Thank the Canadians who helped the U.S. land on the Moon for Canadian Thanksgiving 2019

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving again!  This year, I am tying the original Thanksgiving to the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 by sharing The Canadians Who Got America to the Moon from Vintage Space.

The Canadians who helped get Apollo to the Moon...

Amy Shira Teitel has more in her accompanying blog post at Discover Magazine.

The news of the Avro Arrow’s cancellation reached Robert Gilruth in Virginia. Though now in his role as head of NASA’s Space Task Group, the group charged with leading America’s program to launch a man into space before the Soviet Union, he had been following the Arrow since its early development.

Before NASA’s inception, Gilruth had served as Assistant Director of the space agency’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (the NACA). In that capacity, part of Gilruth’s work had been running wind tunnel and free-flight test of early models of the Arrow at Langley and the NACA’s firing range on Wallops Island. He’d been impressed with the Canadians whom he considered a uniquely gifted group of engineers: brilliant, mature, and the perfect mix of talented and professional. Hearing the Arrow program had been cancelled, Gilruth saw a chance to get those minds working on the problem of American space flight. The Space Task Group was close to falling apart under the pressure of figuring out human spaceflight, and with the future of space so uncertain, he was having a hard time finding people willing to take the professional risk of working for the space program. The Canadians, he thought, might fill the gap.

Within hours of the Arrow’s cancellation* (Maynard, Oral History) Robert Gilruth reached out to Jim Chamberlin with the offer of bringing former Arrow engineers to NASA to work on the fledgling space program. Chamberlin in turn put forth a number of his former team members to Gilruth for consideration, and the interviews started immediately.
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On April, 9 1959**, the same day the world met the Mercury astronauts, the Canadians joined the Space Task Group at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. They didn’t all know each other; many met for the first time while getting fingerprinted to go to NASA.
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By cancelling the Arrow program when he did, Deifenbaken inadvertently gave the American space program its most fortuitous break since when Wernher von Braun found and surrendered to American troops after the Second World War. In true Canadian style, the Arrow engineers never demanded accolades for their work, but many within NASA considered their contributions invaluable. Case in point: When John Glenn sat in the lead car during a ticker tape parade through New York City after his successful Friendship 7’s mission, Jim Chamberlain sat waving from the second car, an appropriately quiet Canadian move.

This story is one of many reasons Americans should thank Canada.  I'll begin by thanking Amy for writing this story and producing the video to bring it to the world's attention.  Thank you and Happy Canadian Thanksgiving from south of the border!

Pandemics and collapse

Although the author of Peak Civilization, the article at The Oil Drum about the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, might disagree, it looks like disease might have contributed to the end of the expansion of the Eastern Roman Empire under Justinian.  Charles Choi of LiveScience explains in Plague Helped Bring Down Roman Empire, Graveyard Suggests.

Plague may have helped finish off the Roman Empire, researchers now reveal.
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The bacterium that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, has been linked with at least two of the most devastating pandemics in recorded history. One, the Great Plague, which lasted from the 14th to 17th centuries, included the infamous epidemic known as the Black Death, which may have killed nearly two-thirds of Europe in the mid-1300s. Another, the Modern Plague, struck around the world in the 19th and 20th centuries, beginning in China in the mid-1800s and spreading to Africa, the Americas, Australia, Europe and other parts of Asia.

Although past studies confirmed this germ was linked with both of these catastrophes, much controversy existed as to whether it also caused the Justinianic Plague of the sixth to eighth centuries. This pandemic, named after the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, killed more than 100 million people. Some historians have suggested it contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire.

To help solve this mystery, scientists investigated ancient DNA from the teeth of 19 different sixth-century skeletons from a medieval graveyard in Bavaria, Germany, of people who apparently succumbed to the Justinianic Plague.

They unambiguously found the plague bacterium Y. pestis there.

The same source who sent me the above article also sent me the next, which I placed together in Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (Carbon Dioxide 400 ppm) on Daily Kos as a reminder that, to paraphrase Samuel Clemens, history may not repeat, but it certainly does rhyme and also that resource depletion and environmental degradation aren't the only threats to civilization.

Discover Magazine: Pandemic Chatter
By Keith Kloor
May 10, 2013 12:22 pm

I’m not on the pandemic beat, but some of the best science journalists are, and they are busy these days. Today, David Quammen, author of the recently published and critically acclaimed book, Spillover: Animal infections and the next human pandemic, has an op-ed in the New York Times. It begins:

Terrible new forms of infectious disease make headlines, but not at the start. Every pandemic begins small. Early indicators can be subtle and ambiguous. When the Next Big One arrives, spreading across oceans and continents like the sweep of nightfall, causing illness and fear, killing thousands or maybe millions of people, it will be signaled first by quiet, puzzling reports from faraway places — reports to which disease scientists and public health officials, but few of the rest of us, pay close attention. Such reports have been coming in recent months from two countries, China and Saudi Arabia.

The worrisome Chinese bird flu strain that has gotten a lot of attention is not, in its present form, going to cause a pandemic, says Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers of Disease Control (CDC). But if you want to learn about the potential for its lethal mutation, and why you should be worried about it, read this piece in Foreign Policy by veteran science journalist Laurie Garrett.

Follow over the jump for the latest on the other pandemic threat coming out of Saudi Arabia.