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Alpine Club memento to make space flight

Canadian astronaut’s ties to mountains began with father’s 1939 trip to Garibaldi

By Lynn Martel

Toothbrush? Check.

Spacesuit? Check.

Alpine Club of Canada patch? Check.

When Canadian Astronaut Dave Williams boards NASA’s Endeavour Space Shuttle on June 28, he’ll be blasting off into space with a piece of Canada’s mountaineering history.

Like his six colleagues assigned to the STS 118 shuttle mission, Williams was invited to pack 10 mementos from organizations of significance to him. Thinking of his father, an ACC member in the 1930s and early ’40s, Williams requested the ACC send him a patch commemorating the club’s 2006 centennial.

“My father was a member in the 1930s to early ’40s,” Williams said. “I’ve always been an outdoors person, I guess I come by that honestly through my dad. Growing up in Saskatchewan I spent a lot of time as a kid playing in the woods, and as a teenager I was really into cross country and downhill skiing, and canoeing and kayaking.”

Although not an ACC member, Williams, who lives in Houston, Texas with his wife and two children, remembers taking a rock climbing course in Banff in 1974. Mountaineers and astronauts share similar passion, curiosity and the drive to explore, he said.

“One of the things I’m very passionate about is exploration,” Williams said, speaking by phone from Houston’s Johnson Space Center. “The quest for knowledge for astronauts is very much like that of climbers wanting to know what it’s like at the top of a mountain — or the top of the world, like climbing Everest.”

Williams, 53, said he remembers his dad showing him 8 mm film footage of climbing and skiing B.C.’s Mount Garibaldi in 1939 — flying from Vancouver and landing on a lake “in an aircraft that resembled a giant flying boat.”

Williams’s own interest in space flight developed during the 1960s, when he watched television broadcasts as the first manned spacecrafts explored beyond the earth’s orbit.

“It was just after they hired the original seven Mercury astronauts,” Williams said. “Like just about everyone, I watched it on TV, and thought ‘wouldn’t it be cool to go in space?’”

While Canada was the third country to launch an unmanned satellite into space, programs for Canadians to experience space travel didn’t exist.

“As a Canadian kid, I never thought I’d have a chance,” Williams said. “So I figured, if I can’t explore outer space, maybe I should learn how to SCUBA dive so I can explore inner space.”

At the time, Jacques Cousteau was also at the top of the TV ratings, as he explored deep below the surface of the world’s oceans. Williams earned his SCUBA certification before he could drive.

“The irony is, I had the chance to go into space before I ever lived underwater,” he laughed.

After graduating from Montreal’s McGill University with a science degree, he pursued a distinguished career in medicine, focusing on scientific research, and as an emergency physician.

In 1992 the Canadian Space Agency selected Williams and three others from 5,330 applicants to begin astronaut training. In 1998 he made his first trip into space as a mission specialist aboard Space Shuttle Columbia. During the 16-day flight, the seven-person crew’s life science experiments focused on the effects of microgravity on the brain and the nervous system as Columbia orbited the earth 256 times, covering over 10 million kilometres in 381 hours.

From 1998 to 2002, Williams was the first non-American to hold a senior management position within NASA as director of the Space and Life Sciences Directorate at the Johnson Space Center.

In 2001, Williams became the first Canadian to have lived and worked in both space and the ocean, through his participation in the joint NASA-NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) NEEMO 1 mission, a week-long training exercise aboard Aquarius, the world's only underwater research laboratory. During his second, 18-day NEEMO mission, the crew conducted research aimed at delivering medical care in remote locations. Underwater research offers a cost effective means of developing space technology, he said.

For his upcoming mission, Williams looks forward to making three space walks of six or seven hours duration each, installing elements to further construction of the International Space Station. During one walk, he’ll move a unit weighing 1,200 pounds, which, because it’s in space, will have no weight, but will still have mass.

“It’s kind of like pushing a Zamboni across a smooth ice surface,” Williams said. “The key is to move slowly, if it were to build up momentum it would be hard to stop.”

Weightlessness offers a number of advantages living inside the shuttlecraft, he added.

“Because there’s no gravity, we can use all the available surfaces,” William explained. “I can run my sleeping bag diagonally across the ceiling and have a restful sleep.”

Some challenges astronauts face are similar to expedition climbers’, he said, including working as a team and understanding technology, equipment and body movement.

“There are many similarities between space walking and rock climbing,” Williams said. “In climbing you’ve got the rope, when you’re space walking you’re on a tether the whole time. Tether management is a big deal, just like rope management. You don’t want to get your tether fouled or tangled up. You look at the task, calculate the degree of difficulty, a lot like climbing. In space walking, there’s a lot of hand over hand movement, quite similar to rock climbing, but primarily using arms, not feet.”

While he couldn’t really see the Canadian Rockies during his first shuttle flight due to the shuttle’s orbital inclination, Williams said this time he expects to see much more of Canada as the spacecraft orbits the earth every 90 minutes, traveling at 25 times the speed of sound.

“There is no way you can really describe how beautiful it is,” Williams said. “The view is constantly changing, from sunrise to sunset every 45 minutes.

“It’s spectacular looking at the planet from space. But you also really become sensitized to the impact human beings have on the planet. You can really see the pollution, and you wonder why we — humans living on earth — can’t take care of the planet and be sensitive to the environment. You also have a really heightened appreciation of geography, you can see the continents, and provinces, but there are no magic lines marking their boundaries.

“For me, space travel represents the pinnacle of exploration. That desire people have to explore — that’s still there. And there’s still lots to explore.”

Special to Pique Newsmagazine