OTTAWA — Bob Thirsk, a British Columbia native who is not yet a household name after 25 years as a Canadian astronaut, is going to rewrite Canada’s book of space records in the next few days.
First Canadian to launch into space from Kazakhstan. First Canadian flight engineer in a Soyuz crew. And the really big one: First Canadian to live in space for six months.
Canada has sent eight men and women into space. They have done spacewalks, operated Canadarms and helped build the International Space Station.
However, after 10 or 12 days, they’ve always flown home. Thirsk will be the first Canadian crew member staying on the orbiting station.
He’s an engineer and a medical doctor as well, and an MBA, a veteran of a 1996 shuttle mission — and now a member of a group with a name many Canadians won’t recognize.
He belongs to Expedition 20, the twentieth crew of the space station, going where — mostly — Americans and Russians have gone before.
The British Columbia native, 54, has been training at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre near Moscow for most of the past year, away from cameras and interviews. But his fellow astronauts paint a picture of what life will be like in space.
“The challenge is that the length of the mission relates to the length of training, so a long-duration mission has long-duration training,” said Dave Williams, recently retired from Canada’s astronaut corps. “The two-week (shuttle) missions are kind of like a sprint. The timelines are busy, you get up in the morning and you’re working all day, you go to bed, you wake up the next morning to do it all again.
“You can’t do that for six months. It’s not tenable. So it’s a totally different approach, like training for a marathon.”
American Sandy Magnus returned to Earth in March after 133 days on the station, bringing a vivid account of what’s waiting for Thirsk.
“I had to establish a lifestyle, a rhythm of a life like we have on the planet,” she said in an interview last week. “You do get into a rhythm” — wake up, breakfast, exercise, work, lunch, and so on. Evenings and weekends are time off, mostly.
“You have an hour or two after dinner to spend at the window and watch the Earth go by and think about where you are and what you’re doing. It’s a lot more relaxed (than a shuttle flight). It’s a completely different type of feeling from a rushed, frantic, panicky shuttle mission.”
On weekends there’s housecleaning that takes about half a day. Exercise is vital every day. There’s also a list of “voluntary” science activities — work that an astronaut can choose to do such as educational events for students on Earth, but that isn’t vital.
“And then on Sundays we have our private family conferences as well. You’re more or less off but you’re still doing things. But you don’t have thousands of people counting on you to ‘Get something done, like no kidding, right now!’”
The station itself is undergoing a major change on this flight. It has always had a crew of three. Finally, it’s expanding to the six-person crew that was intended all along, but delayed by the loss of Columbia.
This will free up astronauts and cosmonauts to do research — the main goal of the station. Thirsk will do experiments on how the heart and blood vessels react to zero-gravity, how astronauts’ perceptions change, and how materials behave.
He’ll also be a flight engineer responsible for maintenance and repairs on the station.
The three-man Soyuz crew also has Roman Romanenko of Russia and Belgian astronaut Frank De Winne. As the flight engineer, Thirsk will sit beside the Soyuz commander and help monitor all the gauges and indicators, “mainly during launch and re-entry, because that’s the most dynamic time of flight,” Magnus explained.
He’s trained to help with some of the controls if there’s a problem, like a co-pilot. All in Russian.
“When we’re in Russia we all speak Russian. Our training is all in Russian, our simulators are all in Russian, and Bob has spent their extensive training classes operating in Russian. His Russian’s good. He couldn’t be a flight engineer if his Russian wasn’t good. You need to be talking to the ground and making quick decisions and assessments of the situation in Russian. You have to process it quick, and then react.”
Launch is set for 6:34 a.m. ET Wednesday.
http://www.vancouversun.com/Technolo...578/story.html 
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