Bristol Aerospace Ltd.

Bristol Aerospace was founded in 1930 in Winnipeg as airplane maker MacDonald Brothers. In 1954, the company was acquired by UK company, Bristol and became the Canadian subsidiary of the company. Bristol played a major role in the last third of the 20^th century in the production in Canada’s aerospace industry, particularly with regards to the production of rockets.Named for a goose common in Western Canada, the Black Brant sounding rocket was developed in 1958 to use a Canadian-developed solid rocket fuel, and marked the beginning of Bristol Aeroplane’s entry into the aerospace industry. By 1965, three versions of the rocket were developed, with different capabilities to carry different payloads, Black Brants III, IV and V.

This payload structure was launched carrying scientific equipment in September 1982 from the White Sands rocket range in New Mexico using a Black Brant V sounding rocket. The Black Brant V was intended to be a highly efficient rocket motor, making use of a new fuel and designed to carry a far bigger payload. The new rocket required several innovations which presented complications, but it launched successful in 1965 and remained the company’s standard rocket in two versions (A, B and C). It was, “the workhorse of the Canadian ballistic rocket space program”. Its main purpose was to lift scientific experiments to the appropriate altitude; therefore, it had to be designed in a way that would deliver scientific payloads in a way that worked with the payloads’ function.

However, things did not always go completely smoothly. The September 1982 launch was carrying a few experiments, including a spectrocoronagraph designed to study UV end of the solar corona, something only possible above an a 100km altitude. The payload included a nose cone cover that was released during flight to open the payload and reveal the spectrograph to the sun. However, oil-covered glass wool was used to pack the cone of the rocket, and during flight the oil came off the wool and covered the instrumentation. Unfortunately, oil is opaque to UV rays, so although the launch went perfectly and the payload was collected safely, no data was collected.