On the morning of 20 February 1959, a factory outside Toronto was building the most advanced interceptor in the Western world. By that afternoon it was building nothing at all. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker had risen in the House of Commons and killed the Avro Arrow with a sentence, and 14,528 people went home that evening without jobs.

What happened next is the part the legend usually skips. The Arrows were cut up for scrap. The engineers were not. Within weeks, a few dozen of the sharpest minds in Canadian aviation packed their families into cars and drove south to a tiny, overstretched NASA outfit in Virginia that was trying, against the clock and the Soviets, to put a human being into space.

This is not the story of the jet. It is the story of the people who walked out of its wreckage, and ended up drawing the spacecraft that reached the Moon.

The jet that was too good to die quietly

Some context, briefly, because the Arrow deserves it. The CF-105 was a big, white, razor-edged delta designed to scramble into the Arctic night and knock down Soviet bombers before they reached Canadian cities. It was the ambitious successor to Avro Canada's workmanlike subsonic CF-100 Canuck, and it was genuinely ahead of its time: a fly-by-wire control system, a computerised weapons system, and, once the home-grown Orenda Iroquois engines were fitted, the potential to hold Mach 2 at altitudes where most fighters of the day ran out of breath.

The trouble was money and timing. By the late 1950s the threat was shifting from crewed bombers to intercontinental ballistic missiles, and a gold-plated manned interceptor started to look like an answer to a question nobody was asking any more. Washington was nudging Ottawa toward cheaper Bomarc missiles. The Arrow, brilliant and expensive, was living on borrowed time.

Even so, almost nobody at Avro thought the axe would fall the way it did. Management expected the programme to limp on at least until a scheduled defence review that March. Instead the cancellation arrived without warning on a Friday and took the whole thing down at once.

Black Friday, and the order to erase

The cancellation became known simply as Black Friday in the Canadian aviation industry, and the aftermath was brutal in a way that still stings north of the border. It was not enough to stop the programme; the programme had to disappear. Within two months of the announcement, cabinet and the chiefs of staff ordered every completed aircraft, every engine, all the production tooling and the technical data destroyed.

The official reason was security, the destruction of classified material, with later accounts pointing to fears that a Soviet mole had burrowed into Avro. Whatever the true motive, the result was the same: torches, saws and scrap dealers turned a national achievement into metal offcuts. A cockpit, a nose section and a couple of wing panels survive in Ottawa. That is more or less it.

What could not be scrapped was the talent. Avro's engineering department was one of the deepest pools of aerospace expertise anywhere outside the United States, and on that Friday afternoon it was suddenly, catastrophically unemployed. The question was where all that brainpower would go.

A phone call to Virginia

The answer began with a phone call. NASA was barely five months old, and its Space Task Group, the small band charged with flying Americans into space on Project Mercury, was desperately short-handed, with only around 150 engineers on the books in early 1959. Its boss, Robert Gilruth, had followed the Arrow's development and knew exactly what kind of work Avro did.

Avro's chief engineer Bob Lindley and chief of technical design Jim Chamberlin knew Gilruth from their aviation days, and they called him to ask whether NASA might have room for some of their people. It did. NASA officials flew up to Malton, sifted around 400 applications, interviewed 100 candidates on 14 March 1959, and made 32 job offers. Twenty-five were accepted that spring; the Avro contingent inside the Space Task Group eventually numbered about 32 engineers and technicians.

CBC's The National on the Avro Arrow and the wound its cancellation left behind.

In Canada this exodus is still mourned as the brain drain, the moment a country trained a generation of world-class engineers and then handed them, gift-wrapped, to its neighbour. From NASA's side of the border it looked rather different. It looked like the best hiring windfall in the agency's short history.

From Dark Day to Giant Leap: how Avro's engineers joined NASA and helped reach the Moon.

From interceptor to spacecraft

Here is where the story earns its telling, because these were not anonymous seat-fillers. Jim Chamberlin rose to become chief engineer of Mercury, then designed the two-seat Gemini spacecraft that taught America how to rendezvous, dock and walk in space, the rehearsals without which Apollo was impossible. He also became an early and vocal supporter of Lunar Orbit Rendezvous, the counter-intuitive scheme, championed by NASA's John Houbolt, of flying two linked spacecraft to the Moon and sending only a small lander down to the surface. That decision defined the shape of the entire Apollo mission.

Owen Maynard, a young stress engineer from Sarnia, was among the first at NASA to seriously sketch out what a lunar lander would even look like. He went on to run the Lunar Module engineering office within the Apollo Program Office and to oversee the systems engineering that made the whole spacecraft stack hang together.

The others fanned out across every corner of the programme. Bryan Erb designed the ablative heat shield that let the command module survive re-entry. Tecwyn Roberts became NASA's first flight dynamics officer on Mercury and later director of networks at the Goddard Space Flight Center. John Hodge became one of NASA's first flight directors, taking his turn in the hot seat in Mission Control. An interceptor that never entered service had, in effect, seeded an entire spacefaring institution.

The History Guy on the Avro Arrow, the interceptor Canada built and then erased.

The loss that became a moonshot

It is tempting to tie this up as tidy irony, Canada's disaster, America's triumph, but the truth is a little richer and a lot more human. These were people who lost their jobs in a single afternoon, uprooted their families, and chose to bet everything on a fledgling agency that might itself be cancelled within months. That it was not, and that they helped make sure it was not, is the quiet heart of the whole affair.

When Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the Sea of Tranquility in July 1969, the lander beneath his boots and the mission plan that put it there both carried the fingerprints of engineers who had once bent their talents to a Canadian interceptor in a factory near Toronto. The Arrow itself was reduced to scrap. The minds that built it were not, and that, in the end, is the flight it actually completed.

Sources: Wikipedia (Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow; Space Task Group), Ingenium Canada / Canada Aviation and Space Museum, SpaceQ, Chris Gainor's Arrows to the Moon