Canadian astronaut Bob Thirsk will have to do a lot of exercise when he settles in for an extended stay on board the International Space Station next year.
Dr. Thirsk and Julie Payette will be the next Canadians to visit the space station and they will be making their voyages next spring within weeks of each other. The 54-year-old Dr. Thirsk hopes to set a record for the length of time a Canadian has remained on the space station.
He will start his voyage, which is scheduled to last between four and six months, when he blasts off aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule on May 25, 2009.
"My job as a long duration crew member will be ... more focused on maintenance or repair work and of course on research as well," he told a news conference yesterday. "I'm gonna need to exercise each day for 2½ hours in order to ward off the effects of weightlessness on my heart, on my muscles and on my bones."
His visit will come about a month after Ms. Payette's 15-day tour of duty that begins when she blasts off in April, 2009, aboard space shuttle Endeavour. It will be the 44-year-old Ms. Payette's second trip in space - she was aboard Discovery in 1999.
During her mission, Ms. Payette and the space station crew will help install the remaining components of the Kibo laboratory of JAXA, the Japanese space agency.
"It's a very challenging mission with five planned space walks and an extraordinary amount of robotics operations," Ms. Payette told reporters. She is not scheduled to perform any space walks.
"This is so important because without those pieces that are missing [from]the construction of the International Space Station we can't fully exploit it ... as a research laboratory."
Dr. Thirsk will also become the first Canadian to hitch a ride to the space station on the Soyuz, which he indicated was more reliable than the "multifunctional" and "versatile" American space shuttles.
"Sometimes it [the shuttle]can't launch on every single day that we would like it to launch because of small problems or the weather," he said.
"On the other hand, the Soyuz vehicle is designed only to be a rocket and a crew transport vehicle. If I'm scheduled to launch on May 25, 2009, I have a pretty good assurance that I will be launching on that day."
All previous space-station visits by Canadians were made aboard a shuttle. Dr. Thirsk last took part in a space mission in 1996 on board Columbia.
Columbia disintegrated in the Earth's atmosphere on Feb. 1, 2003, killing all seven astronauts on board.