In July the world marked the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to land on the moon.
It fulfilled a promise made by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to land a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth before the 1960s was over.
On July 16, 1969, the Apollo space mission lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. On July 20 the lunar landing module, The Eagle, landed on the surface of the moon with commander Armstrong and pilot Aldrin. Armstrong left the first human footprint on the moon.
Aldrin and Armstrong planted a plaque that said, “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”
On July 24, the astronauts returned to earth.
More than 400,000 men and women worked on some aspect of the moon landing.
They wrote the computer programs, they made spacesuits, built the rockets and spacecraft, refined the fuel and ground the camera lens that captured the iconic image of the blue Earth that the three astronauts on the mission saw from above the moon’s surface.
Mountain View County’s link to the space program was Didsbury-born aeronautics engineer Bruce Alexander Aitkenhead.
His parents, Claire and Harold, lived in Central Alberta until Bruce was a year old before returning to London, Ont. where his grandparents lived.
Harold worked as an bookkeeper for several businesses in southwestern Ontario. They were living in Windsor when Bruce caught the aviation bug for life when he and his Dad watched a Zeppelin airship flying above the Detroit River. He was six years old.
In 1941, Bruce was allowed to graduate from high school early to join the Royal Canadian Air Force. In Britain, he transferred to the Royal Air Force. His first job was preparing Beaufighters for night fighting in the Battle of Britain. Then he went to India to do top-secret work on radar.
Back in Canada after the war, Bruce took mathematics and physics at the University of Waterloo. He met his wife, Calgary-born Helen Wait, a journalist in New Brunswick, on a blind date in London.
Bruce and Helen married in time for Christmas 1947. Through the 1950s they had four baby boomer children: Stephen, Kathleen “Kasey," Elizabeth and Barbara.
Kasey remembers weekend family camping trips. “We would set up the tent together and find kindling amongst the trees for our fire. The fireplace consisted of a circle of large stones with an old metal refrigerator rack as a grill across the stones.
"When we packed up to head home, Dad would instruct us to 'leave the campsite in better condition than how we found it.' So we would tidy it up and place neat bundles of kindling and firewood near the circle of stones, ready for the next campers."
Bruce’s first aviation job after graduation was building flight simulators for the CF-104 and the CF-105 Avro Arrow.
When the government scrapped the Arrow project, he was hired by the U. S. National Space Administration for the Space Task Group at Langley Field, Va., for three years.
He worked on the Mercury Project with seven American astronauts whose mission was to go into space, explore above the Earth and come back alive and healthy.
The Mercury Project led to the Apollo missions during NASA’s golden years.
When he returned to Canada, Bruce worked for Canadian Aviation Electronics and RCA.
He was a project engineer on the High Altitude Research Project, a Canada-U.S. defence partnership studying spacecraft re-entry.
Bruce worked on the Canadarm and the Space Vision System of external cameras on space shuttles.
He was the Canadian Astronaut Program Manager and on the panel that chose Canadians Chris Hadfield and Julie Payette as Canadian astronauts from among thousands of applicants.
The factors considered included experience in stressful work-related challenges, personality and teamwork experience. The panel weighed the strengths and weaknesses of the last 20 candidates and considered the results of the medical tests before making their decision
Every candidate was highly qualified. The reasons for individual selection remain confidential.
When he retired in 1993 Bruce was the director-general of the Canadian Astronaut Program at the Canadian Space Agency.
Bruce Aikenhead was a player in Canadian and U.S. space programs of the 20th century but first his mother pushed his baby carriage down the streets of Didsbury.
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist and author.
