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Why did you want to be an astronaut?
In the late ’60s I was seven, eight, nine years old, and what was going on in the news
at that time that really excited a seven, eight, nine year old boy was the Space Race.
The “2001: A Space Odyssey,” that science fiction movie came out, and in reality people
were flying Gemini and people were starting to fly Apollo and starting to go to the moon,
and the whole purpose of it, which was clear to everybody, was to put a human being on
the moon by the end of decade. Within the ’60s, and so as a kid growing up, it didn’t
matter where you were, whether you were in Malaysia or Canada or here in Houston, this
is a pretty exciting thing, and it really captured my imagination. I had a National
Geographic big picture of the moon above my bed on the wall and I was watching the exploits.
On July 20, 1969, like so many other people, I sat and looked at a bad, grainy little television
and watched those first steps on the moon and then went outside with my family, but
really alone, looked up at the moon and thought, that’s what I want to do when I grow up;
I’m going to grow up to be something, why don’t I grow up to be that, that is an interesting
thing, that’s a new challenge for humanity. But then when I look around I’m thinking,
I’m a nine year old kid and I’m a Canadian, what are my odds? Not very good. But I thought,
well, up until yesterday people couldn’t even go and walk on the moon and now they
can, so maybe I can, too. I started getting ready that night, what do I need to do next?
And I need to learn to fly and to scuba dive and to stay in shape and other languages and
study in university and all of those things. To become an engineer, a fighter pilot, a
test pilot and all of that, which was fun and fascinating, but also all to help maybe
in the lifelong dream of having a chance to be an astronaut and to follow in the footsteps
of Buzz and Neil. Amazingly enough it worked.
Tell me a little of that story. Tell me about where you grew up.
I was born in Sarnia, Ontario; a small town, it’s where oil was pretty much discovered
in North America. It’s an industrial town right on the Great Lakes, beautiful little
spot, and my father got hired by an airline when I was about seven or eight and then we
moved to a farm closer to Toronto because he was flying for Air Canada based out of
Toronto. I spent my childhood basically in two towns, Sarnia for the first half of it,
starting kindergarten and grade school there, and then Milton, Ontario, near Toronto, living
on a farm for the rest of middle school and for high school. My parents still live on
a farm near Milton, Ontario.
How did that place and those people help make you the person that you are?
I’ve raised three kids, my wife and I have three kids. I’ve observed through direct
contact the adults they are now is partially the product of where they came from and what
we did. With them growing up, but partially how they were wired at birth. There are fundamental
differences, and I’m sure I’m no different than my kids. I am born with whatever I was
born with, what height I’m going to be and what color my eyes are and how my particular
synapses all fire, but I’m also very much the product of the environment; my value system,
the educational system that I went through, the people that I met, the people that inspired
me or the people that oppressed me. I’m very much a product of all of that. So any
successes I’ve had, partially it’s due to genetics, partially it’s due to the people
that have trained me and taught me and shaped me over the years, and I have lots of people
that I could directly thank for helping get me to where I am today. For teaching me something
critical or maybe teaching me something in general that helped me perceive things the
way that I do. I think, if you want to grow up to be an astronaut, growing up as a kid
in southern Ontario is a pretty good place to come from.
Pick up the story from there for me and give me a thumbnail sketch of big steps in your
education and your career that have led you to be here at this point.
I went to a little tiny rural school called Percy W. Merry. I was doing well in school;
I was in grade three or four and skipped one of those grades. Fortunately the Ontario educational
system in the province of Ontario in Canada, had decided that they should have, what at
the time they called “enrichment,” sort of like trying to pick out the kids that were
doing real well, how to challenge them, and how to maybe put them in a different educational
environment so that they could really learn and be challenged. I got into that program
and for three years I was in an enrichment program, really teaching us to think more
critically, more analytically, think on a different scale then just getting these exercises
done in time for this test. I went to two different high schools, and there was two
different tracks, one the high school track to go to the university and one not. At the
time you went to an extra year of high school if you’re going to university, nice preparation
for the course that I decided to follow. I was a ski instructor; there’s a great opportunity
for outdoor activities in Canada and to be able to have the combination of the natural
environment, the physical challenges of downhill skiing and racing. Being a ski instructor,
for me I learned a lot about managing speed and managing energy. I learned to fly as a
teenager; there’s a program in Canada called Air Cadets, it’s sort of like the Civil
Air Patrol in the United States but it’s a little closer to the Canadian air force,
and they teach young Canadians, whether it’s Sea Cadets, Army Cadets or Air Cadets, they
teach them a bunch of technical things, they teach them self-discipline, they give them
levels of responsibility that they might not get otherwise as teenagers, and in my case,
I spent one summer learning to be a glider pilot and getting my glider pilot’s license.
Right at the age of 16 I became a powered pilot. A significant percentage of commercial
pilots in Canada, something like half of them, went through Air Cadets, so it’s a great
program set up by the country that allows young Canadians to pursue an area of specialized
interest that then makes them useful to the country later on. Then I went to our military
academies, which in our case was called Royal Roads Military College and then the Royal
Military College of Canada, RMC, studying engineering. If you’re going to get into
the air force or any phase of the military you have two different ways, you can come
in directly or you can come through the military college system and I chose, I figured, well,
the odds of being an astronaut are pretty lousy and I need something else as a real
career, and so I decided I want to study engineering and then maybe I’ll be able to be a pilot,
and then maybe I’ll be able to be a pilot as my profession for my whole life. Maybe
I’ll get to be an astronaut, and fortunately, all of those things worked out, but I would
have been happy at each one of those stages as I worked my way through. When I came out
of military college I was lucky enough to be able to do a, master’s work, graduate
level work. Then go on to fly and be able to fly Canada’s new fighter at the time
which is our version of the F-18, we called it the CF-18. I flew those for NORAD [North
American Aerospace Defense Command], then I did exchange to the U.S. Air Force Test
Pilot School, and then flew as an exchange pilot, a Canadian flying F-18s with the U.S.
Navy in Patuxent River. So that long, convoluted flow from an advanced education program as
a ten year old kid or eleven year old kid in the enrichment program in elementary/middle
school in Canada, all the way through to getting selected as an astronaut. I see myself very
much a product of all of those structures and capabilities that Canada provided me.
To fly as an astronaut is to assume some risks that most people don’t have in their lives;
question is, what is it you feel that we get or learn as a result of flying people in space
that makes it worth taking the risk?
Almost everything worthwhile carries with it some sort of risk, whether it’s starting
a new business, whether it’s leaving home, whether it’s getting married, or whether
it’s flying in space. You are taking a risk: you are going from one known set of circumstances
into a new set of circumstances, and everybody takes some of those risks during their life.
It’s a natural progression of maturity, of the desire to do something with yourself,
the desire to have a measure of success and increased capability and increased comfort
in your life. Also maybe the desire to be able to look back at your life and say, I
did something worthwhile in the time that I was alive. That manifests itself all different
ways in human behavior. People try and answer those questions to themselves doing all different
sorts of things. I made the choice early on what I thought was important was technical;
I think it’s important to push back the level of what we can do technically, and I
chose aerospace, and as a fighter pilot, I helped defend North America by using the latest
of aerospace technology, but that wasn’t where I wanted to end up. I wanted to then
get into aircraft design and testing and try and make airplanes safer, make airplanes more
capable. We burnt a hydrogen-fueled engine on the wingtip of an F-18 trying to understand
how to build a vehicle that could get you across the Pacific in an hour. Doing high
angle of attack testing of F-18s, trying to make airplanes that could fly where airplanes
could never fly before, that was really interesting to me, and it was risky. I lost a good friend
a year for ten years as a fighter pilot and a test pilot. I knew that it was risky. My
wife knew that we go to funerals on a fairly regular basis of people that are just doing
their job, but you can’t make that omelet without breaking some eggs. You cannot do
it. You have to be able to take some risks. Some things are worth taking a risk for. Even
if you decide, OK, I’m going to spend my whole life sitting at my kitchen table and
going in between there and my bed and hiding from risks, your house, eventually the ceiling
falls down; there’s an earthquake, a hurricane, a lightning storm, a tornado or whatever.
There’s no guarantees, you may as well try and do something worthwhile in the meanwhile
and minimize the risks where you can. For me, spaceflight is just a natural extension
of all of that. For the first time in history, if we muster all of our best of capabilities,
we can just now safely start to leave the Earth, to go away from our planet, and to
be part of that, to be able to be one of the early explorers that is opening the capability
of leaving Earth, is fundamentally interesting to me but I also judge it as a very worthwhile
thing. It’s an important thing in this stage of human development, like the first sailboats
that left land or the first vehicles that could drive safely and conveniently on the
surface, or the first airplanes. We’re at that level and I’ve wanted to be a part
of it my whole life. I’ve devoted 20 years as an astronaut, and now there’s risk involved.
I’m going to fly a Russian spaceship as the left-seater, sort of like the co-pilot
and then live on a space station for six months and we might die in the effort but I might
die driving home from work tonight. I’m going to manage things as best I can so that
I live a long and healthy life, but a long, healthy and worthwhile life.
You’re about to launch to the International Space Station for Expeditions 34 and 35. Chris,
tell me what are the goals of this flight and what are your jobs going to be on this
mission?
The space station is there for a purpose and that is to do science that can’t be done
on the surface of the Earth. That is the core purpose of the space station, and so our job,
as the people on board, is to make sure that that science gets done. Everything else is
sort of downstream of that. Yes, we need to fix things as they break; sometimes we have
to go outside on spacewalks; sometimes we have to use the robot arm and grab a new delivery
truck that’s full of equipment, but the core of it is to run those hundred and ten
experiments that are running on board, and that’s our main job, to be the lab technicians
as well as the plumbers and the delivery men and all the rest of it, but really the lab
technicians that keep the International Space Station as the big international laboratory
that it is.
Now you didn’t do any of that the last time you visited the International Space Station.
What are you looking forward to about the station, on this trip?
On my first spaceflight I went to the Russian space station, Mir and built a piece of it
using space shuttle Atlantis. The second spaceflight went to the international, the early, small
International Space Station, and built a piece of it using space shuttle Endeavour. And both
times I thought, wow, wish I could stay; what a desirable thing to do in life, be able to
leave Earth and not just go build something and come back but to leave Earth for a while,
change your zip code for a while and really become a resident. Both places I just felt
so jealous of the experience as we undocked and left. And this time after a lot of lucky
coincidences and a lot of hard work, now I get to be one of those crew members that stays
for an extended period away from the planet, and it’s been a long road getting there,
it’s been a huge amount of qualifications necessary to get there, a lot of luck to get
there, but for me, it’s really a culmination of all the things that I’ve done for the
last 20 years as an astronaut. I’m really looking forward to not just visiting space
but moving to Earth orbit and having all of the internal changes, the understanding and
the revelation that comes with that. I’m really looking forward to it.
During your time there you’re going to have a number of crewmates, some who are there
before you, some who will arrive later, two of them that you’re going to be with the
whole time, and one of them, Tom Marshburn, you’re already “flown” with, although
it was underwater on a NEEMO [NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations] mission. Has
the experience of that mission, working with that crewmate, helped you guys prepare for
this flight?
I count myself hugely lucky to be flying with a group of people, the group of humans that
I’m flying in space with. I’ve known all of them for a long time; Pavel Vinogradov
and I trained together for a Mir flight back in the early ’90s. He came over to my house,
I gave him his first Jet Ski ride back in about 1994, so we’ve been training together
for a long time. Tom and I have climbed mountains together as part of [National] Outdoor Leadership
School, as you say, we’ve lived at the bottom of the ocean together, and through all of
that what’s important is shared experience. If you’re going to take a small group of
people and ask them to do something that is really complicated or has really high stakes
and potential for really complex things to happen, then it is great to have had a shared
experience in advance, and as deep and representative an experience as possible. When something
hard happens, if you can look at each other and remember back when we saw this before,
or remember when we were out Jet Skiing together, or remember when we were living on the bottom
of the ocean, that really gives you a foundation to build upon, to rely on and a shared confidence
in your ability to deal with the unknown. I think the process by which we select astronauts
and cosmonauts, the way we train together, not just the technical training but the psychological
and the interpersonal training that we get is a really important and vital part of being
successful in spaceflight.
Any time you make a spaceflight you’re going to miss certain things on Earth. On this flight,
it turns out you’re going to be away for Christmas and New Year’s. What are your
thoughts about spending those holidays in space?
My family lives all around the world. I have a son who lives in China, a son who lives
in Germany and a daughter who lives in Ireland and my wife is back and forth, United States
and Canada, so really at the Christmas holiday is when we get together. This year we’ve
decided to bump it up a little and we’re going to get together for Christmas in Kazakhstan.
Makes a nice card, Christmas in Kazakhstan, that’s where we’ll be this year. So we’re
going to celebrate a little early. On the actual day, the traditional day, the twenty-fifth,
of course, it’ll be like the times when I was working here in Houston in Mission Control
on Christmas Day, which I did several times. It’ll be either we’ll shift the date;
I’ll phone in and have a video conference or talk to each of my family members all around
the world. It’s an understood part of the job. This is a very special year for us as
a family and everyone understands that it’s not going to be normal and this’ll be a
year, even though it’s not typical, a year to talk about for the rest of our lives.
I want to get you to set the scene for me. Tell me about the International Space Station
that you’re going to arrive at. Tell me, what’s there now? What are the modules and
the different facilities there that are there to support you and your crewmates, your mission
and yourselves?
So you’re in a spaceship, and you wake up and in the far distance you see a star, and
it’s like almost miraculous in that all the other stars stay the way they are but
this one star, as you approach it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and then it stops being
a point of light and starts becoming this three-dimensional thing, and the closer you
get to it, the more you’re sort of staring at it in incredulity and fascination because
it turns this big bug of appendages and things sticking out. Then it becomes enormous and
then it’s the size of a small town that you are approaching, it’s huge. I felt that
way coming up to Mir, I felt that way coming up to station even when it was small, and
now, from our little Soyuz looking out the window to come to station, as big as it is
now, we’ll see it, of course, the Japanese module, the European module, then all the
American segments up the middle, all of the Russian segments in the back, the huge truss
and the huge solar arrays: it’s a place away from Earth that humans have built. It’s
truly a big outpost or a big first great landing in another part of the universe and it feels
miraculous to sneak up on one of those and to find it in space, then drive ourselves
in and dock with our little spaceship, equalize pressure, open the hatch and go into this
thing. It’s every science fiction book, it’s every Arthur C. Clarke’s imagination
of what the orbital module might look like as you come up, and it’s this little astronaut
kid’s dream to be able to do that. It’s a massive, capable, human creation orbiting
the world, and I’m really looking forward to opening that hatch.
One of the pieces that were invaluable in putting that together is Canadarm2. That’s
a hunk of technology that you delivered to the space station. Tell me what else is still
to come for Canadian robotics and the station, for Canadarm and Dextre [Special Purpose Dexterous
Manipulator] and other things that are still in the pipeline.
The space station, as far as construction goes, is almost finished. There’s a Russian
laboratory to come up and there are other piece parts to go on but fundamentally it’s
built. That was job one for Canadarm2, to grab things out of the back of the shuttle
or to hand off from the shuttle’s arm to the Canadarm2, take them around, build the
station incrementally like a huge Meccano set or a huge LEGO set, getting bigger and
bigger. But that crane phase for the Canadarm, the construction phase, is pretty much finished.
Now it’s really just an extension of ourselves on the outside. When we need to go out and
look at something, it’s nice to have a camera on the end that you can go have a good close
look. When a new spaceship comes up, some of them reach out, grab one, take it around,
plug it in and help deliver all of the equipment to station and then return them back to Earth
or get rid of them again. Then also like a cherry picker or like a Wichita lineman, sometimes
you need to go out and fix something. You need to use both hands and with the Canadarm2,
as a spacewalker, you can click your feet into the foot restraint and the arm can drive
you around as if you were a tool on the end of a surgeon’s probe, and then it’ll get
you exactly where you need. As Suni [Williams] and Aki [Hoshide] did recently in fixing the
big electrical box on the outside of space station. The arm is just a wonderful extension
and tool for us to be able to work on the outside of the space station. Canadarm2 after
having helped build the station all the way through continues to keep the station vital
and capable. When something comes up with new experiments, fresh food and clean clothes,
that’s what we do, the grabbing and installing and have our Christmas morning as a result
of Canadarm2’s work.
You’ve mentioned that the assembly of the station that has gone, taken over ten years,
pretty much done, and the focus now is turning on to science. How do you explain to people
what the potential is for what kind of science return the station can provide?
Having the laboratory like the space station functions on two different levels. One is
the obvious one that you have a laboratory with basically no gravity. You can then do
experiments that are impossible anywhere else—well, maybe you can go to the top of a building,
drop your experiment and it falls. The time that it’s falling is sort of weightless;
we do that, drop it down old mine shafts so it can fall a couple thousand meters, but
that’s only a short period of seconds and there’s still the air drag slowing it down.
You can put it in the back of an airplane and maybe get 20 seconds of good weightlessness.
On the space station we have perpetual absence of gravity, and so there are all sorts of
experiments that you can do on space station that you can’t do anywhere else, and that
is the fundamental core of it. But the other part is, there are some things that are just
fundamentally exciting to people and one of them is exploration and leaving Earth. To
be able to do this thing that is new in the human experience is fundamentally exciting.
When I sit next to somebody on a bus or in an airplane and they find out that I’m one
of the humans that leaves Earth, that’s all we talk about from then on because no
matter whom they are, this is an interesting thing. This is new in the human experience.
This is something that is sort of joyous and exciting to hear about, and as a result of
that it brings people together. That fundamental shared excitement of something new in humanity’s
experience, no matter where you’re from, it brings people together and so it doesn’t
just bring astronauts together or people on the bus together, but it brings scientists
and researchers together. Not only have we built a place where you can do experiments
with no gravity, where we have a lot of electricity, a lot of time, a really good environment,
but also it challenges and it inspires people from all around the world to try and use this
new experience, to bring them together, to get people from one corner of the world talking
to people from the other corner of the world that without this shared new capability and
challenge, they would never have spoken to each other. And so it functions on both those
levels, we see it every day on board station, and a lot of the work that goes on is the
daughter or granddaughter of that type of great harmony of environments.
Let’s talk about some of that research. One of the areas that station research focuses
on is finding out how being in that environment affects a human body and what we can do to
counteract the bad effects. Tell me about two or three of the human life sciences investigations
that you’re going to be involved with.
If you’re going to do experiments on a space station, some of them are going to be just
taking advantage of the lack of gravity. Some of them are going to be to look at the world,
at the universe, to test equipment and to just look at things that are different because
there’s no gravity. One of the big differences is how a human body functions when you take
away gravity. Some of it is obvious. When you swallow your food it doesn’t sit in
the bottom of your stomach, it floats around. When you are floating inside the station your
balance system doesn’t know which way is up. You don’t stand up and your body never
has to push the blood back up to your head again. For six months you don’t have to
hold your head up, that’s how lazy you can be. The resulting changes in the human body
are one of the things that we study. One of the experiments we have on board is called
Vascular [Cardiovascular Health Consequences of Long-Duration Space Flight], and it’s
looking at what happens to the cardiovascular system when you live in an environment like
that. The heart actually shrinks. You’re aging on a rapidly accelerated scale, your
heart actually shrinks and your blood vessel response changes; it actually sets us up to
cardiovascular problems. If you had something that was pretty low grade on Earth, after
six months of an environment like that, a risk of a heart attack or a stroke might actually
be quite a bit higher. We have a sequence of experiments that’s taking blood samples
and monitoring our body while we’re exercising and doing different things to try and understand
what’s going on with our cardiovascular system. It also challenges people to try and
do the science in orbit. We have an experiment called Microflow [Microflow technology demonstration]
that used to be a big piece of equipment installed at a hospital, they would try to figure out
how can we actually sample the crew member’s blood while they’re in orbit and get looking
at the individual cellular level, as a result, have got it down to the size of a toaster.
It’s like Tony Stark in “Iron Man,” where he’s trying to see if that thing in
his chest has made his blood radioactive, he puts this little thing in, tests his blood
and looks at it. Now on orbit we have a thing the size of a toaster, it’s not quite movie
grade yet, but we can take a tiny amount of blood, and using an optical system that was
very recently developed, that little bit of blood goes through there and it can give us
results in blood analysis within ten minutes. There’s a capability driven by an opportunity,
driven by a set of circumstances that then has great opportunity on Earth. If you can
now do blood work with a very small machine, then remote communities can do it and food
processing factories can do it. It’s taking this challenge and some of the limitations
of what we’re doing, coming up with a new product and then realizing that this is going
to be good all over the place. That’s a piece of hardware we’ll be testing on our
crew. There’s a lot of orthostatic stuff as well. The final piece I want to talk to
you about is the aging process; the loss of bone and the loss of muscle strength it is
so rapid for astronauts in space. It’s as if you spent months, years, or even decades
on Earth, happens in just a few months in orbit. Using changes in exercise and changes
in diet, we have basically found a way to beat that type of osteoporosis so that we
can have crews that used to come back with significant bone loss, now come back basically
with no bone loss at all. This is really important if we’re going to leave Earth, go to an
asteroid or go to Mars, we don’t want the person to show up on Mars as a jellyfish.
They have to show up and be able to put on their spacesuit, go out and explore the surface,
or if after six months on station you have an emergency spacewalk you need to be strong
and fit with a good skeleton to go fight the suit and work outside. For the people here
on Earth that are naturally aging, getting osteoporosis and muscle wasting, there is
a combination of specific resistive exercise, a regimen of exercise, and a specific type
of diet, that we have proven in this environment. It will allow an astronaut to stay healthy
for the full six months, and therefore improving health of people on Earth and allowing us
to go further out into the solar system.
And station is also packed with a lot of specialized gear for science research in other scientific
disciplines, too. Give me a couple of examples of the different kinds of other science you’re
going to be working on.
We don’t know what the universe is made of, strangely enough. We’ve been looking
up at the sky, see things, but we really fundamentally are just discovering that we don’t even
really know what the universe is made of. If you measure how fast stars and galaxies
are moving away from each other the gravity, gravitational pull numbers, it all doesn’t
make sense unless you say, there must be something out there causing these other effects. We
call it dark matter and dark energy, by all of our theories there should have been the
same amount of matter and antimatter created at the beginning of the universe. So how are
you going to figure that out? It’s hard down here on the surface; the atmosphere filters
most of that information. So we decided a little over a year ago to mount on top of
the space station a seven-ton magnet that collects the matter and the tiny little particles
of the universe. It’s already processed 32 billion different particles from the universe.
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer and all of the different sensors that are in it are trying
to understand what the stuff of the universe is: what are the origins of it and therefore
what’s the future of it and what is our place in it. That’s a really hard thing
to do on the surface of the Earth, it’s even hard to do on a satellite, but the station
is a huge, powerful, stable platform above the atmosphere for decades, and so it’s
a great place to mount a long-term sensing experiment like that. We also have a sensor
on the outside looking at all the x-ray sources in the universe, trying to understand black
holes and some of the less visible stars out. On the inside without gravity, heat doesn’t
rise; seems simple but it’s hard to get your mind around what that means. If you put
a pot of water on a hot plate, it doesn’t boil right because you don’t get cold water
at the top and hot water at the bottom then the heat rises and causes those nice convection
patterns. So what happens if you take a tube of water on the space station and you heat
one end? Does the water just get warm at this end and stay cold down here? Well, there was
an Italian physicist, Marangoni, who realized that surface tension, if you take a glass
of wine and you swirl your glass of wine around and you see how it sticks to the wine glass,
that’s the surface tension, the viscosity of the wine. That viscosity changes with temperature,
so if you have a tube of water and you heat one end, the Marangoni Effect, viscosity of
the water, changes as you heat it; in effect, the water starts to move around due to an
entirely different process than we normally can see on Earth. If you start thinking about it,
you can then study all sorts of fundamental fluid physics that we just can never study
on Earth. We can look at how stars form because here we have an environment with particulate
in it just like little bits of matter in the universe and get it spinning and see how those
things behave over time, how they flow with these Marangoni currents. We can design a
blood sensor with just a tiny little bit of human blood, but because we understand due
to the Marangoni forces how it will flow, we can then take a tiny blood sample and just
using the viscosity of it, move it around and sample it, so that’s an application
for here on Earth. When you’re welding something it’s not just gravity that’s moving the
liquid metal around but it’s a lot of those Marangoni forces. The viscosity forces melt
the flux and the metal all together, and we can better understand how welding works and
improve quality of welding. So the space station is this incredible, unique laboratory, an
environment that has been really hard to build, but we’ve created this thing. So many of
the leading minds of the world, right up to Nobel laureates, are using that capability
up there to push further back into our understanding of fundamental processes and where we are
in the universe.
And for the crew, you’re not only there to help run those experiments, you’re there
to make sure that the station continues to operate so that those experiments can run.
What do you do during the day? What’s a crew member’s day like on board the station?
For the people that have been out on a sailboat or a ship for a long time, where you get out
of sight of land, you’re there for some purpose. Maybe you’re transporting equipment
somewhere, you’re going to do research, going to go look at coral reef life, or maybe
you’re just out for a day sailing and you want to get a tan or go visit or just have
a nice time. Part of your day is to do what you went for, to look at the coral reef or
to lay back and look at your tan, but part of it is getting the sailboat ready when you’re
about to take it out of harbor. It is operating the sailboat, steer it, get the sail trimmed
right; you have to pay attention, things break. Your compass starts sticking, your radio or
the toilet in the sailboat doesn’t work properly—part of your day is going to be
that. Then part of your day is just taking care of yourself as a human being, you need
to sleep, eat, and wash. Space station’s exactly the same. You spend part of your day
just being a person. You wake up in the morning, take care of all of your typical morning activities:
breakfast, read the news, use the toilet, get cleaned up, maybe exercise. We don’t
get exercise for free on the space station just by walking around, raising our arm or
picking up water, you don’t fight gravity ever, therefore you can be so lazy and you
have to deliberately exercise, sort of like if you were living on a boat, you have to
deliberately exercise. Then part of your day is fixing things. It’s a big, complicated
structure and things break, so part of the life of an astronaut is fixing everything
from a cord in the back of a laptop that has stopped working to the air purification system,
or maybe something as huge as going outside to replace or repair a big piece of the station
that has broken. Another part of the day is running the experiments on board, which is
the real core purpose of being there. Your days are divided up just like that. Every
day you’re a human being staying alive, a technician keeping the space station alive,
and a scientist doing research.
When you arrive on the Soyuz spacecraft, you’re going to join the International Space Station
crew as a flight engineer, but in the midst of your mission, when Expedition 35 begins,
you’re going to become the commander of the International Space Station. How’s that
change life for you?
I’m lucky enough to be able to spend just a little under six months, on the space station.
It is a long time, six months, a lot of things can happen, but for the first half, which
I count myself really lucky, is that I don’t have to show up there and be in charge. I
show up and the commander will be Kevin Ford, and what a great opportunity for me to learn
because eventually I’m going to be asked to command the space station, but I don’t
have to jump in and be full speed, running and take over right away. I can do a bunch
of on the job training. I can “fleet up,” as they say in the Navy, and I can do my job,
be a flight engineer answerable to the commander, and listen to all the ways that Kevin has
decided. Kevin is learning them from Suni Williams who learned them from Gennady Padalka
so there’s this long pedigree of refined and proven ways to do things that are never
going to be seen properly here on our simulators. There’s always subtle differences, so I
will have three months to really learn how Kevin’s running things and look at it: if
I were the commander I would do that; I would do that differently, I wouldn’t do that,
and I’ll be able to pick and choose. Come March, when it’s time for Kevin and his
crew to get into their Soyuz and go home, he and I will have a ceremony on board, salute
each other, and from that moment on the health of my crew, the space station, and all of
the things we’re trying to do productively, are all resting on my shoulders, weightlessly,
but resting on my shoulders. I need to be ready for that. I’ve been training with
that in mind for several years here on Earth, working to build the crew, to make sure we
have the skills but also the relationship that would allow us to be healthy and productive
during that time, and also making sure that I understand things well enough. No matter
what breaks on the station or no matter what experiment’s going on, I have to have some
understanding so that I can make the right decisions, as things happen during the six
months. At this stage in my career, in my 50s, I’ve been an astronaut 20 years, flown
a couple times, I consider it a huge lucky break, because I’ve been gathering experience,
I’ve been trying to see how to do these things. I’ve been learning from other people,
and to be given the opportunity to command what is essentially the world’s spaceship,
now at this stage of my career, I consider it a great responsibility but also a great
turn of events and a great challenge and opportunity for myself. I’m really looking forward to
it.
You’re also going to be the first Canadian astronaut to command the space station. What’s
it mean for Canada and Canada’s space agency to have a commander?
Canada had its first spacecraft go to orbit 50 years ago; it was called Alouette. We were
the third nation on Earth to have a satellite in space. We did it cooperatively—it was
on an American rocket, but a Canadian satellite, so it kind of laid the grounds for how we’re
doing everything. We have some specialty back home in Canada. We have a set of our own interests,
in this case, the upper atmosphere and the northern lights. Living in the north, we had
a need, a capability, we cooperated with another nation and we got ourselves into space. So
we’ve been in the game from the beginning right on the accomplishments of Alouette,
that very first satellite. Canada has almost linearly built our capability and our responsibility
and therefore our international respect over time. We went from that to sensing satellites,
telecommunications satellites, RADARSAT, the first Canadian to fly on the shuttle, Canadarm
which did so many things from the Hubble telescope to all of the satellites. It grabbed and released,
and then with the other arm, onto the space station. We’ve had Canadians go, from Mark
Garneau, our first who was a payload specialist back in the early ’80s, through to Julie
Payette who was the main flight engineer running the space shuttle during her last flight,
and then Bob Thirsk who lived on station as a flight engineer. Even though no one could
map it out on purpose that way, it has appeared fairly linearly and progressive to now where
Canada is in a position to have a Canadian command the International Space Station. Each
has been a door opening of possibilities for young Canadian kids: this is something you
can do, this isn’t just a dream but this is an actual career choice; this is a thing
that can happen in your life. As a result, this is a big deal in Canada. This is a brand
new capability. It’s something to be proud of, something to look at in perspective of
time, look backwards and see how we got here, look forwards and say, look where this is
going. We’re going to other planets eventually and Canada is part of this. I feel the responsibility
of that as the first Canadian to do it. Fundamentally, for me it’s the first time. Regardless,
it’s a big deal for me, but also it’s a big deal for my country, for my space agency
and for where I’m from, and I’m happy that people are interested in it. I’m fundamentally
happy that this is a continuation of all of those capabilities and it continues to open
opportunities for the Canadians that follow after me.
What’ll it mean to you to have been that Canadian who was first?
I hate to jinx something by talking about things in advance because I would like things
to go well; that’s been my goal for a decade, preparing for this flight of getting myself
into a position to try and do this job well. Since the outset I’ve said I want to come
back with a healthy crew, with a crew that sort of my measure is, would they want to
go do this again right away and if they want to go do this again, then it was a good human
experience. I want to come back with a healthy space station, and having done as much of
the science as we possibly could in our six months on the station. If through luck and
the work of the crew we get all those things done, then of course this is one of the pinnacles
of what I was asked to do during my life, and this is a big event for me personally.
It takes a lot of work, a lot of focus, but it deserves it and I’m really working hard
hoping that when we land at the end of May that I’ll be able to look back and say I
did what I set out to do and I handed the station off to Pavel Vinogradov in as good
a state as I possibly could. It’s something that I can look back on as an accomplishment
and a threshold of my life that was really important for me.
Anyone who has taken a look at your biography sees that among many interests that you have,
music is one of them, and you’ve got some special music plans for this mission. Tell
me about your plans for recording music and a sing-along with students all across Canada.
On board the space station there’s a Canadian guitar. It’s a Larrivee, made in Vancouver.
That’s just luck, I didn’t get the guitar up there, but it turns out when they bought
one in a local guitar shop here in Houston, they ended up buying a Larrivee, which is
great, it’s a nice guitar. I play guitar in a couple bands and sing. I’ve fronted
bands here in Houston for 20 years, and it’s just a natural extension for me to play music
no matter where I am, whether it’s at Star City or Tsukuba, Japan, or on board the space
station; I played guitar on board Mir when I was there back in 1995. I thought, since
I’m there long enough; why not write music about the experience of traveling in space.
The early sailors, the early miners, the early cowboys, the pioneers that moved into a new
human environment, all of them have recorded the experience not just in journals, but also
in song and in music. To be able to use that new environment to help inspire art in the
form of music is a way that I thrive on Earth. I’m not by any means the world’s best
musician, but I love it and I’ve had lots of people to play music with. To be able to
do that on space station is fairly new in the human experience and I want to make the
most of it. You can record it lots of different ways. You can write a journal, a blog every
day, take a million photographs out the window, try and capture this new human experience
different ways. For me, music is a great way to do that recording. I’ve half-written
a bunch of songs and I’ve completed some. I’ve made sure that we have the equipment
on board, not just the guitar but the right combinations of pickups, microphones, recording
equipment, and files and how to get it down to the ground, so that we have a reasonable
recording studio on the International Space Station. I’m going to have the chance to
float weightless inside the Cupola with the world rolling by underneath playing a guitar
inside probably the most scenic recording studio that’s ever existed, and a chance
to record the songs that I have written, to work and write new songs or expand the songs
while I’m up there, and for the rest of my life, to have those as my souvenirs, my
memories of living away from the Earth. My brother, who I write songs with, said, imagine
if the first people going to Mars, if when they sit around their mess table on the six
months on the way to Mars and they sing old space songs and one of the songs they sing
is something that you wrote on board the space station, a space shanty or whatever, what
an interesting idea, and it’s not inconceivable, so I’m really looking forward to that. Playing
music in space also attracts a lot of interest from other musicians. Lots of musicians of
all different levels, right up to some pretty famous bands have said, hey, we would love
to play with you while you’re up there or record something and we’ll incorporate you
into our concert or something like that. I’ve been looking at what’s the best way to do
that. One of them is with schools across Canada. How do you get involved with all the grade
school and high school bands across the country, and there are couple good programs that exist.
One is called MusiCounts, and they try to have one Canadian celebrity song a year that
is then learned by the school choirs and played during the year and it’s themed for the
year or some sort of particular theme. This year they decided to make a space theme and
they teamed me with one of the musicians in the Canadian band called Barenaked Ladies,
guy named Ed Robertson; Ed’s a great songwriter, he’s from the part of the world that I’m
from. So we’ve been working together for about a year now on a song, and actually this
week we just recorded sort of the final version of the song, and it will be put into full
orchestrated form and sent to schools so that the high school bands all have their particular,
the third trumpet has his part to play and the whole thing put together, choirs will
learn the words, and then I will be recording a part of it on the space station as well
and sending it down. There will then be a way to have the Barenaked Ladies’ version
of it with me adding in harmonies and singing verses and playing a little bit of guitar,
and then at school concerts throughout the school year, they will be able to play along
with us. They’ll be able to use our recording, our music, or even conceivably the whole thing
happening live or partially live with my recording and Ed Robertson and company. It’s a really
nice different way, to tie the newness of the experience and the imaginative part of
the experience with people all across the country. It’s a real privilege to be a part
of that.
Sounds like it’ll be fun.
Oh yeah, it’ll be fun, too.
Any increment on the space station has the plan to remain flexible to respond to things
that you made reference to earlier. Sometimes that means going outside. What is, as we speak
today, what is the plan for spacewalks during your time on board?
We have a richness of experience in our crew. People have done multiple spacewalks in the
past, both on the Russian side and on the U.S. side or the Canadian side, so we’ve
been training for years to do spacewalks. There are all sorts of things that we have
looked at and said, if this fails we have to go out and do a spacewalk within this number
of days to go fix it—electrical things, cooling things or something like that. So
we’re ready to go do those. Right now, as of today, there is nothing broken on the space
station that will absolutely, black and white, hard-require us to go outside, but sort of
like maintenance on your car—well, I think I can get another hundred miles out or another
thousand miles out before I have to change the oil or get the air conditioner fixed.
Well, another thousand miles go by and you go, maybe another 500—there’s a lot of
things on station like that, too. You don’t want to replace things that don’t need replacing,
but there is some sort of regular maintenance required to keep a machine running, and, unlike
your car, where if it breaks you can just pull over to the side and call AAA or call
a tow truck, if the station has a serious problem we have to continue to live and survive
up there, so it’s a real balance, juggling, guessing game as to when you have to go outside
and fix things. We’re trying to make sure that the crew can go outside and do any of
the spacewalks it may be asked to do, everything from something minor like retrieving a payload,
the MISSE [Materials International Space Station Experiment] payload that is collecting particles
of the universe, it’s been out there collecting them for years, we can fold that up like a
big suitcase and bring it inside, and that would be a good thing to do. There are cameras
and lights outside that have failed that decrease our capability to see what we’re doing;
some of those need to be swapped out. There are covers that need to go on certain parts
of the station to improve and lengthen their life because of all the thermal cycles and
the micrometeorite damage. There’s a big long shopping list of stuff we really should
do as soon as we get outside and have the spare time. Like doing maintenance on your
house; I have to clean out the gutters—that can wait a little while but the next time
it rains it’s going to be a mess. That’s kind of the boat we’re in. So as a crew
we’re trained, we’re ready, and we’re optimistic that something’ll break.
The landscape of spaceflight is changing these days. Now we’ve got private companies even
flying supply ships to the space station and, and all the different countries in the world
working together instead of competing. Is this the kind of arrangement, that you see
continuing on into the future of human space exploration?
Space travel is hard. It’s easy to do if you’re willing to kill people regularly—like
in the early days of aviation, planes crashed all the time, people got injured, it was sort
of [the attitude] “you know, it’s a risky business, OK, people are going to die.”
That’s not acceptable in space travel. Because of the complexity, the cost and the visibility
of it, we want it to be safe, as safe as we possibly can, and therefore it takes a lot
of preparation and it’s expensive and it’s rare. When something takes a lot of preparation
and it’s expensive and rare, it’s hard to do as one person, it’s hard to do as
a small group or even as an individual company, sometimes even as a nation. I mean, Canada
has not decided to launch their own people into space because of the complexity and the
cost; we would rather share the costs with another country or another group of countries
in order to make it as economically logical as possible, and the whole world is doing
that for the International Space Station, or at least 15 of the leading nations of the
world. That makes sense. If we had some huge breakthrough in engines so that suddenly getting
to space was just as easy as driving to the corner store, if you could just have your
“Back to the Future” little thing on top of your car where you throw in a banana peel
and “poof!” you’re off to space, the whole game would be different and people would
be going all the time. But it is still complex, hard, dangerous and expensive, and so for
the foreseeable future it is going to be, both at the business level and at the governmental
level, an international venture to build and live on the space station, go to the moon,
go to asteroids, and go to Mars. I think it’s the right thing to do. I think as a species,
as a shared group of people living on the surface of this planet, it makes sense if
we’re going to leave it and go somewhere else in the solar system that we should try
and do it as collectively as possible, both to share the cost of it but also to share
the benefits of it. So it’s kind of driven by the physics and the complexity, but there’s
certain purity and a beauty to that. The result that we’re doing it internationally and
collectively, I think, is a really good one, and I hope that we can prolong that as long
as possible and not turn it into just a purely competitive, a one-shot deal or kind of a
thoughtless, selfish way of exploring the universe. I really like the way we’re doing
it as a species right now and I want to help prolong that.
What is it that we are learning now on this space station that is preparing us for future
exploration further beyond Earth orbit?
On the space station, let’s look at something really simple; a little pump that has to move
water around like the pump in your radiator in your car. Well, pumps have liquid in there,
the pump spins and it moves the liquid through. Without gravity the liquid doesn’t stay
in the bottom part of the pipe. It will stick to the walls of the pipe and the pump will
just be spinning and moving air through the middle, so a pump doesn’t work in space.
You need to redesign it, and once redesigned, it doesn’t cool itself normally because
heat doesn’t rise, so how do you keep your pump from overheating? Seems trivial and simple,
but you have to solve that problem. How do you build a space pump? How do you build a
space fan? How do you build a space computer, a space toilet, a space everything? How do
you make sure that it’s going to work? Because if you say, let’s go to the biggest rock
in the asteroid belt; OK, and now we are, our spaceship needs pumps. Well, if you launch
from Earth and you start leaving Earth and you find out that you had a bad idea how to
build pumps, then you can’t just turn around and come home and you’re fundamentally flawed.
You need to test those somewhere, and you can’t test things perfectly here on the
surface of the Earth because you can’t escape gravity and the effects of gravity, so the
space station is the test-bed for the spaceships of the future. Just by its very nature we’re
learning what works and what doesn’t work, how to collect solar energy from the sun,
make it power and cool a spaceship; how to, what thrusters, what fuel should you use,
how do you have your thrusters work; what material do you build your spaceship from—if
you know you’re going to get peppered by micrometeorites and ultraviolet energy from
the sun and radiation from the universe, what do you build it out of? We’re experimenting
deliberately, and just by de facto, just by being there, with all of those things on the
space station, and it is our big proving ground. It is our test track for building spaceships
in the future, and it is therefore the diving board, the launching board, that’s going
to allow us to confidently go further away from Earth.
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