I’m thrilled to announce that I’m up for two Aurora Awards this year! Fireboy is on the ballot for Best Young Adult Novel, and The Worldshapers is once again on the ballot for Best Fan …
I spent a good chunk of today at Wordbridge, the annual writers’ conference in Lethbridge, Alberta. My main reason for coming was to launch a Shadowpaw Press title (Broken Realm by Jenna Greene, a Lethbridge …
This is Easter weekend; last weekend, I sang in the Easter concert of First Baptist Church here in Regina as a guest soloist and chorister. The whole concert is worth listening to, but if you’d …
I put a link to this in the previous post on my Aurora-eligible work for 2025, but wanted to highlight it. This was my contribution to the Shapers of Worlds Volume V anthology, and it …
The Aurora Awards are Canada’s best-known science fiction and fantasy awards, voted on by fans every year. I’ve been fortunate enough to win twice, for Marseguro (DAW Books) (soon coming out in a new edition from Tuscany …
Put this under the category of “things I’ve meant to do for a long time”: I finally published (under my Endless Sky Books imprint) a new edition of The Haunted Horn, a modern-day middle-grade ghost …
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Father of Canadian rocketry dies
A moment of silence, please, for Albert Fia, father of Canadian rocketry, who developed the still-used Black Brant research rockets in the early 1960s.
Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2004/06/father-of-canadian-rocketry-dies/
1 comment
I worked under Al Fia from 1969 to 1974. I was the assistant Vehicle Engineer on Black Brant III’s. It was a great time. We launched Rockets out of Resolute Bay in support of all the manned Apollo flights to the moon. We later flew rockets out of Wallops Island Virgin in support of the Skylab project. This was naturally in addition to all the Upper Atmospheric Research launches out of Churchill, Gillim, Cape Perry not to mention the solar eclipse shots out of East Quoddy Nova Scotia, Hawaii, Australia, etc.
It was the golden time of Bristol Aerospace (1968) Ltd. They had the best of the best in their Rocket Group and Al Fia was the leader… great man.
Bryan Reid