Canada’s Last Sounding Rocket

This photo captures the last sounding rocket launched from the Churchill Research Range on Hudson Bay on May 6, 1985. It also marks the closing of this Canadian rocket-launch site. 

The site, 23 kilometres east of Churchill, Man., had five indoor launching pads and four outdoor ones. It was used by Canada and the United States starting in 1954 for suborbital launches of sounding rockets, which were used to study the upper atmosphere before falling back to Earth. The site was chosen because it boasted roughly 300 nights a year of aurora activity and offered a large uninhabited area of Hudson Bay to safely launch into. It saw the launches of more than 3,500 suborbital rockets by the time it was closed. 

I worked this site from 1979 until that closure, providing meteorological launch support data from Earth’s surface up to 35,000 metres using instrument-laden weather balloons. My supervisor and I also calculated the impact locations of the various rocket stages, the payload’s location for retrieval by helicopter, and the launcher settings for the successful placement of the science payloads in space. 

The rockets launched varied between one and three stages (each stage carries its own engines and propel- lant), with most being Black Brant models built by Magellan Aerospace in Winnipeg. The rockets carried science payloads from 70 to 600 kilograms to heights between 150 and 1,200 kilometres.