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.

The Total Solar Eclipse of April 8, 2024

The author and the eclipse on April 8, 2024

The millions of people who saw a total solar eclipse for the first time on April 8, 2024, now know about the power and magnificence of this celestial spectacle.

The April eclipse was the second of two total solar eclipses that were visible in North America in recent years, the first being the eclipse of August 21, 2017, that crossed the United States. Those two eclipses ended a long draught of total solar eclipses in North America that began in February, 1979. Both once seemed part of a distant future. Now eclipse chasers will have to travel to other parts of the world if they don’t want to wait for the next eclipse in North America, which won’t happen until 2044.

I saw the 1979 eclipse in Manitoba and the 2017 eclipse in Oregon, and I have written about them elsewhere in this blog. After 2017, I faced a difficult decision: where should I go to see the 2024 eclipse? The decision wasn’t simple because of the path of this eclipse and the fact that April weather is more problematical than the August weather we dealt with in 2017.

The narrow path of this year’s total eclipse first touched land in Mexico near Mazatlan and headed northeast through the U.S. starting in Texas and across several states, including Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, New York, Vermont and Maine. The eclipse’s path also included parts of Canada, including parts of southern Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland. Totality passed south of Toronto but was visible in parts of Montreal and in other centres such as Hamilton, Kingston, Sherbrooke, Fredericton and Gander. Most of the rest of the continent got a partial solar eclipse.

The weather on April 8 was more likely to be favourable in Mexico and Texas than elsewhere. Hotel bookings and transportation in those areas would be expensive and complicated. The odds of good weather in the Canadian portion of the eclipse on April 8 were less than 50-50. Each of the past few years on April 8, I checked the weather along the eclipse path, and most years in Canada it was cloudy.

In part because of the pandemic, I didn’t make arrangements for the eclipse years in advance as I had done for the 2017 eclipse. As 2024 dawned, I concluded it was too late to arrange a trip to Mexico or Texas for a reasonable price. I know many people in Toronto, but I felt that too many people chasing the eclipse in Hamilton and points south might complicate things. So I decided to go to Windsor, Ontario, just outside the path of totality. We have relatives there, and it would be relatively easy to cross the border there to chase the eclipse in Ohio if necessary. But it was still a big gamble, and I made sure I had other things to do to justify the trip.

I didn’t get carried away with long range forecasts for eclipse day since I had already made my plans. About a week before the eclipse, I began to see social media posts from my friend Alan Dyer, who has literally written the book on photographing solar eclipses. For this master of astrophotography, failure was not an option when it came to choosing a suitable place to see and photograph the 2024 eclipse. Setting out from his home in Alberta, Alan found that contrary to expectations, the weather in Texas was not promising. He decided to drive in the general direction of eastern Canada.

As the eclipse day got closer, weather predictions called for clouds in southern Ontario, and when I arrived in Toronto on April 4, I was greeted with cold, cloudy and rainy weather. Alan drove on to Quebec, where prospects for clear skies looked better. Two days before the eclipse as I made my way to Windsor, the skies cleared. Things were looking more promising, but clouds were still predicted for April 8.

The night before, the prediction was still more promising for Ohio than the Windsor area, and Ohio locations were closer to the centreline of the eclipse, which promised a longer period of totality. I prepared to cross the border.

April 8 dawned in Windsor with blue skies. The forecast still called for clouds in the mid afternoon, when the eclipse was due to take place. The forecasts for Ohio called for longer periods of cloudiness in the afternoon, which I feared meant thicker clouds, and so I decided to stay in Canada.

Accompanied by my wife, along with her sister and her husband, we drove south from Windsor through Amherstberg into the path of totality. Many eclipse chasers in the area were already arriving in Point Pelee Park, which was closer to the centreline but involved very limited access, so I thought we might set up in Leamington. Before we got there, we found a great spot to watch the eclipse at Colchester Harbour and Beach. The Windsor Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC) had set up tents and telescopes there, a restaurant, coffee shop and other facilities were nearby, and scores of people were already settling in to watch the eclipse over Lake Erie.

Looking south across Lake Erie, we saw a bank of clouds that everyone hoped would stay where it was. But true to the prediction, the clouds moved our way and covered the sun as the partial phase of the eclipse began a little before 1 p.m. Fortunately, the clouds weren’t very thick and we could follow the Moon as it covered the face of the Sun, a view assisted by our eclipse glasses or the filtered ‘eclipse telescope’ I brought along.

A half hour ahead of totality, the temperature in the area began to noticeably cool. I recall the temperature reduction in the 2017 eclipse cooling closer to the time of totality, but that was in the warmer weather of August.

Finally, at about 3:12 p.m., totality began. We were amongst the first to see totality that day from Canadian soil. The transition from needing eclipse glasses to full totality with the naked eye seemed to be prolonged to me, but finally we got our 90 seconds of totality and dark skies. Venus was plainly visible through the thin layer of cloud, but I don’t recall seeing Jupiter or any other celestial object. The incandescent but not overpowering glow of the Sun’s corona took centre stage. No photo has ever done justice to that sight.

In the moments leading into and out of totality, the lighting of the area took on a strange hue. During totality, my viewpoint overlooking Lake Erie allowed me to see the approaching “sunset” to the west and the receding “sunrise” to the east. During this time, I took a couple of photos of the sun and of the light effects around the horizon with my iPhone, and I set up my iPad to film totality. I wanted to spend most of totality enjoying the view rather than spending a lot of time messing with cameras.

All too soon, totality was over, and soon people started to leave. We remained for most of the rest of the eclipse to savour the incredible spectacle. By the time we drove back to Windsor, all the clouds had disappeared. So had the crowds, and as a result we encountered no traffic jams.

The hours and days that followed seemed to be a giant debrief on this event. Who got a good view of the eclipse? Who got skunked by the weather? Those were the major topics of conversation with everyone I met. The evening of April 8 I attended a meeting of the Victoria Centre of the RASC on Zoom, and a few days later I attended a meeting of the RASC Mississauga Centre in person, both full of eclipse talk.

To sum things up, those in or near Mazatlan, some on cruise ships, enjoyed clear views, and the weather in Texas was not great but allowed brief glimpses of the Moon blocking the Sun. Most people who saw the eclipse from both the north and south sides of Lake Erie got a good view of the eclipse through thin clouds. Those who viewed the eclipse from Niagara Falls and eastern Ontario had to deal with thicker clouds, which meant fleeting views of totality or no view at all. The weather was better in Montreal, and those in Sherbrooke and the surrounding area enjoyed clear skies. I heard reports of good weather in New Brunswick and not so good weather in Newfoundland. Alan Dyer got his photos. Only a few people I know missed all of totality.

So the viewing conditions for the 2024 total solar eclipse turned out to be less than perfect but better than most of us could hope for. My friends who had never seen a total solar eclipse were most impressed by the sight. Many found that the eclipse stirred their emotions.

Many astronomical events don’t impress non-astronomers, and that is even truer today when some events such as “Supermoons” are overhyped by people in the media or on the internet. But total solar eclipses never fail to impress, as they should, since they are so rare and so amazing.

Now the question arises - when is the next one? August 12, 2026, in Greenland, Iceland and Spain. In North America, the wait will go on until August 23, 2044. How long will my wait go on? That's a decision for another time.

Asteroid (20041) Gainor

A representation of the orbit of (20041) Gainor, with its position on November 9, 2023 (NASA JPL)

This week the Working Group on Small Bodies Nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) published its latest list of about 40 new names it had approved for minor planets. Twenty of them were named after Canadians, including a number of people I know from my involvement in astronomy. One was named (20041) Gainor, after me.

(20041) Gainor had been discovered on December 18, 1992, by Japanese astronomers A. Natori and T. Urata, and it was known as 1992YH before this week. Over time after the original discovery, additional observations had shown that it is in the Main Belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, about three times as far away from the Sun as the Earth. It takes 1523 days or more than four years, to make one orbit of the Sun. The asteroid is 5.167 km in diameter and rotates every 2.62 hours, and it is tilted nearly 14 degrees to the ecliptic.

The biography issued with ‘my’ asteroid, which can also be called 20041 Gainor, notes that I am "a Canadian journalist, historian and amateur astronomer with a PhD in the history of technology from the University of Alberta. He has written six books about aerospace, including Not Yet Imagined, the operational history of the Hubble Space Telescope, published by NASA in 2021. Gainor was President of the RASC in 2018–2020.”

The first asteroid, Ceres, was discovered in 1801, and today roughly half a million minor planets have been assigned a number. So far, only about 20,000 have been named. Discoverers have 10 years to suggest a name, after which the naming goes to the IAU’s Minor Planet Center. Names must be 16 characters or less, one word (although first and last names are often combined), pronounceable, non-offensive, non-commercial, and not too similar to an existing name.

Today many astronomers, usually armed with cameras, along with automated telescopes and even satellites, are involved in the search for asteroids, particularly those that might collide with the Earth. Multiple observations are required to establish the path of each asteroid. Canadians are involved in the search for asteroids, including some who use the Plaskett Telescope at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Saanich, B.C., a few miles away from my home. Others are consulted on good names for asteroids, and I thank those people for their role in this honour.

This week’s list of minor planets from the IAU includes the names of several friends from the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, including my Victoria Centre colleague Lauri Roche, and prominent science journalists like Ivan Semeniuk, Dan Falk and Nicole Mortillaro, along with environmentalist David Suzuki, the best known Canadian in this list. The others on the list come from a variety of countries and occupations, the best known being the namesake of (332884) Arianagrande.

Right now (20041) Gainor is more difficult than usual to see because it is on the other side of the Sun from the Earth. Even when the asteroid and the Earth are on the same side of the Sun some months from now, it will be very dim - around 13th magnitude. But I hope to get a chance to see it some time.

Canada World Youth, 50 years later

The author and friends in Fiji, 1974

Fifty years this week I boarded an Air Canada flight that took me from my home in Edmonton to Toronto, which I had never visited before. I was just a few weeks out of high school, and like many other people at that point in their lives, I was unsure about what direction my life would take in the years ahead, aside from a general intention to go to university.

I was joining a youth exchange program then in its second year of operation called Canada World Youth (CWY) or Jeunesse Canada Monde (JCM). From my arrival in Toronto through the next nine months into May 1974, I would travel with other young people, most of them like me just out of high school, around Canada and then to an exchange country, in our case, Fiji in the South Pacific.

In its first year, 1972-1973, CWY had youth exchanges with Cameroon, Mexico, Malaysia, Tunisia, and Yugoslavia involving 240 youth from Canada and another 300 from the exchange countries. As I applied and went through CWY’s selection process in June and July 1973, there was no mention that Fiji was amongst the possible exchange countries in the coming year. I had no idea about going to Fiji until I received a letter in mid-July announcing my selection for the program.

CWY was the brainchild of Jacques Hébert (1923-2007), a Montréal journalist, author and publisher who was a close friend of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, then the prime minister of Canada. Later on, Hébert founded a similar organization for youth, Katimavik, and was named to the Senate by Trudeau. Although CWY was a private organization, most of its funding in its early years came from the federal government.

In its original form, CWY was seen to be an educational experience stressing group living and immersion in cultures differing in religion, language, ethnic origin and form of government from our own. Our Fiji team in year two (1973-1974) started with three groups of 10 Canadians, plus three group leaders and two coordinators. Since many of the Canadian participants came from Québec, the cross cultural aspect of our program began immediately, and a few weeks later, when each Canadian group was enlarged by a similar number of Fijian participants and staff, there was much more cross cultural exposure for everyone.

Fiji had been a British colony for nearly 100 years until it gained its independence in 1970. During Fiji’s colonial period, the British authorities introduced indentured labour from India, and by the time of independence, the populations of indigenous Fijians and those with roots in India were nearly equal. As subsequent history that includes military coups would prove, the two groups have had an uneasy relationship.

The 1970s also was a time when support for separatism was growing in Québec, especially in our age group. Since a Québec election took place during our sojourn in that province, our time in CWY was also something of a crash course in Canadian political differences.

Much of what we learned in CWY showed that our home country was far from perfect, especially from the viewpoint of distant countries that were subject to the attentions of Canadian-based corporations.

Our four-and-a-half months in Fiji, which began just before New Year’s 1974, immersed us in the realities of people who lived in what was then called the Third World. This meant a much different standard of living and many features of the colonial experience, including residential schools for many indigenous Fijians. Up to that time I had lived my life in a province where multiculturalism lay in the future. In Fiji I had the edifying experience of living in places where I was the visible minority.

For me CWY was a most thorough educational experience that taught me much about the world, my country, and also myself. One of the paradoxical strengths of that experience was that it was so poorly organized. Many of us had grown up in situations where we had become accustomed to having our lives looked after. In CWY we had to pick up the pieces of what had been planned for us, which involved living in isolated communities and helping out with various community projects.

Some participants in our team had difficulty coping with the challenges presented by CWY, and many including me had issues readapting to home after our CWY exchange was over. Later on I learned that Canadian participants in exchanges with other countries had far worse problems than we did in Fiji.

We also learned that the Fijian participants were not happy with their time in CWY, since they wanted more practical educational experiences that would help them build up their homes and their country. As a result, Fiji remained in the program only for one more year.

Canada World Youth changed and evolved over the years. In our year we had three month-long projects in various parts of Canada and then three or four projects in Fiji. Soon CWY changed its format so that participants took part in fewer but longer community projects that benefited host communities more and provided more practical benefit to the participants. CWY became better with time.

Over time, government funding for CWY fell away, and CWY came to rely on private sources of funding, including funds raised by participants.

Canada World Youth was often compared with the U.S. Peace Corps. But the Peace Corps involved sending skilled workers to developing countries, unlike CWY, which was built around two-way exchanges not necessarily involving skilled people.

In later years, CWY got involved in projects in Canada promoting reconciliation with Canada’s indigenous peoples. But the lengthy COVID-19 pandemic forced CWY to suspend operations, and the disruption the pandemic caused made it difficult for the organization to resume activity. So last fall, just as CWY passed its 50th anniversary, it closed down.

Over the decades since my own CWY experience ended, I have run into many former CWY participants and staff who became activists and community leaders, and this legacy continues.

Today we are living in a time when we are facing global problems such as pandemics and climate change, problems that are being met too often by forms of ignorance such as nationalism, nativism, and wilful denial of reality. To combat these forms of ignorance, more than ever we need more educational opportunities like Canada World Youth for up-and-coming generations.

Peter Armitage, NASA Engineer worked at Avro Canada 1929-2023

Peter Armitage (left) with Astronaut Virgil I. Grissom during Mercury recovery testing exercise in 1961.

Peter Armitage, one of the last of the British and Canadian engineers who helped form the nucleus of NASA’s early human space programs, died on July 10 at age 94 in Houston, Texas. During his career at NASA, Armitage helped develop recovery systems for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft, and later managed the Lunar Receiving Laboratory and the Space and Life Sciences Directorate at the Johnson Space Center.

He was one of 32 engineers hired by the newly formed NASA in 1959 after the Canadian government cancelled the CF-105 Avro Arrow jet interceptor program. Most of those engineers had come to Avro Canada from the United Kingdom.

Peter John Armitage was born on March 5, 1929, in Leeds, Yorkshire, the son of a tool and die maker and a seamstress. As a youth, Armitage learned from an uncle how to machine metal parts, and his family moved to the south of England after his father lost his job. As World War II broke out, his family lived in Hamble, a small village just outside of Southampton, and the young Armitage was selected to be an “aircraft spotter” for his school. When they saw approaching German aircraft, Armitage and his fellow spotters rang bells, and the students entered the air raid shelter, and throughout his life, Armitage maintained his love for the Supermarine Spitfire and other aircraft of that era.

When the war ended, Armitage got work as a trainee draughtsman in the aircraft industry and undertook studies at Southampton University. In 1948 he got work at the Cierva Autogiro Company, working on the Skeeter light observation helicopter that was used by the British Army. In 1950, Armitage was drafted into the Royal Air Force (RAF), and after flight training, Armitage was posted to the RAF 617 squadron, which had won fame in the war as the ‘Dam Busters.’ His decision to leave the RAF after two years may have saved his life because his RAF crewmates were killed on a mission shortly after he left.

Armitage got work at Folland Aircraft, where he worked on the wing structure of a lightweight fighter called the Midge, the forerunner to the aircraft known in the RAF as the Gnat. Persuaded by a colleague to apply for a job at Avro Canada in Toronto, Armitage was chosen and he sailed for Canada in November 1952. His stay in Canada was interrupted in 1955 and 1956 when Avro gave him a scholarship to study at the College of Aeronautics at Cranfield, where he earned his master’s degree.

While serving at RAF Binbrook in Lincolnshire, Armitage met his future wife June Blackett, and they were married in Toronto in 1954. They had four sons.

At Avro Canada, Armitage worked on flight testing of the CF-100 Canuck subsonic jet interceptor, which Avro produced in large numbers for the Royal Canadian Air Force, and for the Avro Arrow, which the Canadian government controversially cancelled on February 20, 1959, during early flight testing, throwing hundreds of engineers and thousands of others out of work.

A few days after it began operations in October 1958, NASA started its first human space program, Project Mercury, at the Space Task Group (STG) at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Because STG badly needed skilled engineers, STG leaders including Robert Gilruth flew to Toronto to interview Avro engineers after the Arrow was cancelled. In April STG hired 25 Avro Canada engineers, and another seven joined NASA later. The immigration process for the new recruits was accelerated, and when Armitage and some of his former Avro colleagues reported for work on April 27, 1959, they went through their employment induction process at the same time as the seven new Mercury astronauts.

Armitage was soon assigned to the recovery branch, and for much of the next decade at STG and the Manned Spacecraft Center (later renamed after Lyndon B. Johnson), which succeeded STG in 1962, Armitage was involved in testing recovery systems for Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft. These systems included parachutes, the landing bag on the base of the Mercury capsule that absorbed forces at splashdown and kept the spacecraft upright in the water, Gemini’s paraglider which was cancelled before flights began, much to Armitage’s relief, and on Apollo the plans to protect Earth from possible contamination from possible biological agents from the Moon.

In 1961 Armitage joined his British colleagues from STG on an informal NASA cricket team that played a game against a cricket team from nearby William and Mary University, which the university team won. The NASA cricket team reformed in 1964 but a planned game against visiting Royal Navy sailors never took place because of an approaching hurricane. Along with many other engineers who had worked at Avro, Armitage became a citizen of the United States in 1964.

Gilruth gave Armitage an “out of the blue” assignment when a Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV) crashed in 1968, nearly killing astronaut Neil Armstrong. Armitage directed a flight certification program for the remaining LLTV before training with the vehicle was allowed to resume. With Apollo recovery systems set in 1969, Armitage attended management school at Stanford University in California on a Sloan Fellowship.

When he returned to Houston, Armitage served as manager of the Lunar Receiving Laboratory when astronauts brought lunar samples back from the Apollo 14 and 15 missions in 1971. At the time, many scientists were discontented with their place at the laboratory, and Armitage was able to make changes that eased the scientists’ concerns. Fresh from that success, Armitage moved to the Science Directorate, later the Space and Life Sciences Directorate, where he helped manage scientific work on Skylab and early shuttle flights.

Armitage retired from NASA in 1986 as the last of the former Avro Canada engineers still at NASA. Soon his friend former astronaut Donald K. “Deke” Slayton hired him for a pioneering effort in private space flight, Space Services, Inc., where Slayton and Armitage worked on developing the Conestoga rocket. Armitage retired shortly after the company was sold in 1990 when contracts for rockets proved to be scarce.

In retirement Armitage pursued his hobby of restoring classic British cars at his home near the Johnson Space Center.