Overlooked: James C. Floyd, 1914-2017

James C. Floyd (l) in 1996 with Owen Maynard, a fellow engineer who worked at Avro Canada and later at NASA. Chris Gainor photo

One of the most durable controversies in Canadian history surrounds the CF-105 Avro Arrow jet interceptor, which was cancelled by the government of John Diefenbaker in 1959. More than 65 years later, every time Canada needs new military jet aircraft or there are concerns about Canadian high technology, the Avro Arrow is raised in the discussion.

Despite the prominence of the Avro Arrow and many of the people involved in creating it, the person most responsible for designing and engineering the Arrow and other aircraft from Avro Canada died more than eight years ago without any notice or attention. James C. Floyd, a British engineer who spent much of his life in Canada, passed away in Ontario, likely in the Toronto area, on April 5, 2017, at age 102. We now know about his passing thanks to a researcher who found the date from official Ontario government records and posted the information a month ago in Floyd’s entry in Wikipedia.

I have written obituary articles for a number of people associated with the Arrow, and James Floyd certainly deserves recognition of his passing, even at this late date. As the man behind the successes and setbacks of Avro Canada, he is one of the most important figures in the history of Canada's aerospace industry, and his influence reaches beyond our borders.

I had many encounters with Jim starting in the 1990s when I began writing my first of two books about Avro Canada and the Arrow, focusing on the group of 32 engineers who worked at Avro for Floyd and then were hired by NASA after the Arrow was cancelled. The Avro engineers played important roles in putting the first humans on the Moon.

James Charles Floyd was born in Manchester, England, on October 20, 1914, and at a young age he began work at the A.V. Roe Company in the U.K. He earned a diploma in engineering during World War II and took part in designing wartime British aircraft at A.V. Roe. He moved to Canada and joined Avro Canada in 1946, and became Chief Engineer a few years later. At that time, Avro Canada was building the C102 Avro Jetliner and the CF-100 jet interceptor.

The CF-100 ultimately became Canada’s only jet interceptor to go into mass production, with 692 made in the 1950s. Some were sold to Belgium, and the CF-100 served in the Canadian Forces until 1981. But as jet aircraft were relatively new when it was designed, the CF-100 had to overcome a difficult development process before it went into production.

The Jetliner was the world’s second jet transport aircraft, behind only the deHavilland Comet, and well ahead of any similar American aircraft. Unfortunately, only one Jetliner was built, and despite interest from airlines in the United States, the Canadian government ordered an end to the Jetliner in an effort to focus Avro Canada’s efforts on the troubled CF-100, which was seen as a higher priority in those Cold War days.

Many people believe that the loss of the Jetliner was a bigger loss to Canada’s aviation industry than the Arrow. I suspect that Jim Floyd was one of them, since he wrote a well-illustrated book in 1986, The Avro Canada C102 Jetliner, that remains the best reference on that aircraft.

In the mid 1950s, Avro Canada and the Royal Canadian Air Force began work on the CF-105 Arrow, which was designed to fly more than twice the speed of sound, and incorporated many state-of-the-art features in its design. Its cancellation in 1959 came after only six Arrows had been built and flown, none of them equipped with the Iroquois engine designed for it. Floyd supervised the work on the Arrow as Avro Canada’s Vice President of Engineering.

Soon after the Arrow’s cancellation and the disappearance of Avro Canada and the thousands of skilled jobs that went with it, Floyd returned to the U.K., where he worked on advanced aircraft programs, including a study that helped lead to the Concorde supersonic jet transport.

As Floyd passed retirement age, he and his wife Irene returned to Canada in 1981 and settled in Toronto. At about the same time, the controversies surrounding the Arrow and the Jetliner were gaining new prominence in Canada. The first of a long series of books decrying the fate of the Arrow appeared in 1978, and in 1980, the CBC broadcast an hour-long documentary about the Arrow.

In January 1997, the CBC aired a two-part miniseries, The Arrow, starring Dan Ayckroyd as Avro Canada President Crawford Gordon, Christopher Plummer as cabinet minister George Hees, and other prominent Canadian actors playing other characters from the story of the Arrow. Nigel Bennett depicted James Floyd.

During those years, Floyd was busy responding to the many legends, both good and bad, that had arisen around the Arrow. He actively disliked the mini-series because some characters were changed for dramatic effect, notably those of test pilots Jan Zurakowski and Jack Woodman. In addition, the mini-series ended with the popular but untrue legend that one Arrow ‘got away’ from the government-ordered destruction of the six Arrows after the program cancellation.

In 1988, a group of former Avro employees founded the Aerospace Heritage Foundation of Canada after gathering for a 30th anniversary dinner for the Arrow, and Floyd assumed a prominent role in the foundation, speaking at many gatherings it held. The foundation also sponsored the fabrication of a full-scale replica of Arrow 203, which was first exhibited at the Toronto Aerospace Museum in Downsview until that museum closed in 2011. Today the Arrow replica is on display at the Canadian Air and Space Conservancy at the Edenvale Aerodrome near Wasaga Beach, Ontario.

The foundation appears to have halted operations at about the same time as Floyd passed away, which was also when many other former Avro employees also reached the end of their lives.

I last saw Floyd in 2007, when he was 93, at an event at the Toronto Aerospace Museum.

Although Floyd passed away without notice, his life is still noted in the form of the James C. Floyd Award given every year by the Aerospace Industries Association of Canada. Floyd is also enshrined in Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame in Calgary.

Floyd is also remembered in the many books written about Avro Canada and the Arrow, including two books that I have written: Arrows to the Moon: Avro’s Engineers and the Space Race (2001), and Who Killed the Avro Arrow? (2007).

NASA Faces A Bleak Future

When Donald Trump returned to the White House this past January, there was some hope that he might enhance America’s leading role in space exploration or at least do little harm to it. The hopes of that time have been dashed, and NASA now faces a bleak future.

Those hopes were fuelled by memories of the first Trump administration’s space policies, which brought focus to America’s space efforts, including continuing the shift to private sector providers for space transportation services, starting the Artemis program to direct human space exploration toward the Moon, and creating the U.S. Space Force in a time of growing military challenges in space from China and Russia. The policies of that administration were continued almost seamlessly by the administration of Joseph Biden.

Trump took office in January for the second time with boasts of American innovation and exploration, and a promise to have U.S. astronauts "plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.” Smiling nearby was Trump’s friend and supporter, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the personification of the new dynamism in America’s private space sector. In contrast to the many controversial and partisan picks Trump made for other leading positions in his administration, Trump had already selected entrepreneur Jared Isaacman to lead NASA, a business associate of Musk but a popular choice whose appeal crossed political lines.

The new Trump administration quickly imposed unprecedented and arbitrary cutbacks on many parts of the U.S. government, notably those related to science, and fears grew that this treatment would be extended to NASA. In April, Isaacman faced generally friendly questioning from a Senate subcommittee that sent his nomination as NASA administrator to the full Senate on April 30. By then authoritative reports indicated that NASA funding would also be chopped.

Two days later, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released its top line budget proposals for 2026, which called for a 25 percent cut to NASA, including a 50 percent reduction to technology development and 47 percent to science programs. The Artemis program would end after the round-the-Moon mission of Artemis 2 (whose crew includes Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen) and the lunar landing Artemis 3 mission. The Lunar Gateway space station, which includes Canadian participation, would be cancelled. International Space Station operations would be reduced. The Mars Sample Return program and other scientific programs in development, including Earth climate monitoring and robotic planetary exploration, were also put on the chopping block.

On May 30, the administration released its full budget proposal, which confirmed the news contained in the top line budget. Six billion dollars would come off the $24.9 NASA budget from 2025, and more details were released on the curtailment of many smaller scientific programs.

During the month of May, Elon Musk began to withdraw from his controversial government budget cutting activities for the Trump administration, and on May 30, Musk bade farewell to Trump in a media event in the Oval Office. The next day, word leaked out that Trump had withdrawn Isaacman’s nomination for NASA Administrator, and a few days later, Musk and Trump began to feud in social media posts. While the Musk-Trump feud is based on differences over Trump’s federal budget plans, the withdrawal of Isaacman’s nomination also divided the two men. There is still no word on who might be NASA’s next administrator, leaving NASA without leadership probably into 2026.

The U.S. Congress passed Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” on July 3, which restored funding for a few NASA programs related to the Johnson Space Center in the Republican-friendly state of Texas, including Artemis and the Lunar Gateway station and its Canadian Space Agency participation. But it will deepen the U.S. government deficit and cut social programs, which will mean that it will be more difficult to restore cuts made to NASA’s budget this year should political winds change in the future.

The 2026 NASA appropriations process involves further consideration from Congress before the budget year begins in October. Trump’s OMB is working to see that the final budget follows the budget submitted on May 30, complete with its major cuts to NASA, by arranging orders to NASA to prepare to wind down programs facing cancellation in that budget.

According to reporting by Eric Berger, the Senior Space Editor for Ars Technica, the OMB’s budget plans for NASA are driven by OMB director Russell Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist and one of the driving forces of the controversial Project 2025 to restructure the U.S. government. Vought is known to be behind plans to cut science programs across the U.S. government.

Today NASA is facing the loss of a quarter of its budget, which would leave it with the smallest budget it has had since its early days when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president. At present, NASA is being led by an interim administrator who is under orders to toe the line from the White House. This means that Vought and the OMB are calling the shots at NASA unless Congress intervenes before October.

The Planetary Society has stated that the 2026 budget proposal for NASA ends: "41 in-development and active NASA science projects, roughly a third of NASA's entire science portfolio. All Venus missions, including DAVINCI, VERITAS, and the U.S. contribution to ESA's EnVision mission, are cancelled. The Roman Space Telescope — nearly completed — is needlessly delayed with reduced funding, which would only add to the overall cost of the project. Billions of dollars of investments in unique assets and capabilities would be wasted.

"The budget proposes reducing NASA's workforce by nearly 1/3, with nearly 2/3 cuts at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The lack of projects threatens the financial stability of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There would simply be no missions for them to work on. The Planetary Society and other organizations have characterized the proposal as an 'extinction-level event' that would usher in a functional dark age for NASA science.”

Despite efforts by some in Congress to preserve high profile but expensive human space programs such as Artemis, many observers believe that these budget plans could imperil NASA’s leadership in that area and many others. On top of the NASA budget cuts, the SpaceX Starship that is at present a key component of Artemis 3 and America’s plans to return to the Moon, is facing delays because of a series of launch and test failures.

Donald Trump is being described as a transformational president, and he may be the most transformational president for America’s space program since John F. Kennedy, whose lunar landing goal made NASA the world’s premier space agency. The cutbacks now planned threaten NASA's leading position in space exploration, at a time when China's space program is closing the gap.

The Canadian Space Agency has recently reaffirmed its association with the European Space Agency, whose scientific programs are not directly threatened by the anti-intellectual predilections of the second Trump administration. This is a wise move, as the Trump cutbacks to NASA will change the direction of space exploration going forward, making Europe a more important player as NASA surrenders its position of leadership.

Northern Star: A Series That Tells The Story Of Canada In Space

Over the past two years I’ve been working on a script for a documentary series that will soon be appearing on television in British Columbia and hopefully beyond.

The two-part documentary, Northern Star, tells the story of John S. Plaskett, the Ontario farm boy who grew up to become the founding father of astrophysics in Canada. Plaskett spearheaded the construction of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory (DAO) just north of Victoria B.C. that is equipped with a giant telescope that was for a few months in 1918 the largest operating telescope on Earth.

Today the DAO remains a vital centre for astronomy in Canada, with its staff exploring the universe using bigger and newer telescopes located in other parts of the world and in outer space, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. Canadians are taking a leading role in space exploration.

The documentary is based on Peter Broughton’s award-winning 2018 biography of Plaskett, also called Northern Star, and narrated by one of Canada’s greatest science communicators, Bob McDonald, the host of CBC Radio’s Quirks and Quarks.

While preparing the script, I worked with Peter Broughton, Bob McDonald, and Nick Versteeg of DV Productions, a top Canadian documentary producer whose perseverance was the vital ingredient in bringing Plaskett’s life to the screen.

The two episodes feature interviews with astronomers and visits to locations around North America. Plaskett himself is brought to life by Victoria-based actor Roger Carr.

The first episode traces Plaskett’s humble beginnings and the massive effort to build the DAO on Little Saanich Mountain. The second episode explores Plaskett’s ground breaking discovery—the rotation of the Milky Way—and how his work continues to influence space science.

The series also includes interviews with Canadian astronauts David Saint-Jacques, who spent months in space on the International Space Station, and Jeremy Hansen, who is scheduled to travel around the Moon on NASA’s Artemis mission.

Northern Star premieres on CHEK TV, Victoria’s own television station, at 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time on Friday, June 13, with part two following on Friday, June 20. It will also be available for streaming and on-demand on CHEK+. Hopefully the series will soon appear elsewhere in Canada.

George Harris Jr., 1929-2025

George Harris Jr. (r) at the Honeysuckle Creek tracking station in Australia in 1967 with station director Tom Reid. Hamish Lindsay photo via Colin Mackellar, honeysucklecreek.net

George Harris, Jr, a British engineer who helped establish NASA’s communications network for Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, and later did the same for European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), died on April 14, 2025, in Las Cruces, New Mexico, at age 95.

Harris was one of 32 British and Canadian engineers hired by the newly formed NASA in 1959 and 1960 after the Canadian government cancelled the CF-105 Avro Arrow jet interceptor program.

Born on July 5, 1929, in Willenhall, England, Harris attended Wolverhampton Technical College and then apprenticed at the Midlands Electricity Board. After emigrating to Canada in 1954, he joined Avro Canada and worked in flight test on the CF-100 and CF-105 jet interceptor programs until the Arrow was cancelled in 1959.

After a brief stint at North American Aviation in Ohio working on the A3J Vigilante aircraft, he joined NASA's Space Task Group in 1960 and helped set up the worldwide tracking network for Mercury, Gemini and Apollo alongside John D. Hodge and others who had previously worked at Avro Canada.

Hodge, Harris and their colleagues applied their experience with control and systems concepts to the Mercury and Gemini programs, especially NASA’s round-the-world tracking stations in the Manned Space Flight Network. Harris oversaw the testing of the tracking stations with specially instrumented aircraft that simulated Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft passing overhead.

In 1962 when the Space Task Group relocated from Virginia to Houston, Texas, the site of the future Johnson Space Center, Harris moved to the Goddard Space Flight Center, where he worked to prepare the Deep Space Network, the USNS Vanguard communications ship and Advanced Range Instrumentation Aircraft (ARIA) for Apollo tracking duties. His efforts are also credited with helping make the Honeysuckle Creek station in Australia ready for Apollo.

From 1968 to 1974, Harris worked for the European Space Research Organization, a predecessor of the European Space Agency, as the head of the Engineering and Operations Directorate at ESOC in Darmstadt, Germany. There he helped set up spacecraft operations and served as flight director for satellites such as HEOS-1, HEOS-2 and TD-1A.

In 1975, Harris returned to the United States, working for four years on systems development at the Earth Operations System Data Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

By the time the Space Shuttle began flying in 1981, Harris was working in the private sector but found himself involved again in human spaceflight when he was responsible for controlling the first Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS), when it was deployed from the shuttle Challenger during the STS-6 mission in 1983. When the Inertial Upper Stage failed to boost TDRS-1 into geosynchronous orbit, Harris led the successful effort to separate TDRS-1 from the balky stage and raise the satellite into geosynchronous orbit. He won the NASA Public Service Medal for his work on TDRS.

Starting in 1985, Harris worked as an aerospace consultant and held several short-term jobs, some of them involving the Ariane launch vehicle, one setting up systems for the United States Information Agency, and another where he served as Executive Director of the New Mexio State Office for Space Commercialization.

In 1997 and 1998, he worked for the Canadian Space Agency as manager of the control facility for Radarsat-1, which had been launched in 1995. His job was to supervise a set of maneuvers to make it possible for Radarsat to map Antarctica, which had not been part of its original mission, and then return it to its normal attitude.

When the Radarsat job was done, he returned home to Las Cruces, New Mexico. There he retired with his second wife Martha, who he had married in 1968 and who died in 2020. With his first wife Mary, Harris had two sons, Kelly and Robert, and a daughter, Sandra.

Book Review: A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?

By Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith

Penguin Press, 2023

ISBN: 9781984881724

Pages: 441

Price: $32.00, Hardcover

There are many arguments in favour of human space exploration and settlement that are advanced by people such as Robert Zubrin, Elon Musk, and the members of groups such as the National Space Society: we need to establish our species on the Moon, Mars and elsewhere in space if we are to guarantee humanity’s survival. Many discussions on the need for space exploration imply that humans can escape a whole host of Earthly problems by starting afresh elsewhere in the solar system.

In reaction to this advocacy, some scholars are bluntly questioning the ethics of attempting to make humans a multi-planet species.

One of the best-selling and most prominent books on the topic of space exploration in the past year has taken a different approach by questioning the feasibility of settling other worlds or establishing space colonies in orbit, and whether there is any chance of delivering on the promises of space advocates, at least in the near future.

The book, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? is written by the husband-and-wife team of biologist Kelly Weinersmith and cartoonist Zach Weinersmith.

The authors, who previously wrote the best-selling 2019 book Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything, say that they started work on what became A City on Mars believing that “space settlement was coming soon,” but reached the conclusion that “the timeline is substantially much longer and the project much more difficult” than they expected. The Weinersmiths argue that space settlement is “a project of centuries, not decades” that must await progress in science, technology, and also international law.

This book starts off by assessing many of the arguments advanced by space advocates, such as that going to space will help us by providing new homes in the sky, and protect the environment by moving industry off world, that space resources will enrich us and reduce conflict, and that exploration is a natural urge that will unify humans. The authors find that real data to back up these beliefs are lacking.

Then the authors turn to the physical challenges of relocating to space, including the physiological problems facing humans who will live in space, the challenges involved in going to other bodies in space and living there, or in setting up space settlements in orbit. These challenges are much bigger than they appear at first glance, and it will take a long time to overcome them.

Perhaps most controversially, the Weinersmiths discuss the legalities involved in the exploration and exploitation of space. Many space advocates are libertarians, and this book speaks about the need for legal regimes to cover questions of ownership and how to deal with the many social problems and conflicts that will be an inevitable part of humanity’s luggage on the route to the stars. The authors argue that simply starting anew beyond the atmosphere will not erase the need for environmental regulations, labour law, or criminal justice, amongst other things.

A City on Mars discusses the history of space exploration up to the present, including the efforts by space advocates to bypass regulatory regimes for space such as the Moon Treaty of 1979. A saving grace of this book is that these discussions are served up with a generous helping of humor, breezy writing, and yes, cartoons.

Even those libertarian space advocates whose arguments are taken up in this book are well advised to read it, if only to put their beliefs to the test. We have already seen that people like Elon Musk who have advanced the technologies of space travel in impressive fashion have fallen short when it comes to keeping up with their ambitious schedules.

Space is hard, as John F. Kennedy has warned us. A City on Mars warns that space is much harder than most of us realize. It does not say that those difficulties are reasons not to go, but simply that we must be realistic about what we can achieve in space and how soon we can make our move there. The popularity and profile of this books means that space advocates cannot ignore these arguments, because they are now part of the public discourse.