A Century of Radio Broadcasting

Canada Post's 2020 Radio Stamps.

The tumult of 2020 has naturally overshadowed many anniversaries that took place during the year. As a historian of technology, I believe that a major overlooked anniversary for 2020 was the centennial of radio broadcasting in Canada, the United States and elsewhere. One of the few acknowledgements of this anniversary was a pair of postage stamps from Canada Post that went on sale in May during the depths of the coronavirus lockdown.

The arrival of radio broadcasting in the 1920s marked a revolutionary change to mass media, quickly bringing with it radio newscasts, broadcasts of live events such as sporting and news events, and all manner of entertainment shows. 

In the case of Canada, a live performance by soprano Dorothy Lutton was broadcast on May 20, 1920, from an experimental radio station in Montreal that later became known as CFCF. Since there were very few radio receivers at the time, a crowd gathered 200 km away at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa to hear Lutton sing over the radio. Similar events were taking place in other countries. As radio receivers went into mass production and became affordable for more people as the 1920s went on, radios became an integral part of daily life around the world. 

What we call radio had been created in the late 19th century, but it had been used mainly to transmit morse code signals between individual transmitters and receivers. Further advances in technologies related to radio, notably vacuum tubes, were needed to make possible broadcasting of the human voice and other sounds. These advances also made possible sound amplification for public address systems and talking motion pictures. 

While newspapers were already well established as a mass medium and were capable of quickly communicating the latest news, radios gave people the ability to listen to events as they happened, offering a new degree of immediacy for listeners. By the 1930s, the voices of popular entertainers and controversial leaders became familiar to everyone, which allowed people to experience events far from home in ways that couldn’t be done with newspapers. 

In the past century radio has undergone many technical transformations, including the arrival of frequency modulation (FM) to supplement amplitude modulation (AM), and more recently, the spread of digital radio. And radio has changed in reaction to the arrival of television and online communications in all their various forms. While radio is no longer the dominant medium it once was, it remains an important way of staying in touch. I usually get my first news of the day from a radio, and I enjoy music on radios in my house and in my car. Many other people enjoy talk radio.

Because Canada has a relatively small population spread over a great deal of territory, broadcast communication has always been a matter of great importance to the Canadian government. Starting after World War II, Canadian scientists became world leaders in determining how radio waves interact with charged particles high in the atmosphere in a layer known as the ionosphere. This research led to the birth of Canada’s space program 60 years ago when Canada built its first satellites, Alouette and ISIS, to learn about the ionosphere.

When communications satellites were created to carry telephone, radio and television signals around the world, the Canadian government and Canadian space contractors established Canadian leadership in this field. Canada was the first country to create its own domestic communications satellites with the first Anik satellite in 1972.

Canada has also regulated radio and television in a very different manner from the United States. While the U.S. broadcast system is based on private providers, Canada has always had a strong national broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, as an alternative to private broadcasters. Many people believe that the CBC and stronger government regulation of private broadcasters in Canada have formed one of the foundations of Canada’s distinct cultural identity relative to the United States.

My December with Terry Fox - 40 Years Later

 

Terry Fox's van at the Terry Fox monument at Mile Zero in Victoria, B.C., 2011.  Chris Gainor photo.

Forty years ago this past summer, Canadians were transfixed by the sight of a 22-year-old man who had lost a leg to cancer running across Canada from one end to the other with the help of an artificial leg. 

Terry Fox set off on his Marathon of Hope with a step in the Atlantic Ocean at St. John’s, Newfoundland, on April 12, 1980, with the goals of raising funds and awareness for cancer research. During much of the early weeks of his run, few people were interested, and he faced challenges of weather and geography.

Fox was accompanied by a friend, Doug Alward, and later his younger brother Darrell, who travelled in a camper van during Fox's daily marathons of 26 miles. In late June, Fox took the Marathon of Hope into Ontario, where he was suddenly taken seriously, and crowds of supporters greeted him wherever he went. Fox quickly found out that fame complicated his efforts to run across Canada even more than being below the media radar did in the earlier days.

Fox continued to run across Ontario through July and August despite his awkward gait, the physical problems resulting from his demanding daily regimen, the crowds and the glare of publicity. Like many other Canadians, I followed his progress with growing interest from my home in Vancouver, where I was a newspaper reporter for The Vancouver Sun.  I had just been handed the medical beat and worked that summer under the wing of the Sun's talented and experienced science reporter, Tim Padmore.

The medical beat involves many things, including the politics of health care, controversies such as access to abortion, and the latest on medical research, including cancer. I had written little about that latter topic before I came to work on September 2, 1980. That day a desk near mine became a beehive of activity as Jack Brooks, a former city editor and veteran of British tabloids who was a master of deadline journalism, assembled a major breaking story for the final edition of the day. The stunning story was that Terry Fox was ending his run near Thunder Bay, Ontario, after having run 3,339 miles over 143 days because the cancer that had cost him a leg had reappeared in his lungs.

Fox was flown home to the Lower Mainland of B.C., where he went into treatment. A shocked nation reacted by contributing millions of dollars to a telethon quickly organized in support of Fox and the Canadian Cancer Society. I wound up writing a lot about cancer research that fall. During those days in September, Tim Padmore told me that the Sun’s managing editor, Bruce Larsen, wanted our newspaper to carry a major feature on Terry Fox’s cancer and how it related to research on the disease, and assigned us to research and write it. Tim took the idea to Blair MacKenzie of the Canadian Cancer Society and to one of Fox’s doctors. The idea required agreement of Terry Fox and his family, and since Fox was undergoing difficult treatment at the time, the initial response was no. We hoped that response might change at a later time.

Weeks later on December 1, Tim made one of his periodic checks with the Cancer Society, and the next day MacKenzie put the idea to Fox himself, who by then was feeling reasonably well during a pause in his chemotherapy. On December 3 my phone rang and I was talking to Terry Fox. The next morning Tim and I went to the Fox family home in Port Coquitlam in the suburbs of Vancouver, where we conducted a long interview with Fox. We also had Fox sign letters that would go to the people who treated his cancer, helped with his rehabilitation and even created the artificial legs he used in his marathon, authorizing them to speak to us.

In common with others, we were struck by the ordinary qualities of Fox’s home. His father worked on the railroad, and his mother raised Terry and his siblings. Dressed in a plaid shirt and well worn jeans, the soft spoken Fox did not seem exceptional. But what shone through our talk with him and the whole story of his Marathon of Hope was his quality of determination. When we spoke of the faint hope of resuming and completing his marathon and completing it with a step into the Pacific Ocean in Victoria, his face lit up. It was clear that there was nothing he would rather do.

The next day Fox spoke at a press conference at the B.C. Cancer Research Centre near Vancouver General Hospital to introduce researchers would work work in the brand new Terry Fox Laboratory. It would be his last appearance before the media.

The deadline for our feature about Terry Fox’s cancer was Christmas, so Tim and I divided the work of interviewing the care providers who had worked with Fox. Armed with our permission letters, we were able to get interviews with most but not all of the people who we wanted to speak with.

As the publication dates approached, Tim put a final set of questions to Fox over the phone and then crafted our work into three pieces. I went to Edmonton for Christmas as usual, and my first stop on this visit was University Hospital, where I completed one final interview with a cancer specialist and phoned in the quotes to Tim. The series appeared in The Vancouver Sun on Saturday December 20 and the following Monday and Tuesday, December 22 and 23, 1980.

Although the word cancer suggests a single disease, cancer is in fact a group of more than 100 different diseases, as we said in the introduction to our series. Each type of cancer has its own causes, courses and available treatments. Nurses and physicians told us about their challenging work treating treating Fox and other cancer patients.

The story we told about Terry Fox himself was one of determination. Always interested in sports, Fox picked up golf, wheelchair basketball and running as soon as he could after the initial cancer was found and his left leg amputated in 1977. The idea of running a marathon across Canada had come to him early in his course of treatment, but months before he formally proposed the idea to the Cancer Society in the fall of 1979, he had begun a rigorous training regimen of regular marathon-distance runs to prove to himself that his idea was feasible.

Even so, his idea was not an easy sell, and he had to gather proof that his health was up to such an audacious undertaking. But finally his cross Canada run began. Fox had convinced himself that he had beaten his cancer once and for all, but he reached that conclusion after skipping an x-ray at the time his run began that might have shown otherwise. 

Reporters such as Leslie Scrivener who followed his run had already written about how Fox’s determination to complete every part of his cross-Canada run occasionally caused disagreements with the people who worked with him. When he spoke to Tim and I, Fox noted that the halfway point of his planned run was reached as he approached Sudbury on August 3. By the time he was forced to end his run near Thunder Bay nearly a month later, he had completed two-thirds of the distance from St. John’s to Victoria. Persistent statements that he had run only half-way to his goal still rankled him. 

Three months of difficult cancer treatment after he left Thunder Bay, Fox told us that he would do everything he could to keep fighting the disease, including calling on the power of prayer. “I know the percentages don’t look very good, but when you look at everything, I think I’ve got a lot going for me.”

Nearly seven months later, Terry Fox passed away as Canadians stood vigil. Soon the first of what has become an annual run in his honour continued his effort to raise funds for cancer research. Even this year, when the coronavirus pandemic has hit the bottom lines of many charities, including the Cancer Society, the 2020 Terry Fox Run went virtual and raised more money than ever. Today Terry Fox remains as big a hero to Canadians as he was four decades ago, and his fame has spread beyond Canada’s borders.

Our feature on Terry Fox’s cancer has proved to be a valuable resource for people wanting to learn more about his life. 

Today survival rates for osteosarcoma, the rare type of tumour that afflicted Fox, are higher than they were in his time, probably due in part to the research that his life inspired. Indeed, scientists and physicians have made progress in the fight against many forms of cancer, but there remains a long way to go in this quest. 

Several monuments around Canada honour Terry Fox and his Marathon of Hope. My favourite is the relatively modest statue at Beacon Hill Park in Victoria where the Trans Canada Highway ends (or begins, depending on one’s viewpoint) at the Pacific Ocean, and where Terry Fox wanted more than anywhere else to be the spot where his Marathon of Hope would conclude.

Nuclear Weapons Were A Driving Force For Space Exploration

Chris Gainor in Hiroshima in 1985.

August 6 and 9 mark the 75th anniversaries of the two times that nuclear weapons have been used in anger, when the United States military dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, killing more than 100,000 people and injuring as many others.

The decision to use those bombs and their role in bringing an end to World War II and starting the Cold War remain matters of great controversy today. What is beyond debate is that the world has had to live ever since under the threat of nuclear weapons.

For many years, that threat centred on the Cold War confrontation between the U.S. and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies. For the last 30 years that threat has shifted to other countries that possess nuclear weapons, including countries in the Middle East, longtime adversaries India and Pakistan, and countries like Iran and North Korea. Today tensions are rising again between the U.S. and its former Cold War adversaries in Russia and China.

It is also important to note that the events of 75 years ago had a major impact humanity’s reach into space.

World War II led to advances in many military technologies. Fears during that war that German scientists had the means to develop nuclear weapons led the U.S. government, with cooperation from Great Britain and Canada, to build the first atomic bombs under a shroud of secrecy. Although Nazi Germany did not build its own nuclear weapons, it developed the first long-range rocket missile, the V-2, which it used in the final year of the war against targets in England, Belgium and France. 

The first nuclear explosion took place on July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico desert, and it was kept secret for another three weeks until 16 hours after a single bomb levelled Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945. The White House announced the bombing and revealed the basic facts about nuclear weapons, saying: “We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history - and won.” 

The news of such a powerful new class of explosive immediately caused many people to think about marrying nuclear weapons to long-range rockets. The New York Times on August 8 contained an article speculating on this idea. At the same moment, both the U.S. and Soviet militaries were rounding up German rocket experts and collecting the remaining V-2 rockets and components in Germany. 

The work on long-range missiles and nuclear weapons in the U.S. and the Soviet Union that followed the end of World War II took more than a dozen years to mature to the point where both Cold War adversaries began testing powerful new rockets known as intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that were capable of lofting thermonuclear weapons to any point on Earth. The Soviet Union gave the world notice that it had that capability by launching the first artificial satellite of the Earth, Sputnik, on October 4, 1957, atop its R-7 ICBM. 

Derivatives of that missile launched the first spacecraft to the Moon and beyond, and the first humans into space, and they are still in use today. The U.S. space program in the 20th century also depended on ICBMs and technologies advanced by ICBMs. 

Without the nuclear weapons that first appeared 75 years ago, it is hard to imagine space exploration as we know it. Given the many calls on government resources, the large amounts of money required to build the first space launch vehicles could only be justified on the grounds of national defence. Even the highly expensive Apollo program that put the first humans on the Moon 51 years ago was motivated mainly by Cold War considerations rather than a desire for scientific discovery. 

While the exploration of space represents one of the most sublime achievements of humanity, it arose from rockets built first in the service of the odious Nazi regime in Germany, and further advanced by the creation of nuclear weapons of a scale that can wipe out most life on Earth. 

I have explored these paradoxes in my book, The Bomb and America’s Missile Age, which came out two years ago. That book is part of a reassessment of the history of space exploration that has been undertaken by many historians in recent years.

For many years, it was widely believed that our first steps into space resulted from widespread public support for space exploration, along with humanity’s love of exploration in general. The truth is that public support for space exploration has been limited by the great cost of exploration and the call of other priorities on Earth.

When the gigantic rockets needed to loft space vehicles away from Earth were being built as part of nuclear forces, and space achievements were seen as a measure of the political, economic and intellectual strength of the contending superpowers in the Cold War, the result was the space race that climaxed in the flights of Apollo. At that time and since, astronauts and scientists have made many unexpected and important discoveries about our universe, including the planet we live on. 

One of them was a set of discoveries about how the atmospheres of planets work. That has led to the finding that humanity’s over-reliance on carbon fuels is leading to climate change, which now stands alongside nuclear weapons as a threat to the future of our species.

Comet NEOWISE Salvages 2020 For Astronomers

Comet NEOWISE as seen from Tsehum Harbour in Sidney, B.C. at 11:15 p.m. July 19, 2020. Chris Gainor photo.

Like everyone else, amateur astronomers have spent the last four months suffering under the weight of the coronavirus pandemic. I wrapped up my two-year term as President of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC) in June at a Zoom meeting instead of our annual General Assembly, which was supposed to take place in Vancouver.

My final three months in office involved working with our staff to shift our activities from in-person to online formats, or cancelling them. The RASC's public outreach events, which often involve members of the public putting their eyes to telescope eyepieces, are a definite no-no in the era of COVID-19. The RASC’s 29 Centres across Canada have quickly adapted to the restraints the coronavirus has put on our hobby.

With some suddenness and little warning, however, a new comet has appeared in our skies and made 2020 notable for astronomers for a happy reason. We will remember 2020 as the year of Comet NEOWISE.

While comets routinely fly into the inner reaches of our solar system, most are difficult to find, even with telescopes. The last major naked eye comet to light up our northern skies was Comet Hale-Bopp in 1997.

Astronomers and many people with only the most casual interest in astronomy love comets, and we have lived through many false alarms over the last 18 years. For example, Sky and Telescope magazine featured comets on the cover of its July issue in the hope that Comet ATLAS, discovered late last year, would break the long draught of naked eye comets. Just as the issue was going to press, Comet ATLAS fell apart as it neared the Sun, as many comets do.

The NEOWISE space telescope, which has been used to discover many comets, most of them of little interest to most observers, was used to discover Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE on March 27, too late for a mention in the July Sky and Telescope. This time, the comet lit up as it approached its rendezvous with the Sun on July 3, and it held together as it swung past the Sun into northern skies. Although Comet NEOWISE is fading slightly as it moves away from the Sun, it is moving closer to Earth until July 22, when it will be about 103 million km away from us. It will fade at a faster rate as it moves away from Earth after that date.

Comet NEOWISE first became visible in Canada last week shortly before sunrise low in the northeast sky. I first saw it last Saturday shortly before 4 a.m. Soon it was visible after sunset in the northwest. This weekend it will be visible all night in Canada as it heads toward the Big Dipper and gets higher in the sky.

Already astronomy-related social media are full of comet photos. NEOWISE is not only the first major naked eye comet in 18 years, it is the first one to appear since most amateur astronomers made the switch from photographic film to digital photography. The result is a large number of amazing photos of this comet, even at this early date, from legions of skilled amateur astrophotographers. Even newcomers to astrophotography like me have been able to obtain photos of this elusive visitor.

In the next few days, Comet NEOWISE will be relatively easy to pick out in the northern part of the night sky below and to the right of the Big Dipper. Keep an eye out for jaw-dropping comet photos in astronomy-related social media and publications. Very soon NEOWISE will fade from sight as it moves out of the inner solar system. It won’t be back for 6,800 years.

We won’t see this comet again, but it will leave behind memories that will give us astronomers something to smile about whenever the topic of 2020 comes up.

Five Years Since Victoria's Pluto Party

Ivar Arroway updates Pluto flyby celebrants in Victoria about New Horizons' latest findings, 14 July 2015. Chris Gainor photo.

Today marks five years since the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto and its moons. It took New Horizons nine years to get there, so the rendezvous was widely anticipated.

In my case, I had lived in Victoria B.C. for nearly two decades before we finally got a look at the ninth planet in our solar system, or depending on your viewpoint, the king of the dwarf planets.

Most of those years I lived near Pluto’s Restaurant, which serves Tex-Mex food in a converted service station on the edge of downtown Victoria. It has always been decorated with photos of the (other) eight planets of our solar system. When, I wondered, would a photo of its namesake object join them?

During the time New Horizons flew from Earth, swung by Jupiter, and finally gave us earthlings our first real glimpse of Pluto, I came up with a plan. I decided to throw a party the evening of July 14, 2015, at Pluto’s.

New Horizons made its closest passage to Pluto early that day, about the same time as its controllers at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. released a close-up photo of Pluto. Word from the spacecraft that it had safely passed by Pluto was due to be received around dinner time.

That morning I got up and ran to my computer, got word that all appeared well, and then drank in the dramatic image showing the face of Pluto. I downloaded it and arranged for a high-quality printout at a photo lab near the restaurant.

With help from my friends in the Victoria Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, I arranged for a screen and a projector at the restaurant so we could follow the news from the APL control centre in Maryland. Astronomers Ivar Arroway and Michele Bannister, who were working at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory on solar system objects, helped update the crowd of people who came for dinner at Pluto’s on what New Horizons had found.

Pluto's Restaurant, Victoria B.C. Chris Gainor photo.

In addition to the usual great food from Pluto’s (“The Hottest Food From the Coolest Planet”) we enjoyed special cupcakes from Happy Ditty Bakery.

Finally, I was able to present a framed copy of the close-up photo of Pluto to the restaurant’s owner. The photo still hangs there today, along with the other planets.

Last year there was word that the block where Pluto’s is located is due to be redeveloped, which portends changes for Pluto’s. But in the meantime, the restaurant has returned to operation after being closed for a few weeks due to the coronavirus pandemic.

As for New Horizons, it is still going strong after upending scientists’ suppositions about Pluto, and in 2019, imaging Arrokoth, a Kuiper Belt object that orbits beyond Pluto.

This photo of Pluto as seen by New Horizons now hangs in Pluto's Restaurant. NASA photo.

The History Being Made By SpaceX Crew Dragon

SpaceX Crew Dragon Demo-2 (centre) docked at the International Space Station, July 2, 2020 (NASA)

Before it was half over, 2020 became a year that will stand out from the others, thanks to the worldwide coronavirus pandemic and the political and social discord over discrimination that has rocked the United States and spread beyond its borders.

Even without factoring in the pandemic and political developments, 2020 also promises to stand out in the history of space exploration because of the launch on May 30 of the SpaceX Crew Dragon Demo-2 spacecraft and its two astronauts from the Kennedy Space Center.

The headline on launch day was that Dragon's launch marked the end of nearly nine years since U.S. astronauts were last launched on an U.S. rocket from the territory of the United States, a drought that went back to the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. If the work behind the Crew Dragon spacecraft and the NASA Commercial Crew program is met with a full measure of success, this flight will be remembered as something much bigger, a major step forward in making space accessible to humans.

As this blog entry was published, the Crew Dragon spacecraft remains docked to the International Space Station, which means that its historic mission is not yet complete. Waiting in the wings is the Boeing Starliner spacecraft, which must successfully fly one more robotic test flight before astronauts can climb on board.

That means it’s still too soon to celebrate the Dragon mission. The Crew of Demo-2 must get home, and then further flights lie ahead to verify confidence in Dragon and prove the Boeing Starliner. Both spacecraft have met setbacks, and Dragon has overcome them, while Starliner must fly once more without a crew due to the mixed results of its most recent test flight.

Success for both Dragon and Starliner will mean that Americans will have more than one option to fly into space from U.S. territory. Success will bring an end to the situation where U.S. access to space is dependent on a single type of spacecraft such as the Space Shuttle, which was often grounded during its 30-year flight history.

Dragon and Starliner are the first of a whole new generation of spacecraft that won’t belong to a government but to private firms. The hope is that soon SpaceX, Boeing and other companies will fly their own missions without reference to NASA, and their spacecraft will be available for other organizations and individuals that have the means. Other firms such as Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada Corporation are working to make their own spacecraft available as well.

Success in the Commercial Crew program should mean that access to space for U.S. citizens or anyone else from friendly countries will no longer be dependent on the ability and willingness of U.S. taxpayers to support space travel when there are so many other calls on government resources. Future space travelers should have something they really haven’t had before – a choice of spacecraft.

The launch of astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on board Dragon Demo-2 represents an important step in opening up access to space. If Demo-2 returns home safely and is followed by more successful flights, there will be many more spaceflight possibilities for people who aren’t professional astronauts, including people from outside the U.S. Fewer than 600 people have flown in space over the nearly 60 years since Yuri Gagarin blazed the trail. Perhaps very soon the ranks of space explorers can begin to increase in a dramatic fashion.

The successful Demo-2 launch was a badly needed piece of good news in a very trying year. More work needs to be done in the Commercial Crew program, and if it is crowned with success, those of us who want to see space opened up will have something to celebrate that transcends national pride.

Happy 30th Birthday, Hubble Space Telescope!

When the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit on April 24, 1990, NASA anticipated that it would last for 15 years. This week’s 30th anniversary of that launch means that HST has now supplied astronomers amazing data about our universe for a period twice that long. And while Hubble is showing signs of aging, it likely has years of work ahead of it.

The main reason this huge spacecraft is still working is the five shuttle missions that updated, refurbished and repaired it over the years. But the last time astronauts worked on Hubble was almost 11 years ago, so its longevity is becoming more and more reliant on the quality of its parts and systems.

The next big milestone for HST is hoped to be the launch of its successor space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope. JWST’s launch has been postponed many times, and its most recent projected launch date of spring 2021 may be in jeopardy because of the coronavirus pandemic. JWST is designed to image in infrared wavelengths different from the ultraviolet, visible and near infrared wavelengths available to HST, so scientists hope that both space telescopes will have at least two years of joint operation to provide a wider range of data on JWST’s early targets.

But for the moment, it’s time to look back on Hubble’s three decades of work as the world's premier space telescope. After being launched with a defective main mirror, NASA and its contractors were able to create a fix that turned HST from a symbol of failure to one of America’s technological prowess. Soon Hubble was producing astonishing views of the stars, galaxies, nebulae and planets, along with data that overturned many assumptions about the universe we live in. 

Using Hubble and other telescopes in space and on Earth, astronomers have answered many old questions about our universe and are now stumped by even more difficult questions about what we call dark matter and dark energy. We now know that the universe is a bigger, stranger and more colourful place than we thought it was 30 years ago.

It’s been my great privilege to have spent most of my time over the past five years writing about the history of the Hubble Space Telescope. I am now working with editors and designers on the production of my book about HST, Not Yet Imagined: A Study of Hubble Space Telescope Operations, which will be published later this year by the NASA History Division.

When I was beginning my work five years ago, I was able to take part in the celebrations on Earth marking HST’s first 25 years in space. Most of the celebrations for the 30th anniversary have been cancelled or postponed by the pandemic, but we will still have new images and data from around the universe to enjoy. And some celebrations have been moved online.

For this anniversary I am happy to reveal the cover for my upcoming book. 

As I have noted, Hubble has contributed to many astonishing discoveries since 1990. While researching this book, I have found that the story of HST is almost as fascinating and surprising as its scientific bounty. The task of dealing with HST’s defective main mirror tested the ingenuity and capability of NASA and the astronomical community. Once that was done, new and better instruments that could further extend Hubble’s capabilities were developed and installed on board the orbiting telescope by shuttle astronauts. 

While Hubble has thrilled scientists with its discoveries, it has also been popular with the general public. HST's arrival coincided with the early days of personal computers connected to the internet, and Hubble images were among the first disseminated widely through the internet. 

Every history book is a journey for its authors. Along the trails I followed in researching and writing this book, I have benefitted from meeting and working with many dedicated, talented and brilliant people who work with the Hubble Space Telescope. I am looking forward soon to the release of my book and sharing it with these people and other readers around the world.

 

The Coronavirus and Apollo 13

Apollo 13 astronauts Fred Haise, Jim Lovell & Jack Swigert shortly after the end of their flight. (NASA)

This week marks 50 years since the flight of Apollo 13, the mission whose crew of three astronauts was nearly lost while heading to the Moon. As is well known thanks to the 1995 feature film Apollo 13 starring Tom Hanks, the bravery of the astronauts and the ingenuity of controllers back on Earth saved the crew during the nearly four difficult days that the crippled Apollo 13 spacecraft took to get back to Earth.

Many celebrations were scheduled for this month, and most of them have been cancelled or postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic. "My compatriot Jim Lovell says, the curse of Apollo 13 continues,” Apollo 13 astronaut Fred Haise told the collectSPACE website following the event cancellations. 

In reflecting on this anniversary of Apollo 13, I have found the confluence of events to be strangely appropriate. There are many similarities to the situation Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert faced during their harrowing journey in space, and the difficulties much of the population of Earth are dealing with today while we isolate ourselves to fight the spread of COVID-19. There is even a viral angle to Apollo 13 - an astronaut on the prime crew for the flight was replaced the day before launch when it was found that he was in danger of coming down with the measles.

On the evening of April 13, 1970, an oxygen tank explosion forced the three Apollo 13 astronauts from their mother ship into the Lunar Module, which was pressed into service as a lifeboat despite not being designed to support three astronauts for the time it would take to get back home. At the time, Apollo 13 was three days into its mission and was much closer to the Moon than the Earth. The astronauts had to quickly absorb the disappointment of having their lunar landing cancelled so they could turn to the difficult job of working with flight controllers in Houston to save themselves.

The Apollo 13 Service Module quickly lost power, and batteries on board the Command Module Odyssey began to drain. Once on board the Lunar Module Aquarius, the crew had to turn off their Command Module, something that had never been done, and run the Lunar Module on extremely limited power. Water was also at a premium, and an ingenious solution had to be found to make sure that the air in their spacecraft was cleaned of the carbon dioxide the three astronauts exhaled. 

At the time of the explosion and for much of the flight, Earth was so far away from Apollo 13 that its astronauts could look out the window into the black void of space and hide their home planet behind a thumb. When Apollo 13 passed around the Moon the next day, the three astronauts set a new record for the greatest distance humans have ever been from Earth, a record that still stands today.

For four nights and three days, the astronauts shivered in a damp, unheated spacecraft as it looped around the Moon and brought them home. They had little sleep. The crew had to fire their engines to stay on the narrow path home with untried procedures. As the spacecraft neared the Earth, they had to go through a complicated checklist to restart their Command Module, which was the only way they had to get through the re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

Controllers back on Earth had to make tough decisions on the path home, and for reasons of safety, they did not select the shortest route back to Earth. Instead, they had to figure out how to husband air, water and power during the way around the Moon and back home.

Most of us on Earth are spending our period of social isolation today in the friendly confines of home, which are confines just the same where unknown dangers of viral disease lurk just outside. Many of us are suddenly faced with having to manage resources that are unexpectedly short because of a loss of employment or business. Some of us are alone and most of us have lost direct access to family, other loved ones, and friends. 

Public health authorities and governments now face difficult decisions about how long the extraordinary measures they have ordered will need to stay in place. At the time of writing, the disease has not reached its peak in North America and we have many weeks of social distancing measures ahead of us. 

Saving Apollo 13 was a complicated and difficult challenge, but today’s danger involves managing millions of people while the invisible and still poorly understood coronavirus circulates. Turning the economy off for several weeks and then restarting it will present us all with many challenges, just like turning a spacecraft off in space and then back on did in 1970. Scores of thousands of people have already died in today's pandemic, and many more will die, although public health measures give promise of saving many more lives. There is a good chance that further rounds of public health measures lie ahead later in the year and next year due to the danger of new waves of this contagion.

The scales of the challenges of Apollo 13 and of COVID-19 are quite different, but we can learn something for our challenge of today from the success of 50 years ago.

"The lesson of Apollo 13 is what we had to do to survive,” Fred Haise observed. "We had to be willing to be able to change the norm, if you will, because we had to deal with a lot of new things and new procedures to work around and get through it all, and that's exactly what the world and people are having to deal with today.”

Recollections of Apollo 13 on its 50th Anniversary

Comet Bennett C/1969 Y1 (Pinterest)

The second Monday of April in 1970 was like many days during that time of my life - a day of classes in my junior high school in Edmonton, Alberta, followed by a monthly evening meeting of the Edmonton Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada at the University of Alberta. The topic that evening was Galaxies and Cosmology.

My thoughts that day likely involved looking forward to the third Apollo landing on the Moon, which was supposed to take place two days later on Wednesday evening, followed by two Moon walks the next day. Apollo 13 and its crew had launched from the Kennedy Space Center the previous Saturday. Because two Apollo crews had already visited the lunar surface, public interest in this flight had fallen off, but I looked forward to the landing just the same.

When I got home from the RASC meeting, my parents greeted me with surprising news: Apollo 13 was in trouble and wouldn’t make it to the Moon. There were only three television channels in Edmonton at the time, but the CBC had pre-empted its programming to follow the saga of Apollo 13 following an explosion of an oxygen tank in its Service Module. The coverage continued into the early hours of Tuesday through the first major engine firing that got the crippled spacecraft on its way home to Earth.

I wasn’t often up at such a late hour, and I took advantage of the time to go outside and enjoy the clear skies that night that had darkened after moonset. A special treat awaited me: high in the sky was Comet Bennett, which could be found at that time of night with the naked eye. It was my first comet. It turns out the Apollo 13 astronauts were due to observe the comet during their flight, but that plan was abandoned due to the life-and-death struggle the astronauts faced. 

That same night near Osoyoos, B.C., two employees of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory were testing the quality of observations available at a site atop Mount Kobau, which had been under consideration for a major new telescope. Frank Younger and Ernie Pfannenschmidt took a number of photos along the path of Apollo 13 as announced by NASA. One of their photos showed a fuzzy object resembling a globular cluster that was actually the cloud of oxygen that resulted from the explosion on Apollo 13. Other observers had caught the cloud, but none of their images matched quality of the photo taken by Younger and Pfannenschmidt, who I got to know years later in Victoria.

Image of Apollo 13 cloud from Mount Kobau. 

The next day Apollo 13 swung around the Moon, and television networks provided wall-to-wall coverage of Apollo 13’s return to Earth through the week. On Friday, April 17, Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert made it back to Earth in their spacecraft while a gigantic audience watched on TV, including much of my school.

The story of Apollo 13 was nearly forgotten after some time, but 25 years later the feature film Apollo 13 directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks hit the theatres.  It told the story of how controllers in Houston figured out how to keep the astronauts alive in their Lunar Module lifeboat far beyond design specifications during the long days between the explosion and the splashdown.

Now another 25 years have gone by and the film version of Apollo 13 still endures as arguably the best feature film made about space exploration. And today there are two more ways to appreciate the first crisis in deep space involving astronauts. 

Both follow productions created for last year’s 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The BBC World Service produced a series of podcasts called 13 minutes to the Moon outlining that mission, and now it is releasing a new series under that name telling the story of Apollo 13 in riveting detail. See www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2

In 2015, NASA software engineer Ben Feist created an amazing website called Apollo 17 in Real Time, which followed every moment from liftoff to splashdown of the final expedition to the Moon in amazing detail using every photograph, film and video of the mission, complemented with tapes obtained from the Mission Operations Control Room in Houston. Last year Feist repeated the feat for Apollo 11, and now Apollo 13 in Real Time is live on the web. See apolloinrealtime.org 

The story of Apollo 13 is a powerful reminder of the dangers astronauts faced when they flew to the Moon, and of the ingenuity exhibited by the young engineers who supported that flight in Mission Control in Houston when faced with a highly unexpected and dangerous situation.

With Jim and Marilyn Lovell, 2016.

A Global Event: the Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020

This updated version of the iconic "Pale Blue Dot" image taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft uses modern image-processing software and techniques to revisit the well-known Voyager view while attempting to respect the original data and intent of those who planned the images. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Just as COVID-19 was beginning its worldwide tour in February, NASA released a remastered version of the 'Pale Blue Dot' image of the Earth taken 30 years ago from the outer reaches of the solar system by Voyager 1. That image shows how small the Earth really is, and now the coronavirus is delivering that same message in a more visceral fashion.

As a pandemic that is affecting people in every part of our planet, COVID-19 is but the latest global phenomenon that is shaping and changing life all over the Earth. 

We are familiar with the economic changes that we know as globalization. Historians argue that the internationalization of business we see today goes back to the world-girdling empires of the 19th century, often business driven, that relied on advances in transportation such as steamships, railroads, and more recently automotive vehicles and aircraft. One hundred years ago, the large movements of people related to World War I facilitated the great influenza pandemic of 1918 to 1920. 

Since that time, we have seen revolutionary changes in communications such as radio, television, the internet and social media that have tied our world closer together, not always with happy results. 

Fifty years ago this spring, the first Earth Day took place at a time when transnational environmental organizations were first being created and when astronauts came home from the Moon with iconic photos of the whole Earth in the darkness of space. 

The declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic on March 11 and the big changes that are now affecting billions of people constitute a major historical event that will ensure that 2020 is long remembered. Even under the best case scenarios, the world and the lives of most everyone in it will be changed. It remains to be seen what changes will endure.

Beyond the casualties of disease and economic dislocation caused by COVID-19, I am wondering what lessons will be drawn from this universally shared experience. To start off, there are encouraging signs that many people are realizing the value of public health. The majority of people who haven’t understood that our public health departments have saved many more lives than the much more expensive and higher profile acute care system are receiving a powerful lesson from the coronavirus. 

In a time that will never be remembered for the quality of leadership from our political classes or economic elites, public health professionals, many of them women, are stepping in to fill the void. We are learning about the importance of even the lowliest health care workers, the cleaners and janitors, who fight germs despite decades of unfriendly attention from budget cutters and efficiency experts.

Like other plagues and pandemics before it, the coronavirus is exploiting weaknesses in our economic and social structures. It will be interesting to see what lessons are learned in societies that have come to tolerate inequality, poverty, and a lack of social solidarity. To fight COVID-19, we face the paradoxical requests to show social solidarity by social distancing, and to slow the virus by closing borders and doors when COVID-19 has already overcome the walls and the nationalist and populist politics that were supposed to protect many countries from problems originating in other parts of the world.

When the pandemic comes to an end, the population of Earth will have to return to facing the challenges of an even bigger threat to our shared future, climate change. With luck the lessons humanity learns fighting a virus will make a proper impression on those people who have up to now chosen to deny or deprecate the scientific evidence of climate change.

On that pale blue dot where we all live, we will have to learn to think in planetary terms in more than matters of economic gain if humanity hopes to endure. 

John S. MacDonald, Entrepreneur, 1936-2019

John S. MacDonald. University of Northern BC photo

By Chris Gainor
Special to the Globe and Mail
January 17, 2020
 
Engineer and entrepreneur John S. MacDonald stamped his name on the Canadian space business by building a technology, space and information services company literally from the ground up. 
 
MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. or MDA, which Mr. MacDonald founded in 1969 in the basement of his Vancouver home with fellow engineer Werner (Vern) Dettwiler, began producing computer systems, but turned to space when an opportunity arose to build a ground Station in Canada for the Landsat-1 remote sensing satellite following its launch in 1972. 
 
By 1998, when Mr. MacDonald retired as chair of MDA, the company had overtaken Spar Aerospace as Canada’s largest space contractor and acquired Spar’s space business, including the work of building the Canadarm for the U.S. space shuttle and the International Space Station. 
 
Just four days after Mr. MacDonald died in Vancouver on December 26 due to cerebral amyloid angiopathy, MDA was back in the news with the announcement that it will return to Canadian ownership in 2020 after two years under the wing of Maxar Technologies Inc.
 
John Spencer MacDonald was born in Prince Rupert, B.C. on August 13, 1936. He demonstrated his interest in electronics early when he repaired radios in fish boats there while in high school. Mr. MacDonald renewed his links with the area later in life when he served as Chancellor of the University of Northern B.C. from 2010 to 2016.  
 
After earning an undergraduate degree in applied science at the University of B.C. in 1959, Mr. MacDonald earned a master’s degree in 1961 and a Ph.D. in 1964, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After teaching at MIT, he returned to Vancouver where be began teaching electrical engineering at UBC.
 
Mr. MacDonald married his wife Alfredette in 1959 after having met her while on a summer job with Atomic Energy of Canada in Chalk River, Ont. They soon had two sons, Neil and Jay.
 
Although Mr. MacDonald enjoyed teaching, he noticed that many of the young engineers he was training at UBC were leaving the province to find work, and as he explained to science writer Barry Shanko in an interview, “I wanted to do something meaningful in an engineering sense.”
 
The result was that he and Mr. Dettwiler founded MDA, which started by building monitoring and control systems for microwave networks and pipelines. Mr. MacDonald was president of the firm until 1982.
 
MDA principal scientist David Sloan alerted Mr. MacDonald to the fact that the Canadian government wanted to build a ground station to receive images and other data from Landsat. As a result, MDA built a major part of the Canadian ground station, and armed with new designs for portable digital ground stations, MDA went on to capture a major part of the world market for portable civilian ground stations for remote sensing satellites.
 
Working with the Canadian Centre for Remote Sensing and its director general, Lawrence W. (Larry) Morley, Mr. MacDonald and MDA turned to remote sensing using synthetic aperture radar, where radar signals are used to create high definition images. Satellites and aircraft using this type of radar can obtain images at any time of day or night, and are not impeded by cloudy weather. The images are useful for mapping, environmental monitoring, and following masses of ice. 
 
MDA developed a digital processor for synthetic aperture radar that flew on Seasat, an American ocean research satellite that was launched in 1978. When the Canadian government launched Radarsat-1 in 1995, Spar Aerospace was the main contractor. MDA was a major subcontractor on Radarsat-1, and it created and sold a whole variety of data products from the satellite for many different users.
 
Around that time, MDA drew up a concept for Radarsat-2 which had much greater capabilities than the first Radarsat. Spar Aerospace resisted Mr. MacDonald’s pleas to incorporate MDA’s ideas into its Radarsat-2 proposal because it considered them too risky. So MDA bid on the job with its own concepts and in 1998 won the competition to build Radarsat-2. Spar soon left the space business and sold its space divisions to MDA.
 
“My basic thesis was that if we’re going to compete in the first half of the 21stcentury, we have to have a much more information-rich spacecraft than Radarsat-1,” Mr. MacDonald recalled.
 
The second Radarsat was so powerful that the U.S. government declined to launch it as it had done for previous Canadian satellites because of security concerns, and so Radarsat-2 was launched by a Russian rocket in 2007 and became another success.
 
MDA has since built the twin-satellite Radarsat Constellation Mission, which was launched last June atop a Falcon rocket, and has continued work on the Canadarm robot arm on the U.S. space shuttle, Canadarm-2 on the International Space Station, and a new Canadarm planned for the U.S. Lunar Gateway space station. MDA also became known for the information products it has developed from remote sensing data, including images and maps  tracing the movement of ground surfaces and sea surfaces, and images of icebergs, oil spills, and areas affected by natural disasters.
 
When asked about his major legacy, Mr. MacDonald said: “It’s the people that rank with the best of the world in advanced technology in B.C. and Canada.”
 
While he tried to hire the best people for his technical teams, Mr. MacDonald did not rely on credentials. He once took on an engineer who expressed surprise at his hiring because he hadn’t yet completed his degree but saw numerous employee diplomas decorating the office wall. “We don’t need any more wallpaper here,” Mr. MacDonald replied.
 
After 1998, Mr. MacDonald served as chair and CEO of solar energy company Day4 Energy Inc. from 2001 to 2014. 
 
Mr. MacDonald was an avid amateur astronomer and enjoyed sailing the B.C. coast. He and his wife enjoyed travelling to every part of the world. 
 
Mr. MacDonald has earned many honours and awards, including the Order of Canada in 1988. He is survived by his wife, two sons, and three grandchildren.