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Canadian astronaut Bob Thirsk gives a thumbs-up after putting on his space suit before launch in May.SHAMIL ZHUMATOV

Once a secret Soviet base carved out of a treeless, remote tract of grassland in Kazakhstan, the Baikonur Cosmodrome is the cradle of space exploration: It's the home port where the first man-made satellite, Sputnik-1, and Yuri Gagarin, the first space traveller, each lifted off half a century ago.

And soon a Canadian medical doctor will arrive in this complex in the steppes of Central Asia on his own cosmic and historic mission.

On May 27, Robert Thirsk will don a white, blue-trimmed pressurized suit with his name in Cyrillic letters on the collar plate. He and two crewmates will cram themselves into a metal sphere no wider than a compact car - fundamentally the same type of spacecraft that once took Soviet space pioneers into orbit.

This Soyuz capsule will ferry him to the International Space Station, where for the next six months he will live 350 kilometres above Earth. In August, he'll celebrate his 56th birthday there.

"It will be definitely the culmination or the pinnacle of my astronaut career," Dr. Thirsk told the broadcaster Russia Today last week in Moscow, where the crew prepared for its final qualifying tests.

Dr. Thirsk is about to become not only Canada's first astronaut to fly in a Russian spacecraft, but also its first on a long-duration mission. He arrives at the space laboratory just as it finally becomes fully staffed and operational after a decade of permanent human presence. And in June, when fellow Canadian astronaut Julie Payette will visit the station as part of a space-shuttle crew, for the first time two Canadians will be in orbit together.

So his trip is not only a personal peak but a milestone for Canada's space program, and perhaps a new beginning.

This week, the Canadian Space Agency added its first new recruits since 1992, fighter pilot Jeremy Hansen of London, Ont., and Quebec City physician David Saint-Jacques, bringing the total in the corps to 12. When Dr. Thirsk was hired in December, 1983, Pierre Trudeau was still prime minister. And except for him, Canada's six original astronauts all have moved on to other careers - academia for Roberta Bondar, politics for Marc Garneau or heading the Canadian Space Agency for Steve McLean.

It's a sign how much the world has changed in the four decades since the lunar landing that inspired Dr. Thirsk as a teenager that now he will ride a Russian rocket, with training from the same former Soviets who were Neil Armstrong's space-race rivals. Together, they will help put humankind back on the moon.

"It's been an amazing evolution, maybe even a revolution for Canadian exploration," says fellow astronaut Chris Hadfield, who as backup will stand in if, for some reason, Dr. Thirsk is unable to fulfill the mission. "That's really a threshold we're stepping across."

Space planners are currently gearing for a return to the moon by 2020, followed by an eventually landing on Mars - a round trip that would take up to three years. The station has therefore become a test bed for researchers studying how astronauts fare on their own for months and years in harsh, unforgiving extraterrestrial environments.

Inspired by Armstrong

Dr. Thirsk grew up in British Columbia, Manitoba and Alberta, the son of a hardware-chain employee who was often on the move. His childhood coincided with the early days of space exploration and he initially became fascinated by space in 1962 when John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth.

Dr. Thirsk made his decision to become an astronaut at the age of 15 on a camping trip in B.C., the night Neil Armstrong walked on the moon - July 20, 1969. "I listened on radio until we could get to a TV set. The images were murky, but I still remember them vividly. And that's when I decided I wanted to become part of the club," he later recalled.

He turned the family Ping-Pong table into a mock lunarscape with rocks and sand. He earned engineering degree from the University of Calgary and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before getting his diploma from McGill University's medical school.

In the early 1980s, as the shuttle program became operational, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Admin-

istration opened the door to non-Americans - scientists who would tend experiments and ride solely as passengers. Canada began an astronaut program and started interviewing candidates such as Dr. Thirsk in the fall of 1983.

When he was hired that December, he was about to get married and didn't even have time for a honeymoon.

Because the shuttle's Canadian-made robot arm had performed so well, NASA offered Canada a chance to fly quickly. Within months, fellow astronaut Marc Garneau was off to Houston to be rushed into an October, 1984, shuttle flight, and Dr. Thirsk went along as his backup.

But the pace slowed down after the Challenger disaster that killed seven crew members in 1986. Dr. Thirsk had to wait until 1996 for his own first mission. By then, NASA was getting ready to embark on the world's most ambitious engineering project, the International Space Station, in partnership with 14 other nations. Dr. Thirsk spent 17 days aboard the shuttle doing experiments to prepare for future space-station operations.

He began training in the Soyuz system in 2004 when he was the backup for a joint Russian-Italian flight and spent a year and a half at Zvezdnoy Gorodok - Star City, the once-secret Russian space centre north of Moscow.

Mr. Hadfield, a retired Canadian Forces CF-18 jet pilot, says that Star City, a northern community ringed by birches and pines, recalled Canadian airfield towns such as Moose Jaw, Sask., or Portage la Prairie, Man. Its aging, nondescript architecture - described by one magazine as "more YMCA than Star Trek" - is also a reminder of how cash-strapped the Russian space program has been. That's why it now sells Soyuz seats to space tourists at $20-million to $45-million (U.S.) a flight.

But for the two Canadians, Star City was an exciting place, because its instructors had direct links to the pioneering days of space flight.

"These people are typically 60, 70 years old, have personally known some of the early cosmonauts, such as Yuri Gagarin, [Aleksei]Leonov, [Gherman]Titov, Valentina Tereshkova," Dr. Thirsk wrote in his diary at the time. "When you sit down and talk about some of the old stories with some of these people, it's absolutely amazing."

Dr. Thirsk learned how the Soyuz flies and how it re-enters Earth's atmosphere. He went through simulated malfunctions, dealing with radio or radar failure, fire or sudden depressurization. He was spun in a gigantic centrifuge and submitted to the crushing gravitational pressures he would face on returning from orbit.

The training was done in a mix of English and Russian that Russian crew member Roman Romanenko dubbed "Ringlish." The lingering effects surfaced last month when, at a press briefing, Dr. Thirsk resorted to Russian as he searched for words to discuss orbital inclinations.

Underwater moonlight

From the rigours of the Russian continental winter, the quest for a better understanding of long-term space life also took Dr. Thirsk to the bottom of the tropical seas. He and another Canadian astronaut, David Williams, were part of a series of underwater experiments in the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations.

During the NEEMO program, astronauts lived in an undersea laboratory, a bus-sized steel cylinder six kilometres off the southern tip of Florida, amid schools of barracudas, sharks and eels swimming among the coral reefs. There, they could emulate the environmental constraints of life in a future lunar base.

Weighed down to simulate lunar gravity, Dr. Thirsk and his colleagues donned diving gear and walked on the ocean floor, assessing adjustments for the next generation of lunar spacesuits.

Back inside, they lived in shirt sleeves, the one hint of their unusual setting being the "Donald Duck" voices they acquired because of the higher air pressure.

Their aim was to learn how to cope with a medical emergency on a lunar base: Would it be better to have a doctor on Earth operating instruments by remote control or to have non-physicians on the moon follow instructions?

Taking video-conferencing instructions from a surgeon 2,000 kilometres away at McMaster University in Hamilton, they simulated surgical procedures such as removing a gallbladder or a kidney stone. In other experiments, a surgeon in Hamilton sent commands to a robot arm, despite a two-second radio delay in transmission.

"What we learned is that you don't have to be a physician, which is very exciting," says Dr. Williams, who since his retirement as an astronaut has headed the McMaster Centre for Medical Robotics.

In a few months, Dr. Thirsk will engage in another exercise in remote-control work. While orbiting aboard the space station, he will send radio instructions to move a little four-

wheeled vehicle in a dusty

lot at the Canadian Space Agency offices near Montreal. He will guide the Rover using laser scans it beams up, in an experiment aimed at duplicating conditions on Mars.

It's all part of a mission agenda of about 100 experiments, many dealing with the way humans adapt to long space flights, documenting bone loss, heart-muscle atrophy, changes in the immune system and sleep patterns.

Besides being the crew's medical officer, Dr. Thirsk will operate the station's Canadian-made robot crane. A highlight of his mission involves using Canadarm2 to grab the H-II Transfer Vehicle, an automated Japanese cargo resupply spacecraft.

Dr. Thirsk's home for those six months will be an orbital outpost roughly twice the volume of a Boeing 747 jetliner - a brightly lit metal universe dotted with video cameras and filled with the permanent noise of fans that keep carbon dioxide from pooling.

"It's like being deployed on a submarine where you're constantly talking to home base," Mr. Hadfield explains. "The station is not designed to give people significant individual privacy."

Each day, Dr. Thirsk will exercise for two hours to counter the loss of gravity.

His bedroom will be a berth the size of a phone booth. He will wash with rinse-less soap and shampoo. Water will come from a machine that recycles and purifies urine and condensation.

The other five crew members, from a rotation of eight men and one woman, will include Russian cosmonauts, American astronauts, a Belgian test pilot and a Japanese engineer.

Life in the station is a series of 12-to-14-hour days on Greenwich time, leading Mr. Hadfield to quip that they would "live and work in about the same cycle as workaholics in London."

But it's a less frantic rhythm than during a short-haul shuttle flight. "With the space shuttle, the missions are so highly paced, it's like a sprint, whereas with the space station it's more like a marathon," Dr. Williams says.

Dr. Thirsk will see the seasons change on Earth below until the Soyuz brings him back at the end of November.

"I hope to bring back the kind of experience that'll enable future Canadian astronauts to voyage for even further periods of time and to other destinations in the solar system," said Dr. Thirsk at a briefing last month.

For the next five years, the route to those destinations will continue to run through Russia. The three remaining, aging space shuttles are due to retire at the end of 2010 and NASA's new generation of spacecraft, the Orion capsule, will not be ready until 2015.

Dr. Williams says that he expects the new astronauts announced this week to be in the generation that will set foot on the moon by 2020. The astronauts who "one day will be walking on Mars," on the other hand, are probably "five or six years old right now," he says.

"Those kids are growing up and reading about space. They're looking at the heavens and seeing the stars. Right now, for them it's just a dream. But somewhere in Canada right now there could be a really young kid who may represent Canada on Mars."

Tu Thanh Ha is a reporter for The Globe and Mail.

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