Fort Saskatchewan astronaut prepares for six months aboard the ISS

Fort Saskatchewan born astronaut, Colonel Josh Kutryk is preparing to be the next Canadian to travel to the International Space Station (ISS) as part of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission.

“It feels really good,” said Kutryk on his selection for the mission. “I’m very excited about it. I’ve been training for this exact mission for about four years now so there is a lot of excitement to go out and do it.”

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“I also feel a profound sense of pride to be able to do this as a Canadian astronaut,” he added. “If you compare it to the size of our country and our GDP we have remarkably successful human space flight program. Maybe unparalleled almost in the world, so it makes me happy to be doing it with a Canadian flag on my shoulder.”

Kutryk is scheduled to launch for the ISS in September on a Falcon 9 rocket inside the Crew Dragon capsule. The launch will take off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Kutryk, along with a crew of three other astronauts, will dock with the ISS and spend a total of six months in Earth’s orbit.

The objectives of the Crew-13 mission are twofold. First, the crew will be responsible for the operation and technical maintenance of the ISS. From the smallest circuit board to general navigation, the four person crew will keep it all in running order. The second part of the job, and the main reason for the ISS’s operation, is to conduct scientific experiments and test new technologies.

“The space station is an orbiting laboratory where hundreds of experiments are running everyday from researchers in Canada, and from all over the world,” explained Kutryk. “An important part of the four of our jobs will be to do that scientific work on behalf of those researchers. I’ll be doing scientific work using myself in many cases as the test subject. We’re running these experiments studying things like medicine, and aging diseases, and doing this host of experiments that we’re only able to do so far in outer space.”

Kutryk says that while he is excited for all the work, he is looking forward to working on a Canadian technology called MicroPREP.

“MicroPREP is essentially trying to develop a device that is the size of your fist, where we can put a single drop of blood into it and get a whole bunch of diagnostic information from,” said Kutryk. “We’re trying to do it because it has obvious and profound implications for here on earth and remote health care, but its also very important for us as we look forward to the next challenges of human space flight, going to the moon and even further for longer and longer duration missions. It’s challenging to do from a physics perspective with fluids in microgravity but it’s something that Canada is taking a leading role in.”

Kutryk also stressed that studying aging and health is a key priority of science in space.

Living with Microgravity

When Kutryk and his crew reach the ISS, they will be contending with a variety of day-to-day challenges. Astronauts in space must adapt their everyday routines like eating, sleeping, and personal hygiene to contend with the lack of gravity.

“There are some real challenges and we don’t always talk about them,” said Kutryk. “It’s a very different thing to go and live and work in space for six months as compared to a shorter mission, and it’s very difficult for the body to adjust to that. So we expect to be pretty deconditioned, and unhealthy, and sick frankly for the first two or three or even four weeks as we work through that. It’s something we practice and train for, but its still something that’s very unpleasant and is something that all of us are not looking forward to.”

Kutryk explained that during the initial adjustment period living in space, the sickness symptoms astronauts experience are very similar to the experience of motion sickness on earth.

“It all comes down to the fact that we removed something the human body has been so dependent on for our entire life as a species, and that something is gravity. When you take that away your body does not know what to do.”

Thanks to the extensive training that Kutryk and his crewmates, along with scientific advancements in medicine, that adjustment period is shorter than ever.

When you get past the motion sickness, space travel is a human marvel which Kutryk is beyond excited to experience.

“My greatest excitement is for the simplest thing, and that is just looking out the window and seeing earth for the first time as a blue ball hanging in space,” he explained. “I’m excited for a lot of the technical work and the science and all of that, but the first thing I want to do is just look at our planet.”

Speaking to the next generation

As part of his career as an astronaut, Josh Kutryk has spent a good amount of time speaking with kids about space. He passes on his experience, teaches them about space, and he encourages those who hope to travel to the stars to chase their dreams.

“The first thing I say is that if you’re a young person in Canada with these interests your timing has never been better,” said Kutryk. “I think the future is really really bright for us. We are entering a world now where we know that there is going to be humans working on the surface of the moon within the next couple of years. We expect to see astronauts from other countries there and we know Canada is going to continue to play an important role and because of that the future is very bright.”

“The second thing I would say is that these goals are seemingly impossible, they’re so daunting, but that shouldn’t take away from the value of having that goal,” continued Kutryk. “There is a tremendous amount of value to setting really difficult, seemingly impossible goals for yourself at a really young age and using them throughout your life to help guide decisions, to help motivate you, and to help you decide how to lead your life. I recognized young in life that if I accomplished my goal or if I didn’t, it was all the same. There was still a tremendous amount of value from having that impossibly hard goal in the back of my head and I’m still grateful for that.”

Josh Kutryk and the Crew-13 mission are schedule to launch mid-September.

jbonnell@postmedia.com