Fort Churchill
Coordinates: 58 ° 44 ′ 3 ″ N , 93 ° 49 ′ 13 ″ W.
Fort Churchill is a now inactive missile launch site in Churchill , Manitoba , Canada. The former rocket launch site Fort Churchill is near the maximum of aurora activity and played a major role in investigations of the high atmosphere , especially in the 1950s .
history
The complex was built in 1954 by the Canadian Army and served as a research facility to research the effects of the northern lights and the effects they have on long communication channels. The research program was declared ended in 1955 and the site was temporarily closed. In 1956 the complex was reopened and heavily expanded for the International Geophysical Year . 1957 launched several rockets with experiments for the international geophysical year. When this program was also declared ended, the plant was temporarily shut down again. In August 1959, the US Army reopened the facility for sounding rockets. At the end of 1960, large parts of the facilities were destroyed by fire. From the 1970s, the facilities were used for Canadian high-altitude research programs. The systems have hardly been used since 1989.
present
The Canadian space agency CSA announced in early 2010 that it was currently looking for launch sites for smaller rockets. You think of two locations. According to current plans, one of them should be Fort Churchill, from where several hundred rockets have already been launched in the past. The other new location will be in Cape Brenton , Nova Scotia .
Web links
- Fort Churchill - a landmark in Canadian space research ( March 13, 2014 memento in the Internet Archive ). Canadian Space Agency
- Fort Churchill - Historical Photo Album
- Fort Churchill in the Encyclopedia Astronautica (English)