Humans have been living in space for 20 years: Canadian astronauts on the ISS and beyond

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On Oct. 31, 2000, the universe changed. At 10:53 a.m. local time, a Soyuz spacecraft lifted off on a tail of fire and smoke from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Onboard were three travellers: NASA astronaut William Shepherd and Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev, headed to the then-unoccupied International Space Station, or ISS.

Before liftoff, the skies above them were empty. There was no one in space. Sure, humans had been there and returned – in fact, the space shuttle Discovery had just landed 10 days earlier. A few years before, there had briefly been a record 13 people in orbit at one time. But on that day, every human being on Earth was just that – on the Earth.

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But since then, the ISS has been a constant home to a rotating series of crew members and visitors, 240 in total. For 20 years as of this Halloween, humanity has had a toehold in the cosmos. Just as anyone under 50 has never known a moon without footprints, so anyone in their teens or younger has lived their entire lives — the whole of the 21st century to date — in a time when Earth is not our only home.

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We haven’t yet arrived on Mars. But in a very real sense, we are already on our way.

Window seat to history

Chris Hadfield has had one of the best seats in the house to that historic stretch. As a young astronaut, he rode the space shuttle Atlantis to the Russian space station Mir in 1995. Six years later, in 2001, he was a mission specialist on a trip to the ISS by the shuttle Endeavour. One of his jobs was to install Canadarm2, a vital piece of equipment that would in turn help build the rest of the station.

But his crowning glory was his role as commander of the ISS in 2013, during a five-month stay in space. Hadfield experienced more than 2,600 sunrises as the station whipped around the Earth every 90 minutes, travelling more than 7 kilometres a second. In fact, in the 20 years that humans have lived there, 320 years worth of stellar sunrises and sunsets have flashed by, not one of them obscured by clouds or rain.

I asked Hadfield recently what it means for humanity to make it to that milestone, and for him to have been a part of the chain that made it happen. And while he finds the anniversary a little arbitrary, he chuckles when I say that we forget other anniversaries at our peril, and remind him that each of us marks the day we’ve gone around the sun one more time.

“Each different culture honours historic dates,” he says. “The culture that I grew up in? The year zero is important. 1066 is important. 1492 is important. For me personally 1969 was very important.” Hadfield was nine years old, staying at a summer cottage on Stag Island in southern Ontario, when he watched the first moon landing on a neighbour’s TV and decided he too was going to be an astronaut.

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“But if you look at us just from a homo sapiens point of view, the year 2000 was the year we permanently left Earth,” he says. “And that’s a big deal.”

Baby steps to space

It wasn’t one giant leap, of course. In 1961, Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union became the first spacefarer, followed three weeks later by American Alan Shepard, whose sub-orbital spaceflight lasted just 15 minutes. The space race that followed led to longer and longer missions. On Apollo 17 in 1972, three astronauts spent a total of 12 days off-world, although three of those were on another world, the moon.

Even space station stays were a gradual process, beginning in the 1960s with the U.S. Manned Orbiting Laboratories and the Soviet Salyut stations, of which cosmonaut Valery Ryumin once wrote: “All the conditions necessary for murder are met if you shut two men in a cabin measuring 18 feet by 20 and leave them together for two months.”

Over time, stations and crews grew larger. Most people remember Mir, the Russian station that was, until the ISS, both the largest extra-terrestrial vehicle in history, and the longest continually occupied, for just shy of 10 years between 1989 and 1999. It was during this period that cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov set an individual record of 437 straight days in space that has never been beaten.

“Mir was a wonderful space station,” says Hadfield, recalling his brief visit in 1995. “I love that they called it Mir, which is the Russian word that means peace and it also means the world. We don’t have one word for those two things in English but they do in Russian. What a lovely name!”

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He notes that the water reclamation and air filtration systems left a little to be desired. “It’s like an old ship,” he says diplomatically. “But we learned a lot from Mir. The ISS would have been a lot worse if we hadn’t had the opportunity to see how Mir worked for nearly a decade first. It was really a pivotal part of building ISS properly. I would have loved to have spent six months there.”

Hadfield is one of just nine Canadians to have visited the ISS, including Cirque du Soleil co-founder Guy Laliberté, who went there as a space tourist in 2009. But only three have spent more than a few days at Earth’s orbiting frontier outpost. The others are Robert Thirsk, who flew in 2009, and David Saint-Jacques, who returned to Earth in June of 2019 after more than six months on the station.

Saint-Jacques is less of a household name than Hadfield — a sign of the times, surely, compared to an era when you could count all the astronauts on your hands and toes — but he is just as enthusiastic about Canada’s role in 20 years of living in space.

“I remember launching almost two years ago now from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, on that venerable launch pad from which Gagarin launched,” he says. “There’s not that many flags up there on the launch pad, and Canada is one of them. I think we’re really punching above our weight to be part of that club of spacefaring nations that are pushing the boundaries on behalf of everybody.”

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One oddity of space travel is that the destination can be very close to home. The ISS orbits at a little more than 400 kilometres — roughly the distance from Toronto to Ottawa. If you could drive straight up, you’d get there in about four hours at highway speed. But the moon would take more than five months of straight driving. To reach Mars, you’d need 72 years. Even at spaceship speeds, it’s a journey of many months.

Camping in space

“It’s as if we’ve been camping in our back yard,” says Saint-Jacques. “Just to make sure our tent, our sleeping bags, our stove, everything works. But we’re in our back yard. We can afford mistakes. It’s OK, we can still go home.

“But the point of ISS is to take that camping gear that’s been tested in the back yard and then go climb Everest with it. That means going into deeper space, going back to the moon and eventually going to Mars. Using all the knowledge and the technology we have developed over decades living on space station. It’s a stepping stone to further exploration.”

It’s a stepping stone to further exploration

And in spite of the seemingly routine nature of space station living, there have been problems over the years, ranging from nuisance issues – balky toilets are common – to life-threatening breakdowns. Hadfield in his memoir An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth recalls a broken ammonium pump that required an emergency spacewalk just days before he was due to leave the station.

And during his shuttle mission in 2001, an almost unheard-of triple computer failure left the station blind and almost out of contact with the ground. “[ISS flight engineer] Jim Voss and I had to dig into the main command and control computers of the space station and give them lobotomies basically and rebuild them in order to get the space station back under control,” says Hadfield, describing a scene reminiscent of something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. “That was an adventure-filled flight.”

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Then there are potential impacts to the station from artificial objects as well as micrometeoroids. The former can be mitigated by tracking orbital space debris from the ground and instructing the station to fire its boosters to avoid a collision. (An overly dramatic example of the threat can be seen in the 2013 movie Gravity.)

Micrometeoroids are a different matter. “If you get to a quiet place [on the station] and you wait, you can hear the ricochet sound of things hitting the metal of the ship,” says Hadfield. “The Earth gets hit by 40 tonnes a day of rock from space. And every ounce of that comes past the space station, so obviously it’s going to get hit. That’s a reminder of where you are.” Even as of this writing, a slow air leak that has been dogging the station for more than a year has yet to be pinpointed.

Back to the moon

Hadfield isn’t going to back to space — he retired from the astronaut corps at the end of his time commanding the ISS — but he remains intensely interested in the future of humanity there. In his role as chairman of the non-profit Open Lunar Foundation, he recently penned a policy paper with recommendations for lunar resource and property management. “The new province of humankind is closer than ever,” it notes.

It truly is. NASA’s Artemis project, named after the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, aims to land women and men on the moon in 2024. Even if that date slips — and the history of space exploration is rife with missed deadlines and cost overruns — the prevailing notion is that the journey is not a matter of if, but when.

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“Landing and settling on the moon is going to be way harder and more fraught with peril than everybody wants it to be,” says Hadfield. “But it’s happening. And how we do it is really important to me. I’ve been trying to be involved in the technological and sociological precedents that go along with it my whole life.”

Politics are a big part of that picture. “Is the moon just going to be a reflection of the Earth’s politics in the 2020s? That would be a real shame, if we had a little China and a little United States and a little Russia on the surface of the moon. Surely we can do better than that. We’ve done better than that in Antarctica, which was an uninhabited continent. It’s not perfect but it’s different than any other continent we’ve settled.”

Canada has already signed up to be a part of that next step. The Lunar Gateway is a small space station, set to begin construction in 2023, that will orbit the moon and provide a waystation for ships plying the cislunar ocean. Canadarm3, sibling to the famous remote manipulator systems on the shuttle and ISS, will be a vital component of the Gateway, helping ships dock, and moving equipment.

Ageing infrastructure in space

Meanwhile, ISS isn’t getting any younger. Its first module was launched in 1998, which means the flagship of humanity in the 21st century is working with 20th-century technology, at least in part. But the major partners, including the United States and Russia, are committed to keeping it operational through the 2020s, something Hadfield applauds.

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“The Russians didn’t deorbit Mir until the ISS was up and running,” he notes. “Because they didn’t want to give away something, even though it was old, that worked, before something new was actually up and working.”

He adds: “The Americans have always followed an extremely puzzling policy, in that they cancel their current operations in space and then they start building the rockets and the ships for the next one. And that normally takes 10 years, and it leaves them with this long non-functional hiatus of inactivity.”

A prime example: The last shuttle launch took place in 2011, but it wasn’t until this year that another crewed spacecraft, SpaceX Dragon 2, lifted off from American soil for a trip to the ISS.

“The Russians are smarter about it,” says Hadfield. “The fact that they’re just now launching big new important pieces to the space station is a pretty clear demonstration that it’s there for a while still. Nobody’s giving up on it.” Russia’s Nauka (science) module is scheduled to lift off next year.

To the planets

And Mars beckons. “The first humans to set foot on Mars, they’re probably born already,” says Saint-Jacques. “Those dreams are in the heads of kids.”

And what if there comes a day when ISS has to be abandoned, with no one in orbit to pick up the baton of continual human presence there? Hadfield is sanguine, repeating his belief that anniversaries are a bit arbitrary. “It’s great that we can do it,” he says. “But if we had six months or a year where we didn’t have anybody in space, in the process of continuing to explore and settle, then …”

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He shrugs. “I mean, so long as you can maintain the inertia and the continuity of processes then it doesn’t really matter. But I think we’ll be on the station for quite a while yet, and we have an excellent chance during that time of starting to permanently settle on the moon, and for commercial spaceflight to have opened to the point where they’re going to have regular space travel.”

Saint-Jacques is just as keen to see the 20-year record continue. “It’s like a bridge above the fray where we work together,” he says. “It’s psychologically very important to have that daily demonstration that of course we can work together as human beings. We do, every day.”

He adds: “When I was up there what was most shocking was just how comfortable it is. It made me come back to Earth feeling that when we get our act together there’s nothing we can’t do.”