Some suggested (seriously?) that France could have reached space thanks to a Soviet rocket. The British and Italians, on the other hand, might have used locally-designed rockets. Rumours circulated that all of these countries were thinking of putting some (little?) something into orbit, with a little help from NASA in most cases. The one which could, I repeat could, have pitted Canada against Australia, France, Italy and the United Kingdom. Would you believe that a space race was underway at the start of that year? No, no, not the one between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the United States. Incidentally, representatives of the Canadian press saw a life-size model of the first national satellite in February 1960, in Ottawa, Ontario. While the former wished to advance Canadian space technology for reasons related to industrial progress and defence, the latter were motivated by the desire to advance knowledge and science with a capital S, but I digress. One might wonder whether, from that time on, the objectives pursued by the federal government and the Department of National Defence corresponded to those of the researchers at the DRB and DRTE. Indeed, that expression was mentioned in the press in December 1959 at the latest. The Canadian satellite was initially identified by the expression Topside Sounder Satellite. This Canada-United States cooperation was actually part of an international cooperation initiative launched by NASA around March 1959, but I digress. Better yet, it agreed to place said satellite into orbit at the expense of the American government. At the end of April, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency, an organisation quickly renamed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), agreed to cooperate with the Defence Telecommunications Research Establishment (DRTE) of the DRB in order to place its satellite – a satellite funded by the federal government – into orbit. The May 1959 announcement actually came a few days after a very significant event in the history of the Canadian space program. (Hello, EP!)Īnd yes, the rockets of the time had the unfortunate and very expensive habit of going badaboom. Keith Brown indicated that 4 to 6 examples of the satellite would be manufactured, one for ground tests, another intended to be launched and 2 to 4 others used in case the first launch, or the second, or the third, ended badly. The source, very official and approved that time, I think, was the head of the space instrumentation section of the Defense Research Board (DRB). It was apparently in early May 1959 that appeared the first newspaper articles mentioning Canada’s federal government’s plan to finance the construction of an artificial satellite to be launched in 1961 by an American rocket. And yes again, yours truly remembers seeing a number of episodes of the French version of Thunderbirds, Les sentinelles de l’air, during the 1960s or 1970s, but I digress. Period.Īnd yes, that series was mentioned in September 2018 and March 2019 issues of our blog / bulletin / thingee. If you do not recognise the opening sequence of every episode of the British television series Thunderbirds, launched in September 1965, then there are serious gaps in your knowledge of the popular culture of the Cold War period. Welcome aboard our special spatial ship, my reading friend.
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