However, Canada's military-industrial complex lacked the panache, and the funding, of that of the United States. Bull, a visionary and energetic man, grew impatient with what he considered the pedestrian pace and limited imagination of the Canadians. As an aerodynamics scientist for CARDE, Bull's salary in 1959 was only $17,000. In comparison, in 1961 Bull earned $100,000 by consulting for the Pentagon on nose-cone research. It was small wonder that by the early 1960s, Bull had established lively professional relationships with the US Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory (as well as the Army's Redstone Arsenal, Wernher von Braun's own postwar stomping grounds).
It was the great dream of Bull's life to fire cannon projectiles from the earth's surface directly into outer space. Amazingly, Dr. Bull enjoyed considerable success in this endeavor. In 1961, Bull established Project HARP (High Altitude Research Project). HARP was an academic, nonmilitary research program, funded by McGill University in Montreal, where Bull had become a professor in the mechanical engineering department. The US Army's Ballistic Research Lab was a quiet but very useful co-sponsor of HARP; the US Army was especially generous in supplying Bull with obsolete military equipment, including cannon barrels and radar.
Project HARP found a home on the island of Barbados, downrange of its much better-known (and vastly better-financed) rival, Cape Canaveral. In Barbados, Bull's gigantic space-cannon fired its projectiles out to an ocean splashdown, with little risk of public harm. Its terrific boom was audible all over Barbados, but the locals were much pleased at their glamorous link to the dawning Space Age.
Bull designed a series of new supersonic shells known as the