I think the legacy of the space station will be that we can do something this technically complex in an international way.
I’ve always thought space station is a great name. It should be like a gas station where we go for service and supplies before heading further out.
In the original ‘Star Trek’ TV series, space stations served as deep-space research laboratories, as well as rendezvous points where starships could dock before exploring the unknown. When we were envisioning our own space station, the applications were similar.
A lot of these things will fly in later forms on the space station themselves, or a later form of that research will, once they kind of find out some of the basics from flying it on shuttle.
But thanks to the International Space Station, we’re able to study the effects of weightlessness and develop countermeasures in orbit, close to Earth.
It is incredibly exciting to be able to actually go and live on the space station after having worked so long on seeing the hardware built, getting it launched and maintaining it.
I think the International Space Station is providing a key bridge from us living on Earth to going somewhere into deep space.
It’s an international space station. We have crew members from both the U.S. and Russia and now the United Kingdom with Tim Peake from the U.K… It’s great to see that, on this space station, that we can work across cultures in a very cooperative way.
There are several revenue streams that are near and present that could support a private space station, including in-space manufacturing, microgravity research, and tourism – for both individuals and sovereign nation astronauts – and in-space supply logistics.
Finally my dream came true in that there was a possibility that I could travel to the International Space Station. I’ve gone through the medicals and the training and now I’m officially, by the Russian Space Federation, a cosmonaut in training.
In space, you need to stay as ‘usual’ as possible. On the space station, I would brush my hair every day.
The space station here is a magical place and an incredible science facility.
Space station is, it really is one of the more, if not the most, impressive technological achievement of the modern day, not only in what we’ve accomplished engineering-wise but what we’ve accomplished on this international scale, because anybody will tell you that half the challenge is making it all work.
CASIS has to succeed because for it not to succeed would be a huge setback for the International Space Station program.
I was a graduate student in 1984 when President Ronald Reagan called for the construction of a new space station. I knew then that I wanted to apply for the astronaut program, and this was an exciting development.
If you don’t like airline food, you’ll probably have the same impression of space station food. I would not fly to space for the food.
While on the space station, I kept up with news a couple of ways – Mission Control sent daily summaries, and I would scan headlines on Google News when we had an Internet connection, which was about half the time.
Through these ongoing activities and possibly in the future, a Canadian will go live and work on the International Space Station and we will continue to make Canadians proud of our achievements in space.
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