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.