 The Apollo lunar landings, and indeed NASA's entire 1960s era spaceflight programs, are generally regarded as the pinnacle of American ingenuity and engineering. But what about the Canadians? Yep, we were there too. To say Canadians were around for NASA's Apollo-era programs, I don't just mean they were hanging out north of the border. Canadians were very involved not only in getting Americans to the moon, but getting them into orbit in the first place. And it's all because of the Avro-Aero's cancellation. The Avro-Aero, properly the CF-105, was built by Canadian airplane manufacturer AV Rho, or Avro. The Aero wasn't just the pinnacle of Canadian aviation engineering, it was remarkable on an international scale. The Aero was an experimental delta-wing supersonic interceptor jet that was more technologically advanced than anything the Soviets or the Americans were flying in the early years of the Cold War. Without specialized engines, it could fly at Mach 1.8, almost twice the speed of sound. With specialized engines, it could easily surpass Mach 2. The Aero's development began in earnest in 1957 as a direct result of the Cold War. Canada realized that if the Soviet Union were to attack the United States flying over the North Pole, that left Canada right in the middle. And so the Aero was its way of protecting itself. It was, in effect, Canada's defense strategy, an interceptor that could prevent the country being caught in the Cold War crossfire. But the Aero was almost immediately overshadowed by the space age. Avro created a huge media event for the plane to be unveiled on October 4th of 1957, which just so happened to be the same day the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. So the following day, instead of triumphant headlines about Canada's great-nude supersonic interceptor jet, everyone was talking about the Soviet satellite. For the most part, Avro engineers didn't pay too much attention to Sputnik. They, of course, knew what was going on with the Cold War, but as for the early space age, a lot of the engineers were more concerned with their own plane, the Avro Aero. So the program continued. The first flight came on March 25th, 1958, and five Aeros were built in the year that followed. Then, on February 20th, 1959, the entire thing came to a grinding halt. Avro's president, Crawford Gordon, got on the PA system that afternoon and announced to the entire company that Prime Minister Diefenbaker and his conservative government had just canceled the Aero project. Rumors swirled about why the program was canceled. Cost was cited as a major factor. The program was costing about $1 billion. And even though the Aero was a massive engineering triumph in the early Cold War, Avro still couldn't find a buyer for the plane. Another issue was politics. Diefenbaker's government didn't believe that the Aero was necessary, and he and Gordon were often at loggerheads about the usefulness of the plane. In one fell swoop, 60,000 people lost their jobs. That's the engineers that were designing it, the heads of engineering, all the way down to the contractors and subcontractors that were building the planes. Everything was ordered to be destroyed. The plans destroyed. The planes cut up and sold a scrap metal. But Canada's loss turned out to be America's gain. Robert Gilruth, formerly of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, was now NASA's head of the Space Task Group, the group that was charged with leading the American program to launch a man into space before the Soviet Union. And he was having a hard time finding engineers. Space was largely seen as a gamble and potentially even career suicide, so not a lot of people were keen to leave good aviation engineering jobs to be part of the space game. Gilruth knew about the Avro Aero. Avro had used some of the NACA's wind tunnel facilities for small scale and model testing of the Aero to help with the engineering. He also knew that the Canadians behind the program were some of the most brilliant, brightest clever engineers he'd ever met. So when he heard on that Friday afternoon that the Aero program had been shut down, he immediately sought getting contact with those engineers. Gilruth reached out to Jim Chamberlain, a 13-year veteran of the Aero company who is now its chief of technical design. Chamberlain in turn put forward a handful of his best men for Gilruth to interview, and those interviews started immediately. Robert Gilruth, Paul Perser and Charles Donlin arrived in Canada from NASA and began interviewing engineers immediately. By the next day, they'd offered jobs to a handful of men, 32 of whom accepted the offer to work for NASA. These job offers were full civil service positions. There was no probationary period at all. But accepting the job was one thing. Getting into the United States to work immediately was another thing. The Canadian engineers, as well as the NASA managers, had to work very closely with both the Canadian and American governments to rush getting these men passports, as well as all the necessary work permits, not to mention permits for their families to come into the country as well. But they all got it done. On April 9, 1959, the same day the world met the Mercury astronauts, 32 Canadian engineers joined the space task group at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. They didn't know each other. Many actually met for the first time while getting fingerprinted to go into NASA. They were all on a six-month work period, as agreed upon by the Canadian government and NASA. And the idea was to keep the team together, let them kind of do their thing as a little group of Canadians. And then once Avro figured out what its future was in the post-Aero world, all the Canadians would go back to Canada and go back to work building planes. However, they just never left. Robert Lindley went to work with McDonnell Aviation in St. Louis, where he led the contractors' work on the Gemini spacecraft. John Hodge is potentially a more familiar name. He became a flight director in all three Apollo-era programs, Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, leader of the blue team. Fred Matthews served as a backup flight director to Chris Kraft and was in charge of monitoring flight controllers at tracking stations around the world. Jack Roberts led the trajectory group in Mission Control and played a significant role in laying out the design of the Mission Control Center in Houston. Owen Maynard emerged as perhaps the most notable Canadian working on Apollo. Though John Hubbolt pioneered the use of lunar orbit rendezvous for the lunar missions, it was Owen Maynard who was among the first members of the Space Task Group to see the wisdom of his method. He started working on sketches of his own landing bug that eventually became the first concepts of the lunar module. This work helped sell the idea of LOR around NASA, and it propelled Maynard to the role of chief of the lunar module engineering office in the Apollo program office in Houston. As for Jim Chamberlain, he became one of Robert Gilroy's close advisors, playing a major role in the final design of the Mercury spacecraft. He eventually became head of engineering for the Mercury program, and in 1961 became the first program manager for the Gemini program. Among other things, he championed for the use of the regalo wing to spare the Gemini spacecraft the dangers of a splashdown landing. In 1963, he moved to the Apollo program office where he became something of an all-star troubleshooter. He solved problems affecting every part of the Apollo spacecraft – the lunar module, command service module, and even the Saturn rocket – as well as the mobility units astronauts would use on the surface. He even began drawing up plans for the space shuttle before leaving NASA in 1970. In cancelling the Avro Arrow, Prime Minister Diefenbaker probably gave NASA its biggest break since Werner von Braun managed to surrender himself to American troops in the close of the Second World War. Of course, Canadians aren't exactly brash about their role in these things. Case in point, when John Glenn received his ticker-tape parade in New York after his Friendship 7 flight in 1962, he was in the lead car. Right behind him was Jim Chamberlain, quietly waving like Canadians do. As for Avro, also in 1962 the company was dissolved and became a subsidiary of the Hawker-Sidley Group. Its old plant in Malton, Ontario is now part of the Pearson Airport. If you'd like to know more about the Avro Arrow and the very important role Canadians played in getting Apollo to the moon, be sure to check out my latest blog post at Discover – it's linked in the description below. And let me know what nation you're from, because even though it was an American program, there were brilliant minds from all over the world contributing on Apollo. Let me know where you're from and what little tidbit no one knows your country did in helping America get to the moon. I want to remind you guys that my Apollo 11 live tweet is about to begin, so be sure to follow me on Twitter so you don't miss any of the exciting action. And of course, be sure to like this video, comment if you've got things to say, and as always, subscribe so you never miss a future episode. Thank you guys so much for watching.