A Little Canadiana

There's a competition going on right now for something called the X-Prize. You probably haven't heard about it, but it's a prize for the first team to 1) Privately finances, builds & launches a spaceship, able to carry three people to 100 kilometers (62.5 miles); 2) Returns safely to Earth [Seems like an essential clause to me--ed.]; 3) Repeats the launch with the same ship within 2 weeks.

About twenty-four groups have signed on to compete, though not all of them are serious. Two that seem to be are, can you believe it, Canadian corporations. One of them is the Canadian Arrow, whose design is essentially that of the German V-2 rocket, enlarged and updated with modern materials and technologies.

This tickles me silly, for several reasons. One is that one of the first private corporations with a good shot at being the first non-government entity in space is, from of all places, our semi-socialist neighbour to the north. Not only that, never have I seen so many maple leaves--other than on the Canadian hockey team--than in this picture of the astronauts selected to go up on the Arrow. Maybe Canadian patriotism, hitherto confined to hockey, might leak into bold and audacious entrepreneurial endeavours like private spaceflight.

And then a Canadian friend writes me the following:

There's even more irony there than you know. You see, the "Arrow" is the
name of a fighter jet that was developed--likely at a similar price as the
Concord cost the Brits and the French--for use in Canada and to sell abroad
during the 1950s and early 1960s. All was not going well with production and
the costs were over-running, but Canadians had been willing to put up with
that during the Liberal era. When the Tories won government, under
Saskatchewan's John Diefenbaker, they secretly destroyed not just the program
but, under the dark of night, disposed of "Avro Arrow." It was never to be
seen again. I tell you the truth--people were upset about this well into the
1980s. It just wouldn't die.

So, no doubt, these people have the Avro Arrow in mind in developing their
product, and are betting that the Liberal will be in government for a long,
long time.

Hmmm. Perhaps. Or maybe they are pointing out that they are going into space on an Arrow without any help at all from the Liberal government.

Canada to the stars! After all, the moon is hardly as inhospitable as winter on Great Slave Lake.