David Saint-Jacques is a medical doctor, engineer and astrophysicist who is Canada’s only flown current astronaut. He spent more than six months in space during the Expedition 58-59 mission during 2018-19, returning to Earth only months before the coronavirus pandemic erupted.
Roughly 18 months ago, Saint-Jacques decided to recertify as a physician to get on the front lines of the pandemic, he told SpaceQ. He moved back to his hometown of Montreal – luckily, within easy reach of Canadian Space Agency headquarters – and worked on COVID units as a physician part-time during numerous variant surges.
It’s one of four projects that Saint-Jacques is working on in the fields of space medicine and more broadly, within the space industry itself. He will be stepping back somewhat from his Montreal COVID role in the coming weeks, as he moves back to NASA’s Johnson Space Center to work on other projects – but he can still come back north if needed, he said.
“There’s a group of us who share the load,” he said of the fill-in work that he has been performing, along full-time physicians “Among ourselves, we’ll make sure that the schedule is full.”
Saint-Jacques used to be a remote physician on the shores of Hudson Bay, working alongside Indigenous communities and others in isolated circumstances. He says this work, along with the COVID service he has been performing, is experience he hopes to blend into his second job: continuing to support the development of deep-space health care.
The Canadian Space Agency is working through phases of the Deep Space Healthcare Challenge (Saint-Jacques is involved in the evaluations and planning), but more broadly, Canada is joining the United States and others in the Artemis Accords. It’s an effort that hopes to land humans on the Moon later in the 2020s. Out there, they will need medical support.
“One of the major sort of new constraints at a higher level for the mission is to ensure crew health is not a given. They can survive and remain functional for the many years of these really isolated missions,” Saint-Jacques noted.
At first, of course, the excursions will be closer to home and more conservative, being on the Moon or in lunar orbit – the future destination of a Canadian aboard Artemis 2. But he said Mars is still very possible “within a lifetime” and the CSA is thinking ahead to such missions.
“The human health and performance is turning into one of the major sorts of challenges for those missions, as we’re contemplating leaving the Earth’s orbit to go deep into space,” he said. “So there’s a nice alignment there for Canada because of our public health care, and remote communities that are very isolated.”
In the shorter term, Saint-Jacques is lending his space experience to the early planning of Canadarm3. MDA just received another, nearly $270 million design contract days ago from the Canadian Space Agency to advance the project.
Saint-Jacques reminded SpaceQ readers that Canadarm3 – unlike the Canadarm and Canadarm2 predecessors – will be working on its own for most of its robotic career. Astronauts are expected to be at the future Gateway lunar space station only for about a month or two per year, requiring Canadarm3 to do a large share of maintenance fueled by machine learning.
“We’re in the early stages of when the big high level decisions are taken,” Saint-Jacques said of the new contract. “So that’s obviously when it’s important that operators be involved. This is great, because it allows me to sort of use my contacts at NASA Johnson Space Center and develop my work relationship with colleagues here at headquarters.”
Saint-Jacques said he is honored to be a part of the project, which will see the first new Canadarm in a generation. (Canadarm2 was installed in 2001, although we cannot forget other vital ISS hardware such as the “handy robot” Dextre put into space in 2008.)
“A bunch of young, smart, robotic engineers are studying what was done in the past, but are going to be ready to turn the page and come up with new ideas and concepts, and so I think we’re going to be impressed with the result,” he said.
“Canada’s front and centre with some critical capacities for these future missions,” he added, “so I think it is really exciting to see the next big thing developing.”
When Saint-Jacques comes back to Houston, he’ll be slipping back into his usual support roles for other astronauts, but coming at it with the experience of a “flown” person who has also performed extra-vehicular activity. It’s valuable experience used in the front lines of spaceflight, including capcoming in Mission Control or developing spacewalks at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, he said.
NASA Astronaut Group 23, “The Flies,” reported for duty earlier this year to start their approximately 2.5-year astronaut candidacy training. While those early years will be somewhat sheltered for the new group in a basic training cycle, Saint-Jacques said there are still opportunities to provide mentorship in social situations.
He added that having the perspective of somebody who has reached space is valuable in conversations with the public, as “we humans need to get come together to figure out common problems.”
“This is the only way forward,” he said of spaceflight. “We’re all proud astronauts to be part of this sort of network in the sky, where humans talk and collaborate and shape the future. We should be proud of Canada, that we are a part of this collective effort to move forward as a species.”