Bruce Aikenhead, Canadian Space Pioneer, 1923-2019

Bruce Aikenhead tries out weightlessness in 1987 on board the KC-135 'vomit comet' NASA photo.

By Chris Gainor
Special to The Globe and Mail
August 21, 2019

In 1959, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) introduced America’s first astronauts to the world. Nearly 25 years later, Canada’s first astronauts were chosen. Both groups of astronauts were trained by Bruce Aikenhead, a soft-spoken Canadian who began a long career in spaceflight after losing his job when the CF-105 Avro Arrow jet interceptor was cancelled.
His career also included service in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War and work at well-known Canadian firms including Electrohome, CAE Inc., and Spar Aerospace, but Mr. Aikenhead, who died this month, will be best remembered as one of the key individuals in the early years of Canada’s space program.
Until the Canadian Space Agency opened for business in 1989, Canada’s space efforts were spread amongst a variety of government agencies and private contractors. No one could match Mr. Aikenhead’s variety of experience in Canada’s space sector or his three years in a key role at NASA.
Shortly after Bruce Alexander Aikenhead was born, on Sep. 22, 1923, in Didsbury, Alta., his family moved to London, Ont., where he was raised. During the war, Mr. Aikenhead joined the RCAF and serviced radar equipment while attached to the Royal Air Force in England and later in India.
Mr. Aikenhead studied radio physics at the University of Western Ontario after the war and completed an Honours Bachelor of Science degree in radio physics in 1950. He married the former Helen Wait in 1947, and together they raised their family. Starting in 1950, Mr. Aikenhead worked at Dominion Electrohome Industries in Kitchener on production engineering of radio receivers, car radios and televisions.
In 1955, Mr. Aikenhead turned to aviation, joining Canadian Aviation Electronics in Montreal, now known as CAE, where he helped develop aircraft simulators. Three years later, he moved to Avro Canada in Malton, Ont., where he worked on the flight simulator for the Avro Arrow, a highly advanced aircraft that was capable of flying twice the speed of sound.
Six months after Mr. Aikenhead started work at Avro, the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker cancelled the Arrow program on Feb. 20, 1959, throwing thousands of skilled people out of work. A few weeks after the cancellation, top officials from NASA flew to Malton and hired 25 former Avro engineers including Mr. Aikenhead to work on Project Mercury, which would launch the first U.S. astronauts into space.
On the day in April 1959 that Mr. Aikenhead reported to work at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., he was assigned to join the team that would train the Mercury astronauts. He then went through his formal employment induction procedures for NASA alongside the seven astronauts, who had also started work that day. For the rest of his time at NASA, he and the astronauts worked in adjacent offices.
With his experience in simulators, Mr. Aikenhead developed a device that simulated the cabin of the Mercury spacecraft, and he helped train Alan B. Shepard Jr. and Virgil I. Grissom for their suborbital launches in 1961. Mr. Aikenhead and his colleagues were training John H. Glenn Jr. that fall for his first American orbital flight when NASA decided that its human space program would relocate to Houston, Texas.
Along with some of the other engineers from Canada, Mr. Aikenhead decided that Houston was too far away from home, and he was able to get another job at CAE working on aircraft simulators. When his friend Col. Glenn made his historic flight on Feb. 20, 1962, Mr. Aikenhead could only follow it on the radio from his new home in Montreal.
While Mr. Aikenhead's time at NASA evokes movies such as The Right Stuff, he and his family also had to live with the realities of segregation in the U.S. South as depicted in the 2016 film Hidden Figures. Once back in Montreal, Bruce and Helen Aikenhead made sure that their home was open to international students studying at McGill University.
In 1966, Mr. Aikenhead returned to the space sector when he decided to join Dr. Gerald Bull of McGill in the High Altitude Research Program, which sought to develop cannons capable of launching satellites into orbit. The program ended the following year when the Canadian government withdrew financial support, and Dr. Bull went on to notoriety by developing cannons for military clients around the world until his still-unsolved murder in 1990.
After his layoff, Mr. Aikenhead soon found a job at RCA Canada in Montreal, where he was project engineer for the ISIS 2 spacecraft, the fourth and last of Canada’s first generation of satellites that explored the ionosphere as part of the International Satellites for Ionospheric Studies program. Following the launch of ISIS 2 in 1971, he worked on the Communications Technology Satellite, which after its launch in 1976 was known as Hermes and pioneered direct-to-home and other communications technologies.
By then, RCA had been purchased by Spar Aerospace, which assigned Mr. Aikenhead to work with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) on a program to build the Space Shuttle Remote Manipulator System for the U.S. Space Shuttle. In 1981, Mr. Aikenhead moved to the NRC in Ottawa as deputy program manager for what became known as the Canadarm.
The Canadarm proved itself in early shuttle flights, and in 1983, the Canadian government followed up on NASA’s invitation to fly Canadian astronauts by selecting five men and one woman for the Canadian Astronaut Program. Mr. Aikenhead was involved in the final selections, and with his experience at NASA, he quickly became involved in training the Canadian team. When Marc Garneau was selected to be the first Canadian to fly in space, Mr. Aikenhead’s contacts at NASA helped open many doors in Houston for the Canadians prior to Cmdr. Garneau’s flight in October 1984.
Mr. Aikenhead was put in charge of the Canadian Astronaut Program in 1986, but the program was effectively on hiatus for a time because of the loss of the shuttle Challenger that year. He presided over the program’s transfer from NRC to the CSA in 1989, the shuttle flights of Canadian astronauts Roberta Bondar and Steve MacLean in 1992, and the selection of Canada’s second group of astronauts, including Chris Hadfield and Julie Payette, now the Governor-General of Canada.
In March 1993, Mr. Aikenhead retired and moved to Salmon Arm, B.C. with his wife, Helen, who died in 2005. Mr. Aikenhead was named an officer of the Order of Canada in 1997. During his retirement, Mr. Aikenhead indulged his love of jazz and opera, and became a founder of the Okanagan Science Centre in Vernon, where he developed exhibits on space science and took part in school programs.
Mr. Aikenhead’s death of natural causes in Vernon, B.C. on Aug. 5, brought quick responses from Canadian astronauts. Mr. Garneau, now Canada’s Minister of Transport, praised him as a mentor, Robert Thirsk remembered him as the “go-to guy” when astronauts needed information about space travel, and Mr. Hadfield called him “kind, smart, hard working and humble.”
Mr. Aikenhead, who was 95, is survived by his son, Steve Aikenhead; and daughters, Kasey Bernz, Elizabeth Aikenhead, Barbara Newton and Jane Swaine (who was fostered by the Aikenheads).

Bruce Aikenhead with Chris Gainor, 2007.

Voyager 1 Upended Our View of Space - 40 Years Ago

Jupiter and its four Galilean moons - Io, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede - as seen by Voyager 1. NASA image.

Forty years ago this week we got our first real closeup view of Jupiter and its system of moons, a moment that I believe was a turning point in the history of space exploration.

Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter on March 5, 1979, opening an extraordinary decade of exploration by this spacecraft and and its twin Voyager 2 after their launches toward the outer solar system in 1977. Both spacecraft flew by Jupiter and Saturn, and Voyager 2 went on to visit Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. Today both spacecraft are still sending back data after having effectively flown outside of the solar system.

When Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter, it sent back eye popping images of Jupiter and its four major moons, Io, Callisto, Ganymede and Europa. For the first time, Jupiter’s complicated atmosphere could be seen with full clarity. The Voyager images transformed the four Galilean moons in the eyes of Earthbound observers from anonymous spheres into worlds of their own: Io was a reddish pockmarked moon that at first glance resembled a pizza, Ganymede was marked with craters and grooves, Europa appeared as an icy but relatively smooth world, and Callisto also was icy but covered with craters. Voyager made many more discoveries about the Jovian system, including a ring around Jupiter and new smaller moons orbiting the biggest planet in our solar system.

The day after the spacecraft’s flyby, Voyager Project Scientist Ed Stone said: “I think we have had almost a decade’s worth of discovery in this two-week period."

Three days after its closest approach to Jupiter, the departing Voyager 1 looked back and shot an image of a crescent Io, mainly to verify the accuracy of Voyager’s navigation system. When a member of Voyager’s navigation team, Linda Morabito, examined the image, she found what looked like a cloud rising from the moon's surface. As the smallest of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons, Io doesn’t have an atmosphere, so Voyager scientists soon reached the then surprising conclusion that Io has active volcanos, the first body other than the Earth known to have them.

In retrospect, I look at Voyager 1’s flyby of Jupiter the first real “wow” event of humanity’s reach into space. The most exciting thing about the space probes that came before Voyager was that humans had actually succeeded in exploring worlds beyond the Earth.

Their discoveries didn't really impress the public. Humanity’s reach for the Moon culminated with landings in places that resembled slag heaps instead of the mountainous spires that many people had expected, our first robotic visits to Mars dashed our hopes of finding life, Venus was shrouded by clouds, and Mercury was a cratered world that resembled our own Moon. Two Pioneer spacecraft had flown by Jupiter in 1973 and 1974, and their flights proved that spacecraft could survive the journey through the high radiation environment surrounding Jupiter. But their rudimentary imaging systems gave us only the smallest hints of the beauty of Jupiter and its moons. 

These “meh” moments were one reason space exploration seemed to fall out of public favour in the 1970s. 

I’m not saying that our early explorations were not important or that their discoveries did not excite scientists, but to the general public, the headlines were that humans had walked on the moon and robots had given us close-up views of other worlds, not what these explorers had actually found.

Finally, in March 1979, Voyager 1 provided images and other data that showed that our solar system contained many surprises. These results drew attention from the public, and more media were on hand when Voyager 2 flew through the Jovian system later in the year. Even bigger crowds and more media coverage were in evidence when the Voyagers provided stunning close-up views of the Saturnian system in 1980 and 1981. 

I joined the media hordes at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for Voyager 1’s flight through the Saturnian system, and the only disappointment was the opaque cloud layer that shrouded the largest Saturnian moon, Titan. More attention was paid to the spectacular features Voyager found on other moons and the strange findings from Saturn’s rings, including shepherd moons.

Titan eventually gave up its secrets nearly a quarter century later when the Cassini spacecraft arrived for a long visit to Saturn with the Huygens lander that touched down on Titan's surface and found lakes of hydrocarbons and other astonishing features. Jupiter and its moons have also been explored by the Galileo spacecraft and is now being investigated by the Juno spacecraft, which is sending back amazing images of its own. 

Not long after the Voyager planetary flybys came to an end, NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. Although Hubble couldn't operate fully until 1994 due to the problems with its main mirror, it began to send back an amazing stream of images and other data that have helped upend our view of the universe. Hubble images, including those of the marks left on Jupiter by Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, the ‘Pillars of Creation’ in the Eagle Nebula, the Hubble Deep Fields and many others, have captured the imaginations of many people. 

Hubble has found that the universe is a larger, more colourful and more amazing place than what we had previously thought. Other space telescopes such as Chandra and Spitzer have made discoveries of their own, and the Kepler and TESS space telescopes are finding a variety of unexpected planets orbiting distant stars. In recent years a string of rovers have revealed striking geography on Mars and found tantalizing hints of life on the Red Planet. The New Horizons spacecraft amazed many people on Earth with its surprising views of Pluto in 2014, and it started off 2019 with the first view of a Kuiper Belt object.

Today we see the universe as a very different place from what we imagined forty years ago, and new questions regularly arise about its nature. Today's discoveries are just the latest in a string that followed Voyager 1's astounding findings when it arrived at Jupiter four decades ago. 

Looking Back at the RASC's 150th Anniversary

The Royal Canadian Mint's coin celebrating the RASC.

Now that 2019 is well under way, I am looking back on last year’s 150th anniversary celebrations held by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, whose membership includes more than 5,200 amateur and professional astronomers from every part of Canada. These celebrations were especially memorable for me because midway through the year I had the honour of becoming President of the RASC, succeeding my friend Colin Haig from Ontario. 

In 2018, the RASC obtained recognition in the form of special stamps issued in June by Canada Post, and a commemorative coin created by the Royal Canadian Mint that includes a piece of a meteorite. As a long-time stamp collector, I was thrilled to help unveil the stamps at the 2018 RASC General Assembly in Calgary. The anniversary coin sold out within hours of going on sale, and I was lucky to find one in a local post office for my own collection.

Much of the credit for this recognition goes to the RASC's Executive Director, Randy Attwood, who persuaded both the Mint and Canada Post to include our sesquicentennial in their 2018 commemorative programs.

The RASC had two national star parties in 2018, and the first one in January was carried live in a nationwide webcast. Members across Canada, including myself, have contributed astrophotos, sketches, and other artwork to our  imaginingtheskies.ca website, and prizes are now being given out. 

My colleagues on the RASC History Committee have been busy. Committee chair Randall Rosenfeld and Board Member Heather Laird have created a great set of podcasts on our shared history in RASC, which can all be found on the RASC.ca website. Much of our General Assembly in Calgary was taken up with an excellent set of papers in a seminar called A Shared Sky: The RASC 1868–2018. We are now working on revising those papers for publication in a book in the near future.

Like many other RASC members, I enjoyed the great hospitality and terrific speakers at the 2018 General Assembly from June 28 to July 1 at the University of Calgary. The opening ceremony involving local First Nations’ speakers and dancers at the U of C’s Rothney Astrophysical Observatory was especially memorable.

During 2018, I was able to visit a number of centres, including the Toronto Centre where the RASC was created in 1868. I also spoke about the Hubble Space Telescope at my home centre in Victoria and at the Vancouver, Winnipeg and Sunshine Coast Centres as well.

A special highlight for me was enjoying the magnificent beauty of Yukon when I spoke at the Northern Nights Dark Sky Festival at Kluane National Park in September, which I wrote about in this blog in October. I rarely get to see the Northern Lights at home on the West Coast, but this display took me back to the time many years ago when I first joined the RASC as an adolescent at the Edmonton Centre, and where I quickly became an enthusiastic auroral observer.

My home centre in Victoria took full part in the RASC sesquicentennial activities, and it also was involved in celebrations led by the National Research Council of Canada marking the 100th anniversary of first light at the 1.8 metre Plaskett telescope at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Saanich. 

In 2019, I have already visited the Edmonton and the Prince George Centres, and I am looking forward to visits soon to the Calgary and Okanagan Centres. The 2019 RASC General Assembly will take place at York University in Toronto June 13 to 16. Members of RASC will be meeting jointly with members of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, and we will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11’s historic landing on the Moon with a talk by James Hansen, author ofFirst Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, the book that inspired the recent movie.

As the RASC’s sesquicentennial goes into the history books, it is being followed up by plenty of RASC activity in 2019.

RASC members and visitors mark the 100th anniversary of public outreach activities at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory.