Free The As It Happens Files by Mary Lou Finlay

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 theU.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’tprepared 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