The As It Happens Files (8 page)

It seems to have paid off. His World Clinic in New London, New Hampshire, now boasts 3 full-time doctors and 5 support staff and can call on the help of 20 other physicians for consultation, including 8 specialists. Their clients include crews, island populations, top executives and families with “high net worth” who travel a lot and maybe keep several residences in different parts of the world. The money the clinic brings in from well-heeled clients goes to support projects in Madagascar and Cambodia and a street clinic in Boston. Carlin even has a few sailors still on his list, including a bunch of “old guys in their 70s,” who had just called him from Gibraltar the day we were chatting. They were in the process of planning “their last hurrah”—a voyage from Portugal to Hawaii.

As for Victor Yasekov, his arm’s fine, apparently. Carlin met up with him in Charleston, Virginia, when the race was over. Isabelle Autissier, the French Vendée Globe racer, was also there, and Carlin said he was thrilled to find himself in such terrific company.

Not so crazy after all? I’ll let you decide.

Radio that has all the right stuff

S
pace pilots, or space sailors as they’re sometimes called, aren’t adventurers in the way the Vendée Globe sailors are. In some ways, astronauts are the antithesis of what we think of as venturesome: they don’t work alone, they need the backing of hundreds of people and billions of dollars and so on. Not to belittle them at all, but the first astronaut was actually a monkey called Able—the first one to survive anyway—and he was followed by an assortment of guinea pigs, other monkeys, frogs, rats, and cats and dogs—as well as
Homo sapiens.

That said, you have to have a certain amount of the right stuff to ride an aircraft straight up until you run out of air and the sky turns black around you—as Joe Walker did when he piloted the X-15 into space—or to plop yourself down atop a rocket and head for the moon.

Roberta Bondar, a neurologist by training, was the first Canadian woman in space, a mission specialist aboard the space shuttle
Discovery
in 1992. Her book about that experience was called
Touching the Earth,
but when you think about astronauts hurtling through space, you think,
Here’s another group of people who are also touching the void.
We were especially conscious of their bravery the day in February 2003 when we talked to Bondar about the fiery descent of the shuttle
Columbia
and the loss of its seven crew members.

I asked Dr. Bondar if there had ever been a moment during her trip when she believed she wouldn’t make it home. She said that one day they’d heard a loud bang, like an explosion, and immediately everyone started rushing around to get the shuttle ready for what she called “an emergency de-orbit.” It turned out that what they’d heard was only the noise of metal tanks expanding—but it sure scared them.

Astronauts don’t often talk about the fear they must feel, especially at the time of launch. Bondar was more candid than most. “If you don’t have respect for the seething monster that’s about to engulf you,” she said, “there’s something wrong with you.” What gets you through is that you’re very focused on the job you have to do. In eight and a half minutes, the blast-off is over, the fiery engines have been dispatched and you’re sailing through space. Even so, everyone who flies the shuttle is very much aware that it’s still an experimental system.

“We’re all test pilots. We’re sitting on a rocket. It’s not licensed by the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration). We get our affairs in order before we fly.”

But fly they do, and I, for one, am quite envious. It’s the one kind of exploration that I can imagine myself doing if I were qualified, notwithstanding the fact that I’m a total coward. Quite a few people with the means have already flown as “space tourists,” and many more are reserving places on the first private commercial tours, so I guess the idea of exploring outer space appeals to a lot of people. My own interest probably stems from nights spent with my father on the roof deck of our house in Ottawa when I was growing up, the two of us mesmerized by the night sky and speculating about what other kinds of life might be out there. (You could see the night sky in the city in those days! And we often saw the Northern Lights.) No doubt these moments also explain
why, when I was old enough, I had to get a pilot’s licence and why I never pass up a chance to watch Canada’s incomparable aerobatic team, the Snowbirds, in action. To this day, a chill runs up my spine when I picture Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the
moon.

My son, David, had an even greater passion for space when he was small; he was especially taken with the space shuttle. Before he could read, he knew his little shuttle book by heart and could have worked as a tour guide at the Kennedy Space Center. The day he and I and my mother drove up to the gates of Cape Canaveral in Florida for the first time and he caught a glimpse of the towering Redstone rocket guarding the entry, he was beside himself with excitement. (I’d agreed to deliver him to Canaveral if he would accompany me to Disneyworld, not too far down the road.) We were both thrilled to attend an actual launch a year or so later and grief-stricken when the
Challenger
blew up in January 1986. We were then living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and since there was a New Hampshire teacher aboard the shuttle, every classroom in New England had tuned in to watch the launch. Many hearts were broken that day, ours among them. David never talked very much about it; in fact, we didn’t talk much about space ever again.

The old Redstone rocket later fell down in a storm.

The shuttle’s image had been tarnished anyway, for me, by Ronald Reagan’s attempt to link the shuttle flights with Star Wars, the popular name for his missile defence programme. I don’t know if there’s any compelling reason to oppose missile defence research today, but during the Cold War, critics feared the U.S. project would spark a new round of weapons building on the part of the Soviet Union, and since the U.S. and the
U.S.S.R. already had about eighty thousand nuclear warheads between them, there seemed to be more than enough on tap to blast the earth out of its orbit. There were others who thought Star Wars was just impractical and a waste of money.

The astronauts, though, were like members of some master race. They were not tarnished in any way by the schemes of their political masters, and I was always pleased to talk to them, especially to the Canadians among them, like Bondar and Marc Garneau and Chris Hadfield. Hadfield was the voice of Mission Control on the ground for the flight that would take a 77-year-old John Glenn back into space, making him the oldest person to venture beyond our atmosphere. I asked Colonel Hadfield what were the major differences Senator Glenn would experience between his first flight and the one he was about to make, and he said, “Room, for one thing.” On his first flight, 36 years earlier, Glenn had been wedged into a compartment the size of a go-cart; now he’d be able to unstrap himself and float around, weightless, with the rest of the crew.

And this time he was going as a scientist, not a pilot. Everyone experiences osteoporosis and loss of balance in space, Hadfield told us, but in younger astronauts these conditions reverse themselves after they’ve returned to earth; no one knew what would happen to Glenn’s body after he returned.
Like giving your body to science while you’re still alive,
I thought. Hadfield added that Glenn was tickled pink to have a second chance to fly. Hadfield himself was 36 years old when he got his
first
flight, and now he was hankering for another.

Julie Payette, a mission control specialist aboard
Discovery
in 1999 and the second Canadian woman in space, tried to convey to us once how really weird it was to be weightless. Even though we’re all familiar with the concept, even though you train for years before you fly, your reflexes just aren’t
prepared for the experience, she told us. So if you drop something, you look
down
to see where it fell, when in reality, of course, it doesn’t
fall
anywhere. Payette said that when she went to sleep the first couple of times in space, she got into a “horizontal” position, or what seemed like horizontal in the context of the ship, just as though she were lying down on a mattress. But there was no mattress and there was no horizontal and you could go to sleep in any position. In fact, said Dr. Payette, she came to appreciate that sleeping in space was one of the great aspects of weightlessness.

Payette also said she would never get over the sight of the planet Earth from space. She would look up from her work and think,
Oops, there goes Australia.… Oops, there goes a small island in the Pacific.
The immensity of the desert in northern Africa, the greenness of Canada, the way the sun rises instantaneously—they had 16 sunrises and sunsets a day—were things she thought were etched on her soul for all time.

Nowhere were the stamina, ingenuity and courage of space sailors more tested than aboard the Russian space station
Mir
in the months between February and June 1997, when a fire and then a collision with a docking cargo ship put the Russian and American crew members in great peril.
As It Happens
covered the accidents when they occurred, but it wasn’t until journalist Bryan Burrough took us behind the scenes in his book
Dragonfly
that we really understood what had been going on at the time—and we, of course, invited Burrough to paint a picture for our listeners.

Burrough told us about the strains that existed between the Russians and Americans, in space and on the ground. The strains were caused, in part, by personality clashes among them and, in part, by cultural differences. As Burrough
described it, NASA chiefs were intent at that time on getting more bang for their bucks—a kind of
higher, faster, cheaper
policy—but even so, the Americans went to great lengths to make space travel as safe as possible. The Russians, on the other hand, were used to stuff breaking and making do, and they seemed to think that some of their fellow travellers were sissies. Burrough had got access to transcripts of all the Russian radio traffic during this time, and he did a brilliant job of recreating the tension and danger aboard
Mir
during the crisis.

A poignant aspect of the
Mir
story was the fact that, although the space station was launched and assembled by the Soviet Union when it looked like a superpower, it was a bankrupt and demoralized Russia that was trying to keep the space programme going. The cosmonauts, as the Russians call their space pilots, held all the records for endurance in space, but by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, they were already being pushed to their limit, operating on a shoestring. Indeed, there was a lone cosmonaut aboard
Mir
when the U.S.S.R. came to an end, and for a time it looked as though he might be forgotten up there.

In 1999 I went to Russia with
As It Happens
producer Thom Rose to report on how people were coping with a faltering economy and all the other challenges of adjusting to life after
glasnost.
The trip was memorable in several respects, but going out to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Star City to meet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev was both memorable and thrilling for me. Apart from his charm and good looks, Colonel Krikalev, it turned out, was the very man who had been stranded aboard
Mir
in 1991. The mission lasted more than 311 days as a result. When Krikalev finally stepped out of his Soyuz capsule back on
terra firma,
he was wearing the badges of a country that had ceased to exist.

When I met him, I asked Krikalev how he had kept from going crazy, alone in space for months at a time. He said it wasn’t as hard as you might think. There was the view, for one thing—always spectacular. And he’d had lots of communication with the ground—with Russian space officials, of course, but also with ham radio operators who would call him up to chat.

Krikalev had a practical view of the problems the space programme was facing at a time of widespread economic hardship. As I reported back to Barbara Budd and Jennifer Westaway in the
As It Happens
studio in Toronto, the budget for the space programme that year was $290 million, a tenth of what it had been in 1989. The Kremlin had decreed that
Mir
could be kept aloft only if they could find a private backer to pay for it. (Would they consider re-naming it the Ted Rogers Space Centre?) The buildings at Star City looked shabby and neglected; people were scarce. I thought all this must be very hard on Russian pride, but Krikalev said he understood that times were hard and that the country had other priorities. He added, though, that he was concerned about the lost opportunity.

“Space is our future,” he told me, “our science, the education of the next generation.”