had been a stray on the streets of Moscow. By all accounts, she was a docile animal, and did not seem to mind being strapped in the capsule with various censors hooked to her body. Photos were taken of her and through them millions of dog lovers, and others, developed an intense interest in the journey she would make. In due course, they would be stunned by her demise.

The officials in charge of Laika’s trip assured the world that she was being properly cared for. They stressed that she had plenty of food and water for several days, and that she would not suffer from hypoxia, or lack of oxygen. Her vital signs were monitored at all times, and those readings were transmitted back to Earth. In all of the bulletins issued concerning the dog, none of them hinted that there might be a problem. Laika was said to be adapting well to space travel.

However, that was not the case. “Laika’s cabin was cramped and overheated [and] there was no way to bring her down to Earth and no humane system had been installed for putting her out of her misery. Dehydration and heat stroke killed her.”¹² Nevertheless, while Laika lived in space for less than a day, her journey was deemed a success. To a degree it was. At least rocket scientists now knew that an animal could endure a launch, and perhaps even an entire mission. However, the “entire mission” part still had to be proven.

Over the next few months, other dogs went aloft from Baikonur, but they too gave their lives for the cause. Finally, on August 19, 1960, the Soviets saw success. Strelka and Belka reacted well to space flight, and these two successors to Laika lived for years after their safe return to Earth. One of them, Strelka, was later bred, and in a curious footnote to history, a puppy she bore was presented to the children of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. That dog later had puppies of its own at the White House.

But whatever the Russian success launching animals, in 1957 the United States was still having trouble getting any kind of satellite into orbit. Their launch rockets failed again and again, with the ultimate embarrassment coming on December 6 of that year.

A Vanguard rocket, similar to the model displayed with such promise at the Academy of Sciences in Washington that fall, was moved onto one of the new launch pads at Cape Canaveral. The satellite, part of the United States Navy’s developmental program, was intended to show the Russians up. The Vanguard was the way of the future; America would no longer trail in the space race.

Reporters from the major papers in the United States and Canada were there to cover the launch, as were news people from Europe and elsewhere. Television cameras were put in place, and the throngs of observers waited with ill-concealed anticipation for the big moment. Finally, all the essential preparations were done; the rocket was ready and all systems were go. The big moment would be televised across the nation.

Then the countdown began — and ended.

With a mighty roar and lots of smoke and flame, the rocket slowly began to rise — about six inches. Then the fuel that powered the thing exploded, and the Vanguard collapsed awkwardly back on itself. In short order, it was a crumpled mess of metal, wires, and waste that profoundly shocked those who were there and, through television, vast numbers of stunned viewers in homes and offices elsewhere. The moment, proclaimed one of the most well-known observers of his country’s efforts to launch a satellite, had become “the image of the American space program.”¹³

And so ended 1957; a year that had held so much promise, but in the final analysis undoubtedly benefited the Soviets more than the Americans. However, as we know, that would change. The United States would recover and go on to remarkable achievements in space. The next decade would see such advances, and Canada would play important roles in them. Within that time we would become only the third nation in the world to have our own satellite in orbit.