17
Build the Station, Build the Future
The first time I ever saw Dave Williams, he and the rest of a spaceship crew were walking out of the Operations and Checkout Building at the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. They were clad in the familiar orange launch and entry spacesuits, and were smiling and waving at the assembled media. Two minutes later, they were gone. Almost as quickly, so were the reporters.
This “walkout” was part of a carefully choreographed series of steps that occur prior to each space shuttle launch. It is a chance for news people, and a few others, to catch a last glimpse of crew personnel as they board the Astrovan that takes them on the twenty-five minute drive to the launch pad being used that day. In Williams’ case, the van headed for 39A, where the shuttle Endeavour waited. Once there, they would take the 195 foot elevator up to the White Room, next to the shuttle crew access hatch, and ultimately crawl into the orbiter and take their positions for blast-off. Gantry technicians would secure safety straps for each flier, all of whom were lying on their backs with their knees upward. The necessary communications and other hook-ups were made and checked, and, finally, the hatch was sealed as the countdown continued. Barring a scrub, no one would see the astronauts on Earth until their mission had ended.
On a personal note, I found the walk-out photo op somewhat disconcerting. It was like a last wave to those who were flying; a bittersweet goodbye until they returned. And, watching Dave Williams go, I could not help but wonder if I would ever see him again. I talked to reporters who were there, and some of them vividly recalled the walk-outs for both Challenger and Columbia. On those two terrible occasions, the goodbye waves were final ones, and neither would be forgotten.
Of course, I did see Dave Williams again. This time, it was in a small, tastefully neat office on the eighth floor of St. Joseph’s Hospital in downtown Hamilton, Ontario. Now, instead of the flight suit, the flag patches, and the big boots, Doctor Williams wore freshly pressed slacks, a shirt and tie, and dress shoes. A firm handshake replaced the obligatory wave to the crowd on the day I had seen him last. Now, instead of an active astronaut about to fly, he was a professor of surgery in the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University. It was good to get a chance to talk to the man. He is urbane, congenial, helpful, and approachable. He is also a raconteur with an unquenchable curiosity. Even though he would be loathe to admit it, he is undeniably one of Canada’s modern heroes. I had come to talk about his career as an astronaut, in particular his second flight and the three spacewalks he did while on it.
Because I had been at Kennedy the day he left the Earth, and for a few days prior to the departure, I had at least a rudimentary understanding of the preparations, sequence of events, and countdown procedures that were involved. I had seen the orbiter as it stood waiting to go; I had gone to the pad the night before liftoff and admired the shuttle, gleaming and white in the powerful xenon lights, and I had heard, seen, and felt the majesty of the liftoff when the mission began. But this was the first time that I had met this man who was such an integral part of it all.
STS-118, as Doctor Williams’ second and final flight was called, involved an important building project at the International Space Station. At the precise time that Endeavour and its crew of seven left Florida, the station with which it would dock a couple of days later was 212 miles above the Atlantic, just southeast of Halifax. On board it were three men, one American and two Russians. When the Endeavour crew arrived, all ten individuals would work together to complete the tasks at hand. The spaceship en route was transporting three main items. In NASA parlance, these were a “4,000-pound Starboard 5 truss segment, a replacement for a Control Moment Gyroscope and a 6,900-pound External Stowage Platform, to stow replacement parts outside the station.”1
Canadian Doctor Dave Williams waves to reporters as he walks with Barbara Morgan to the Astrovan, which transports astronauts to the space shuttle they will fly in. Barbara Morgan was the backup to Christa McAuliffe, who lost her life when the Challenger exploded above the heads of thousands of horrified spectators at Cape Canaveral.
The flight would be the twentieth for Endeavour, which first flew as STS-49 back in 1992. The orbiter was built as a replacement for Challenger, but for the four years prior to this Williams mission had been on the ground at Kennedy, being substantially upgraded. It was, and still is, NASA’s newest shuttle, and the downtime was because of budget tightening and other factors. But “during its stay on earth, about 200 technicians performed routine maintenance work on the ship, outfitting it with thousands of new parts. Endeavour also received nearly 200 upgrades to its systems.”2 Included in the overall upgrade was the replacement of “2,045 of Endeavour’s heat tiles,”3 and hundreds of gap fillers between the tiles.
The launch of the orbiter was picture perfect, and its first hours on orbit were just as positive. A nagging worry cropped up soon though. A few bits and pieces of foam appeared to have come loose during lift-off, but likely late enough that it was felt they would not be a danger to the shuttle. So, with that reasoning, as the spaceship sped towards the space station, even NASA’s all-inclusive moniker for the flight seemed guardedly appropriate. It was dubbed: “Build the Station, Build the Future.”
When he went into space, Dave Williams said goodbye to his wife of twenty-one years, Air Canada Pilot Cathy Fraser, and their children: Evan, twelve, and Olivia, nine. At the time, the family was living in a community not far from the Johnson Space Center, and while the children took an active interest in what their father was doing, it was not necessarily novel to them. That was because several parents of the children’s schoolmates were astronauts, and many of them had done spacewalks as well.
“Around here, a spacewalk is pretty routine,” Fraser told a reporter at the time, “because we are surrounded by people who have actually done that sort of thing.” Nevertheless, the children were excited for their father. “They see other parents go off to space and come back two weeks later, and all the hoopla that goes with it,”4 she added. But neither she nor the youngsters would be far from Williams’ thoughts during the flight. He took personal mementoes of theirs with him, including a CD of his daughter playing “It’s a Wonderful World” on the piano. He always loved the song, and Olivia’s rendition of it added a delightful emotional depth for him.
There were five men and two women on the flight. As mentioned earlier, one of the latter was teacher–astronaut Barbara Morgan. She was the replacement for Christa McAuliffe, the original teacher-in-space, who perished on Challenger. The second woman on board was Tracy Caldwell, who holds a doctorate in chemistry and can converse in American Sign Language and Russian. She was the designated intravehicular officer on board, and as such, would play an integral role in the choreography for the spacewalks scheduled for the mission.
During their first full day in space, crewmembers used the Canadarm and boom to check out the spacecraft, to locate and assess any damage that falling foam, or even ice, on liftoff might have caused. The heat shield on the leading edges of the wings received particular attention. Technicians on the ground determined that “the first foam fragment came off at 24 seconds after liftoff and appeared to hit the tip of the body flap. The second was 58 seconds after liftoff, with a resulting spray or discoloration on the right wing. The third came almost three minutes after liftoff, too late to cause any damage to the wing. The most worrisome is one that appeared to hit the right wing.”5
While these concerns were being studied at Mission Control, the spacesuits to be worn during the scheduled spacewalks were double checked by those who would wear them. The schedules for the walks were reviewed, as were the detailed objectives that would be carried out. Nothing, even the smallest detail, was left to chance.
The Endeavour had left the pad at 6:36 EDT on a Wednesday. By noon, two days later, it was preparing to dock at the space station. And, as has become the norm since Columbia, when the arriving shuttle came close to its destination, the orbiter was flown on a kind of back flip so that its underside could be photographed from the station. In this case, 296 digital photos of Endeavour were taken, all of which were immediately downlinked to Mission Control.
Unfortunately, when they were checked, an aberration was noted, and in short order it became the subject of several news accounts as the mission continued. Typical of these was a story that ran the day after the photos were taken. “A spray of ice during liftoff might have gouged the heat shield of shuttle Endeavour, which has carried Canadian astronaut Dave Williams to the International Space Station. NASA managers said yesterday that a white spot near one of the shuttle’s landing gear traps is likely a seven-centimetre gash in a heat tile. A closer inspection will be conducted.”6
Closer inspections were made, and for the next few days, technicians in Houston carried out tests on the materials involved, and tried to come up with the best, safest, and most practical solution to the problem tiles. As the examinations were being made on Earth, Dave Williams and his partner, Rick Mastracchio, were preparing to walk above the clouds. The two moved out of the station at 11:28 a.m. Central Time, on Saturday, August 11, and remained there for over six hours. I asked Dave Williams to tell me what doing a spacewalk meant to him.
“Well, to me, it is such an honour, and it’s such a pleasure to do. On my first flight, STS-90, I was trained as a contingency spacewalker, which meant that I would have gone outside if there had been a problem. Fortunately, we did not have anything that went wrong, so I did not have to go. But you have mixed feelings about that,” Williams added. “You hope to have the experience, but you don’t want a problem. So, on my second mission, I was ready.
“To me, spacewalking is a true test of your ability to work as a member of a team, and I can’t stress that enough. Rick and I did our work, but we relied heavily on Tracy Caldwell so that we could get things done. She was what is called the IV crew person, or the Intravehicular Officer, and she has to work seamlessly with the spacewalkers, doing the robotics to integrate everything. The IV person has to choreograph the whole thing, so that it happens in the most efficient manner possible. She did a great job of doing that, and Rick and I had to learn to work together, and work with Tracy to make this all happen.
“You know, when you are a spacewalker, you are kind of independent team player, which sounds like an oxymoron. But by that I mean that you have to be able to go forward on your own, troubleshoot problems, think about where you are on the timeline, make sure everything is moving forward, but at the same time, do that in conjunction with the team. So in some cases, you have to wait for the IV crew person to have you go forward to begin a task. Tracy, Rick and I really worked hard in training to achieve that, so by the time we were in space, we were able to go forward seamlessly to do what had to be done. It has been said that in spacewalking you should take your checklist and your procedures and throw them away as soon as you go out the hatch, because things change. But I will always think back to our working as a team, and how successful it was.”7
And, as he mentioned, “things change,” or at least can happen without warning when working in space, as they do here on Earth. An example of this occurred during Williams’ third walk, when he was outside with astronaut Clay Anderson, one of the men who had been living on the space station prior to the arrival of Endeavour. I asked Dave Williams to explain what happened.
“Well, that day, Clay and I were outside, working in separate places, doing separate things. Suddenly, the fire alarm sounded! We are in the middle of an EVA and we get a fire alarm!
“Clay said something like, ‘Oh, it’s a fire alarm. It’s a station fire alarm,’ but he didn’t react otherwise.
“Then Tracy said: ‘Okay guys, just continue. I’ll let you know what’s happening.’ So we didn’t even pause. We just kept on working. A few minutes later, Tracy got back to us and told us it was a false alarm.”
Another unexpected occurrence happened on an earlier spacewalk, and although Dave Williams was not involved, Rick Mastracchio was. That time, after Mastracchio had been outside for more than four hours, he noticed a tear in the thumb of his left glove. However, even though the rupture only penetrated two of the five layers of the glove material, the astronaut was ordered to go back inside immediately. Had the tear penetrated all of the layers the consequences would have been grave. This was because the entire suit that astronauts wear on EVAs is really a small spaceship, designed to protect its wearer from the vacuum of space. If the protective shell of the suit becomes punctured, its wearer would perish.
The first American woman to walk in space described the dangers of working in such a hostile environment. During her training for a spacewalk, Kathy Sullivan told of technicians who pumped all the air out of a vacuum chamber in order to demonstrate for her the contrast between the Earth’s air pressure, and the lack it in space. When all the air was removed from the vacuum chamber, it did not look any different. However, a shallow pan of room temperature water had been left inside. As Sullivan later wrote: “As the air pressure in the chamber decreased, the water began to bubble and then boiled vigorously. Then, in one dramatic flash, the water making up the walls of the bubbles froze and dropped into the pan as a layer of slush.” Her comment about what she had seen: “If a picture is worth a thousand words, this vivid demonstration of what would happen to all the fluids in your body if your suit depressurized in space was worth a million.”8 No wonder Rick Mastracchio was told to hustle back inside the space station when he noticed that his glove was torn. And, even though NASA informed the media about the incident at the time, they insisted that the astronaut “was in no danger and that the hole did not penetrate all the layers of his glove.”9
Problems aside, the astronauts on Endeavour had come to the space station to continue the building of the edifice. The work was hard, tiring, and required every skill they possessed and practiced. They also prepared themselves mentally for whatever they might have to face, in an environment that is completely alien to human beings.
“When you go outside for the first time,” Dave Williams explains, “you are alone in the universe. It is truly a unique feeling. The best way to compare the difference is to use the analogy of going down a highway in a car, versus driving down the same road on a motorcycle. On the spacewalk, you are on the motorcycle, and you feel so much more in the open. You are more alone; you are in your own spacecraft, in your own little world. So, when you open the hatch for the first time, you ask yourself how you are going to react. You look down — or up — whichever way you want to think of it, but you are looking at the earth, over 440 kilometres away, recognizing that you are travelling ten kilometres every second, at Mach 25. It’s an incredible sensation.”10
To prepare for his exit from the spacecraft, Doctor Williams made use of a software package specifically designed to help with the spaceship egress. He would also sit down with his eyes closed, doing his best to imagine every step he would take once he was outside.
“When you leave the spacecraft,” Doctor Williams continued, “there is a real risk that you will be overwhelmed by the view, by the magnitude of the openness. If that happens, there could be significant mission impact and everything you have to do would be delayed. So as a crew, we train to guard against this. That was why, before going out, I used mental imagery and virtual reality to prepare for what it was going to be like. Because we didn’t know if it was going to be dark or light when we went out, Rick and I made sure that for the six and a half hours of our first spacewalk, we basically memorized the whole thing. We memorized where we would be putting our hands, from handrail to handrail.
“So the goal we had, working with Tracy, was to go into auto-pilot when we went out the hatch, so that we would seamlessly transition right into our trained mode. Anyway, when we went out the first time, it was night, so we moved into our trained mode right away. That was important, because the station is now so big; it was about 160 feet to our work site, so we had two 85-foot tethers with us. We had to put one 85-foot tether onto a handrail, and use the second, just to get to our work site.
“By the time we got that done, I was on the outer surface of the station, and looking down at the Earth just as the sun was coming up. I had a brief chance to enjoy an absolutely spectacular view of the world because I was in the foot restrain, far out on the starboard side. But, because we are so completely focused on our work during that first time out, there was only a brief time to take in the view. On the second and third spacewalks though, we took a bit more time to enjoy the experience, but even then, we made sure we did not get distracted.
“As a matter of fact, on the walk when we had the fire alarm, and about half an hour after it, Tracy said to us: ‘Hey guys, look, we are flying over the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricane Dean is right below you. Have a look!’ I looked down, straight down into the eye of the storm, and it was absolutely incredible! But unless Tracy had alerted us, we would have continued working, and would not even have noticed it. That is because spacewalking is not only a huge physical challenge; it is a big mental challenge as well. In order to remember the sequence, the choreography and so on, you can’t afford to let your attention wander.”11
This picture of the shuttle Endeavour docked at the International Space Station was taken by a crew member during the third spacewalk on STS-118. Both Canadarm and Canadarm2 can be seen in the photograph — with the Earth and space as backdrop.
The hurricane mentioned by Williams was an unexpected occurrence during this flight of Endeavour, and it impacted in the latter stages of the mission. However, in the first days in space, there were plenty of tasks at hand, and the spacewalkers had their work cut out for them. On their first spacewalk, Rick Mastracchio and Dave Williams installed a two ton, eleven-foot-long device called a spacer. It was attached to the station’s truss, or central “backbone,” and once in place meant that the truss itself was now 246 feet long. By way of comparison, the ice surface of a professional hockey rink is two hundred feet long. However, this great construction project is far above the clouds and spinning around the world faster than a bullet shot from a gun.
One of the main objectives of STS-118 was the replacement of one of the station’s four big gyroscopes. This was necessary because it had failed the previous year, and as these things controlled the orientation of the station in space, all needed to function. During their second spacewalk Williams and Mastracchio installed the new gyroscope and stored the faulty one on the outside of the station. The failed machine would then be brought back to Earth on a later mission.
The installation proceeded without incident and the entire time outside amounted to six hours and twenty-eight minutes. As the two spacewalkers went about their tasks, there were the usual NASA photos taken of them doing so. One of the most dramatic of these shows Williams standing on a foot restraint, the 600 pound replacement gyroscope in his arms, with clouds over the Pacific Ocean visible far below, and the velvet blackness of space beyond [see cover photo]. Holding, moving, and certainly lifting such a weight would be virtually impossible on Earth. The illustration is certainly a vivid example of how things can be done in space, where gravity is neither a factor nor a constraint.
In addition to their work on the station and outside it, the crewmembers of Endeavour participated in media and other interviews from space. Sometimes these were with news organizations alone, sometimes they involved school children, and at other times politicians in astronauts’ hometowns and elsewhere. Because she was the first teacher in space, Barbara Morgan received, and had to juggle, far more interview requests than she had time to handle, but Dave Williams not only helped her out, he took part in many as well. Some of these were for radio, while others involved televised downlinks. One of the latter, as mentioned earlier, was with the Discovery Center in Boise, Idaho, and had been chosen by NASA because Morgan had taught in that state. And even though Dave Williams was never a teacher there, he was asked to participate because of his easy broadcast manner, and because of his ability to connect with youngsters. There were questions about what it was like to be weightless, how the crew got fresh air on the shuttle, what planets and stars looked like when viewed from space, why people in space became taller, and more.
Another broadcast involved Canadian school children in the community of La Ronge, Saskatchewan. During that twenty minute session, Doctor Williams answered the questions put to him, and then talked to his audience about their role in the future, how they should learn to recognize the explorer within themselves, and how each might play an active role in whatever their generation did in space. Then, as one of the print outlets on Earth added: “Doctor Williams, who was born in Saskatoon, talked to the students about his Saskatchewan roots and reminded them that anything is possible if they work hard.”12 Hopefully many took his words to heart.
While the work at the space station progressed, and as supplies and equipment were off-loaded from the shuttle, much soul searching and testing was being done in Houston, with regard to analysis of the damage to Endeavour during launch. For hours, and ultimately days, technicians studied the problem, tried to replicate the conditions in laboratories, and then did detailed assessments of what they found. The photos of the underside of Endeavour were studied, enlarged, and studied again. Because each tile on the bottom of the ship was numbered, the exact location of the damaged area was ascertained. Then, to see how such tiles would react, individual ones on Earth were subjected to temperatures the spaceship would encounter on its fiery ride back through the atmosphere.
Initially, there were five areas under the ship that received attention, but soon four of them were found not to be of concern. However, the fifth, where a worrisome tile gash was located, became the main focus and engineers at Houston’s arc jet facility began to do thermal analysis of tiles similar to the ones damaged. These tests included “subjecting intentionally damaged tiles to heat and pressure comparable to shuttle re-entry conditions. Depending on the results of the tests, spacewalkers could be called upon to repair the damage.”13 In this bulletin from Mission Control, the possibility of astronaut repair was first broached. Then, in no time, Dave Williams and Rick Mastracchio were being mentioned as the likely crew persons who would be called upon to do such a thing. They had been given the training to do so, and had the requisite skills.
By this time, news outlets that followed the progress of this space voyage began to pick up on the possible seriousness of the problem on the shuttle. “A close-up laser inspection by Endeavour’s astronauts revealed that a nine-centimetre-long gouge penetrates all the way through thermal tiles on the shuttle’s belly, and has NASA urgently calculating whether risky spacewalk repairs are needed,”14 reported one organization. The story went on to mention that “the unevenly shaped gouge — which straddles two side-by-side tiles and a corner of a third — is nine centimetres long and five centimetres wide. Yesterday’s inspection showed that the damage went all the way through the 2.5-centimetre-thick tiles, exposing the felt material sandwiched between the tiles and the shuttle’s aluminum frame.”15
Further coverage was equally alarmist: “NASA experts were evaluating whether astronauts should venture into the void of space to fix a deep gash on the shuttle Endeavour’s belly before the crew returns home,” was typical. The same piece continued: “NASA put together a team of engineers, astronauts and spacewalk gurus who would be able to suggest the best method to pick and perfect the best way to fix the gauge and avoid extensive post-flight repairs. The gouge is relatively small and the damage is benign enough for Endeavour to fly home safely. But part of it penetrates through the protective thermal tiles, leaving just a thin layer of coated felt over the space shuttle’s aluminum frame to keep out the more than 2,000-degree heat of re-entry. To patch the gouge,” the article concluded, “spacewalking astronauts would have to perch on the end of the shuttle’s 30-metre robotic arm and extension boom, be maneuvered under the spacecraft, apply protective black paint and then squirt in a caulk-like goop.”16
Fortunately, in the end, NASA managers elected to do nothing because their experts finally concluded that the damage was not severe enough to pose a threat on the return flight. With the decision, which came at the end of the day on Thursday, August 16, Dave Williams and Rick Mastracchio put aside their thoughts of having to do shuttle repairs. They had spent considerable time preparing for such an eventuality and felt they were ready to attempt the task if necessary. The final meeting on the matter in Houston lasted over five hours, and involved assessing a massive amount of technical information. Some of the data led to concerns that “the heat of re-entry could weaken the shuttle’s aluminum frame,” but mission managers felt that having astronauts do repairs would have added risk and “they did not want to attempt it unless absolutely necessary.”17
With the question of the damaged tiles set aside, just one day later another matter would demand the close attention of the NASA decision makers. Hurricane Dean, which Dave Williams mentioned earlier, had formed in the Atlantic, and a possible track for it was across the Gulf of Mexico, with landfall along the Texas coast near Galveston, and in a direct line to the Johnson Space Center just southeast of Houston. If that were to occur, there were fears that Mission Control would have to shut down, and in so doing, effect the scheduled return of Endeavour. Indeed, if that came about a small emergency mission control team was prepared to leave for Florida to support the intended landing there.
The hurricane watch became an intense one, and all of the computer updates on its track were followed closely. The swirling winds of the storm were extremely powerful, enough to do significant damage both to shoreline communities and inland as well. The storm was said to be moving at seventeen miles an hour, so it took some time to determine where landfall might occur. In the end, it bypassed Houston, but because there were always fears that this might not happen, NASA decided to cut the STS-118 mission by one day. This was in order “to avoid any disruption to flight operations in case the formidable storm takes aim at Houston.”18 By bringing Endeavour home a day early, it would be back and on the ground before Mission Control had to close. “It would be irresponsible for us not to pay attention to this storm,”19 LeRoy Cain, chairman of the mission management team said at the time.
While the decisions about their mission were being made in Houston, the Endeavour crew, in conjunction with the men on the space station, went about their work. Dave Williams did a third spacewalk with Clay Anderson. The two men spent five hours outside, two less than previously planned. This was because Mission Control needed the hatch to the station closed earlier than intended in order to allow for undocking and to facilitate the earlier return to Earth. This walk accomplished three main objectives: as summarized in the status report of the day, the astronauts “installed the External Wireless Instrumentation System antenna, attached a stand for the shuttle’s robotic arm extension boom, and retrieved the two materials experiment containers to be brought home on the shuttle.” Because of the abbreviated timeline, “cleaning up and securing debris shielding and moving a tool box to a more central location — were deferred to a future spacewalk.”20
Endeavour undocked from the International Space Station at 6:56 on Sunday morning, August 19. Following another close inspection of the tile under the shuttle, the leading edges of the wings, and the nose cap, the spaceship headed for home. Commander Scott Kelly and the rest of his crew affirmed their faith in the decision made by NASA managers that the astronauts not do repairs. All felt secure in their belief that the flight back would be a safe one. And it was.
On the last day on orbit, Houston wakened the sleeping crewmembers with a musical rendition called “Flying,” by the Canadian group the Long John Baldry Trio. The piece was dedicated specifically to Dave Williams, because on this flight, he surely had been flying. His three spacewalks set a Canadian record, a total of seventeen hours and forty-seven minutes outside the space station. During the mission, on day five, he had also found time to participate in scientific experiments with another crew member. In sum, his contribution to the success of STS-118 was considerable.
As one newspaper reported, at 11:52 in the morning on August 21, 2007, as it was flying over the Indian Ocean,
Endeavour fired its maneuvering thrusters for 3 minutes and 35 seconds. For the next hour, it dropped out of orbit towards Earth’s atmosphere. The craft cruised over Costa Rica and Cuba, then over southern Florida, where the skies were blue with broken clouds and steady breeze.
Two quick, loud sonic booms thundered across the space center as the shuttle passed to the east. It made a U turn for its final approach from the north. In a picture-perfect landing, its rear tires touched the runway at 12:32 p.m., and the nose gently swiveled to the ground 13 seconds later. Slowed by a drag chute, it rolled to a stop a minute later.21
After it was all over, I sat down to talk with Dave Williams about the mission, and about his illustrious career as an astronaut. I asked him if being in space changed him.
“Yes, I think so,” he told me, “being in space helped me with a couple of things. You know, I’ve been a neuroscientist. I’ve been a medical doctor, an emergency trauma physician, an astronaut and an underwater explorer — an aquanaut. Now, when I look at that list, I finally understand a common theme: I’m a scientific explorer. For me, exploration is the quest for knowledge. It’s truly that simple. I’m just one of those people who are truly curious about a lot of things. I like to understand physical phenomena, whether it’s neuroscience, or taking apart the lawn mover engine or flying in space or being under water. This mission brought all these things together.
“Being in space was very humbling. I remember during the second spacewalk, riding on the end of the Canadarm, and feeling incredibly proud as a Canadian, and proud of the amazing team of individuals from Canada who were responsible for the Canadarm technology, and the achievements of the Canadian Space Agency. Then I would look down at the Earth, so far away from me, and think that that is the planet on which the entire history of the human species has taken place.
Canadian Mission Specialist, and veteran of three spacewalks, Doctor Dave Williams is now professor of surgery at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
“But then, I would look out into space, into the infinite black void of space, this black like nothing you have ever seen in your life, and then, back at the earth, and realize how amazing it all was. Out there is so vast, so infinite, and apparently so hostile, while beneath me is the planet where everything that has happened to me; everything that has happened to the human species has taken place. All my loved ones are there. It was so remarkable, and so humbling.”22
And with those few words, Dave Williams — explorer — went back to his first love: the healing of human beings.