“Space is our future - Canada is a spacefaring nation.”
- Dr. Dafydd Williams
Back at the start of May my friend Chris, who is a graduate from McGill University in Montreal, had invited me to join him for an alumni event in June at the exclusive Vancouver Club. The topic for the evening: Is McGill ready to take space discovery to new heights? I'm always interested in opportunities like this, so I cheerfully accepted his invitation.
At this point, some of you may be wondering, “Why McGill?” Apparently McGill might as well be called "Space U": since Canada started its astronaut program in 1983, five out of the 14 successful candidates have been McGill graduates. It’s also home to the McGill Space Institute, which opened in October of 2015. The Institute's 2017 Annual Report lists a range of research that would make the gang on The Big Bang Theory salivate: Muon Hunting, Galaxy and Supermassive Black Hole Co-Evolution, Merging Neutron Stars in X-rays and Gravitational Waves, A Possible Dark Origin of Matter - you know you have a good lineup of research when all your topics sound like the titles of science fiction novels from the 1950s.
The room at the Vancouver Club had seating for 110 people, and it appeared to be an almost full house of interested alumni and friends (plus one infant, presumably supplied by the same organization that ensures that every airplane has at least one screaming baby on board.)
As the evening began, we were presented with a prestigious trio of speakers, starting with Professor Victoria Kaspi, who is the Lorne Trottier Chair in Astrophysics and Cosmology, the Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics and the Director of the aforementioned McGill Space Institute.
Joining Professor Kaspi were former Canadian Space Agency astronauts Dr. Robert Thirsk and Dr. Dafydd Williams. Dr. Thirsk was selected in December 1983 for the Canadian Astronaut Program, flew on the 1996 STS-78 Columbia space shuttle mission , and was part of the 2009 ISS long duration mission , during which he spent 188 days on the station.
Dr. Williams, who started astronaut training in June of 1992, also flew on Columbia, in 1998, and and went to the ISS in August of 2007, where he set the Canadian record for time spent outside the station on spacewalks: 17 hours and 47 minutes.*
In fact, it was such a prestigious lineup that it led me to think that the room must have contained some very heavy hitters in terms of McGill donations to have elicited this sort of representation – let’s face it, they didn’t fly two astronauts and a prominent astrophysicist in from the other side of the country just because Chris and I chipped in fifteen bucks each.
 |
| Okay - Bob, Vicky, Dave, let's talk space. |
After a couple of forgettable speeches by university administrators, the main event started, presenting us with a fascinating and wide ranging discussion that managed to almost entirely ignore the
original topic of McGill's readiness to raise the bar for space
research.
The evening began with a very fundamental question from the moderator: when and how did the panelists become interested in space? Victoria Kaspi admitted that she was a big Star Trek fan, and had always been fascinated by the night sky.
Astronauts were Bob Thirsk's heroes in the 60s, and Dave Williams described how his original interest in being an astronaut dated back to 1961, when at the age of seven he watched the television broadcast of Alan Shepard lifting off to become the first American in space.
The next day, he announced to his grade school teacher, “That’s what I want to do!”, only to be told by his teacher that he couldn't.
“Why not?”
“You're a Canadian.” **
Fortunately times have changed since then: as mentioned above, there have been 14 Canadian astronauts since 1983, 11 of whom have flow into space. In fact, when asked about the qualifications for being an astronaut, Bob Thirsk pointed out that, outside of the scholastic requirements, they were very Canadian in nature: politeness, understanding, acceptance of others, and the sense of adventure historically possessed by Canadians.
He went on to add that one of the best things about the current state of space exploration was its international nature, the manner in which former enemies were now working together, and how Canada occupies an undeniably important role in that exploration.
They all agreed that the next exciting frontier for space travel is Mars, although Dave Williams felt that someone currently in the space program might walk on the Moon again, "a profoundly transformation experience". Bob Thirsk hoped that within a couple of generations we would be living on Mars, commenting that, "...somewhere in this room is a person who could walk on Mars - they just don't know yet."
This led to the question of whether the future of space exploration would be private or public. Bob Thirsk gave the example of the ship in Alien, which was a commercial mining vessel, and mentioned that the driving force behind the exploration of Canada was development for commercial reasons. His expectation was that private corporations would take over low Earth orbit development, but that exploration would still be the purview of governments.
Perhaps the most interesting topic was the panel's thoughts on the search for extra-terrestrial life. Bob Thirsk expressed his conviction that in our lifetime we will discover other life in our galaxy, a discovery which will be the most significant event of the 21st century - unless it finds us first. Vicky Kaspi observed that there was a need for sophisticated technology in order to conduct the search for bio signatures. She also thoughtfully mentioned her curiousity about what's going on under the ice on Europa, Jupiter's sixth moon.
Bob Thirsk concluded the evening by speaking passionately about the need to give the young people of Canada an audacious challenge like Mars. He went on to add that he was concerned that Canadians were losing their sense of adventure, and that there should be more experiential hands-on learning. "Yes, get a degree, but climb a mountain too, live under water for a week, do things, get out there!!"
If there were two aspects of the event that stood out for me, the first would be the complete confidence with which the trio discussed the future of scientific advancement and space exploration: developing advanced technologies, pushing the frontiers of science, living on Mars, and finding life on exoplanets or elsewhere in our own Solar System – not as “what ifs” but as “whens”.
The second was the equally complete conviction that Canadians, as individuals and a nation, will be part of that future.
- Sid
* Surprisingly, this isn't even in the top 30 - the international record is an astonishing 82 hours and 22 minutes by Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Solevyev, spread out over 16 missions for an average of 5 and a quarter hours in space per mission.
** Coincidentally, when David applied for the astronaut program in 1992, the Canadian government received over 600 applications from children under ten.
