Henry Wolfond was less than two years old in 1961 when Alan Shepard became the first American in space, during a 15-minute sub-orbital flight in a Mercury capsule atop a Redstone rocket.
On Friday morning at 10:30 ET, some 63 and a half years later, he’ll follow in Shepard’s trajectory as one of six passengers aboard the ninth crewed flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket when it blasts off from a spaceport in West Texas. He’ll also become one of the few Canadians to have made it to space — so far, just 12 and counting.
Wolfond is chairman and CEO of Bayshore Capital in Toronto, and chair of the Confronting Antisemitism Committee of the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto. He also moonlights as a professional pilot on charter, medevac and organ retrieval flights around the world.
But he always wanted to be an astronaut.
“I was glued to every Gemini mission, every Apollo mission, obviously the historic moon landing on July 20, 1969, through the space shuttle program and beyond,” he told the National Post.
The young Wolfond was also a fan of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he watched “probably 15 or 20 times” at Toronto’s Glendale Theatre in the year after it came out in 1968.
“From the perspective of being eight or nine years old, it was like, well, that’s going to be the future in 2001. I’m going to fly to the moon on a Pan Am rocket ship.”
That didn’t come to pass. Nor did his dreams of becoming a fighter pilot, since he lacked the 20/20 vision required. But young Wolfond was also a Star Trek fan, watching the show in reruns at four o’clock every day after school. “Captain Kirk was my idol.”
Then, three years ago, William Shatner — a.k.a. Captain Kirk — became one of the few Canadians (and Jews) to travel to space, aboard another of Blue Origin’s rockets.
“He brought back with him the observations of how fragile this planet is, how we have to protect it,” Wolfond recalled. “And it just inspired me to say, this is something I want to do. I began the conversation with Blue Origin, and here we are.”
Wolfond hopes to bring to space some of the mindfulness, and return with some of the wisdom and humility, as his space-faring predecessors. But there’s a personal component to his journey as well.
I’m Jewish,” he said bluntly. “I’m involved with the Jewish community. And I’m very disturbed by the surge of antisemitism throughout the world, but in particular in Toronto and Canada, in the aftermath of October 7.”
He continued: “Hatred of Jews became normalized. Hateful words escalate to violence, to harassment, to intimidation, to blocking businesses, and ultimately to murder. I hope that’s not the path that we’re on, but I’m very frightened that we could be.
“So my hope in connecting that to this mission is that I can reach out to people, responsible Canadians who see that the same way that I do, will be aligned with us, and will speak out against antisemitism and speak out against all hatred. I don’t think any hate should be accepted in our society, and people need to recognize, if it’s hatred against the Jews today, it can become hatred against them tomorrow.”
His thinking also informs some of the personal items he’ll be bringing with him, in a small bag that fits in one hand and can’t weigh more than three pounds.
“I have a photograph of my grandparents, who fled antisemitic violence and persecution in Russia and Ukraine,” he said. “And they came here. My grandfather literally had witnessed his cousin hanging from a lamppost after a pogrom in a small town in the Ukraine. They came here for a better life.”
Another memento, and an even more stark reminder of the horrors of antisemitism, is a picture of his wife’s father, who was a survivor of Auschwitz. “He arrived on a cattle car train with his mother and his five sisters. After they were separated on the platform at Auschwitz, he never saw them again.”
Wolfond has flown as high as 45,000 feet as an air ambulance pilot, and he once rode in the Concorde to an altitude of 60,000 feet, or about 18 kilometres. “My passion for aviation and the joy that I feel, it’s one of those things that never gets old,” he said.
New Shepard leaves those numbers in the dust. It will pass the Karman line at 100 kilometres that marks the official boundary of outer space, and will likely reach about 106 kilometres before it returns to Earth beneath three parachutes.
But the experience won’t last long, just 11 or 12 minutes from liftoff to landing. Wolfond said a NASA astronaut told him: “Yes, the experience of weightlessness is going to be novel. It’s going to be exciting. But rather than spend your time doing backflips and taking in that thrill … just look out the window, tune everyone else out, and take in that experience of seeing the world from an altitude of almost 350,000 feet.”
And fear?
“It’s in a corner of my mind,” he said. “I think you can’t imagine yourself sitting on 50 tons of a combination of liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen and other volatile chemicals that are going to propel this machine to an altitude beyond the atmosphere and not have a little bit of ‘What happens if there’s a spark or something that goes wrong?’”
But ultimately: “The desire to do this and the anticipation of the experience outweighs it.”
He added: “I’ve never been bungee jumping. I’ve never been skydiving. Those things truly scare me, because I don’t really see an end or purpose in mind. But as I’ve become more immersed and more afraid of what’s happening in the world with hate, the purpose that I’m attaching in terms of taking that view in and being mindful of what this planet is all about, has become more important.”
And while he may be following the path of Shepard, Wolfond also takes inspiration from another astronaut, the first human to step on another world. (Shepard was fifth, by the way, when he flew on Apollo 14.)
“I end these conversations with a bit of an adaptation of Neil Armstrong’s immortal words when he set foot on the moon. And that is that this is one giant step for me, and hopefully it will be a small step towards turning the tide on hate in this country and around the world.”
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