Every astronaut comes to Montreal to learn how to catch a spacecraft. I took the controls

A cargo vehicle is sitting about 10 metres out from the International Space Station.

“Just micro-movements,” says Ed Birchnall, supervisor of mission control and training at the Canadian Space Agency.

The cargo has just arrived from Earth, loaded with food, water, science equipment and perhaps spare parts. I’m using Canadarm2, Canada’s robotic arm and core contribution to the space station, to bring it in.

“This is like driving with six pedals instead of one,” Birchnall says. “And you’re doing it with your hands.”

Thankfully, this is only a computer-generated simulator.

We are in the robotics training room at the space agency’s headquarters on Montreal’s South Shore in Longueuil, which is something out of a Men in Black movie. You are first greeted by an eerily quiet parking lot. Enter a grandiose glass-and-silver building which houses most of the nearly 1,000 CSA employees. Inside, most doors open only with a tap of a security badge.

This is where virtually all astronauts in the world come as part of mandatory training to go to the ISS: how to use Canadarm2. That includes astronauts from NASA, Europe, Japan and Canada, and also some from Russia. The four members of the Artemis II crew have all completed the training.

“There’s about 100 hours of training that goes into qualifying an astronaut to operate the arm. We cover about 50 per cent of that,” Birchnall says.

The first stretch happens in Houston, where astronauts learn the fundamentals of space robotics. They then come to Montreal for an eight-day course in the middle that applies those skills to the actual environment of the station, before heading back to Houston to complete the training.

Birchnall says that by the end the astronauts-in-training are expected to use the arm to support a spacewalk and perform what is known as a visiting vehicle capture, or free-flyer capture. (This is what I am attempting.)

“We’re grabbing the groceries,” Birchnall says.

Every few months, a cargo spacecraft arrives at the station carrying supplies. An astronaut will use Canadarm2 to reach out. After, teams on the ground take over and move the spacecraft into place so it can be attached and unloaded.

“The two independent spacecrafts fly right alongside each other,” Birchnall explains. “If you only partially have them connected, that’s bad. So you really want to make sure that you’ve got a secure hold on it, and we need to train them to have a time-critical response if anything happens.”

Birchnall joined the agency in 2003 as a robotics mission controller, before spending two years at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. He began training astronauts in 2009. He has worked with nearly every class until about two years ago, and that includes the entire Artemis II crew.

“Everything you see on TV, they are just as genuine as what you see,” he says of the Artemis II astronauts. It’s this human side that is underestimated, he adds.

“If you’re going to be there for 10 days, you need to work as a cohesive team under any circumstance. You should be able to put any mix of astronauts there, and everybody can get the same job done.”

The harder skills of astronauts are widening, too.

“In the 1950s and 60s, everybody was test pilots. Now it’s a much broader spectrum,” Birchnall says. “It’s really about capability, the ability to learn and adapt.”

Canadarm2 itself has been in orbit for 25 years, built by MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA), based in Brampton, Ontario. And it remains crucial for how the station is maintained.

Birchnall shows me a 3D-printed model of the station, pointing out where the arm sits, where it can reach and how much of the station it can cover: about 90 per cent.

“It gives us an enormous amount of flexibility,” he says, adding that much of the time it is operated from the ground, often from Longueuil.

Spacewalks look marvellous in pictures and on TV, Birchnall says, but they are also incredibly dangerous. Issues arise like water in a helmet, which in space take a different form. Picture solid particles bobbling about, potentially obscuring your vision, or worse, your breathing.

“If you can do something robotically, why wouldn’t you?” he tells me.

The original Canadarm was made in 1981, used with NASA Space Shuttles for deploying and retrieving satellites. When the ISS was launched in 1998, it was used to help assemble it.

The next chapter is Canadarm3, an AI-enabled robotic arm for Gateway, NASA’s planned lunar-orbiting station. NASA, in return for that arm and other contributions, provided Canada with seats on two missions to the moon, as per a 2020 treaty signed with the U.S. The first of those was assigned to Jeremy Hansen.

But in March, NASA announced it is shifting its focus away from Gateway and toward infrastructure on the surface of the moon. That leaves Canada’s most important contribution to the lunar program without an obvious home.

“Canada continues discussions with NASA on this change and approach and will pursue collaboration with Canadian industry and international partners to determine the next steps,” Lisa Campbell, CSA president, later said in a statement.

The ISS is scheduled to remain in space until late 2030 or early 2031.

Birchnall notes the announcements are still recent, and decisions are still being worked through but stressed the big picture when it comes to robotics in space: “There’s always going to be a need for robotics.”

“It’s just a question of what the context is,” he says, adding a moon base would still need machines.

In fact, the farther humans go, the less practical it becomes to operate everything from the ground.

So, something like Mars, he adds, would need even more autonomy. The question is whether that robotics side will continue to be led by Canadians.

Birchnall points in front of me on a screen at the black-and-white marker on the computer-generated cargo ship. I’m ready to give it a go.

I have one controller in each hand. The left moves the arm through space — up, down, left, right, forward and back. The right controls how the tip is angled, letting me tilt it up or down, turn it left or right, and twist it so it lines up properly.

My goal is to centre on the target, move in slowly, then pull a trigger when the end effector, the arm’s hand, is in position.

Inside it are snare wires that wrap around a pin. Then latches secure the connection, triggered by me once close enough.

Normally, Birchnall says, there would be two astronauts doing this: one flying the arm, the other monitoring the vehicle and calling out distance, alignment and whether the spacecraft is behaving. The cargo ship would also be moving.

“You are go for approach,” Birchnall says.

I push forward with my left control. It feels stiff. The spacecraft grows larger on the screen.

“Four and a half metres,” he says, perched over my shoulder. “Good alignment.”

The trick is not to do too much, he explains.

Younger people, like teenagers or even gamers, Birchnall says, are often worse than grandparents on the controls, as they want to jab and correct. Older people are more cautious, which is closer to what you need.

At about two metres, Birchnall reminds me to “fight that instinct to change alignment.”

At half a metre, the white bars on the target start to come into position. I am supposed to wait until the tips sit between the red lines, then pull the trigger.

My hand jitters. I don’t pull the trigger fast enough.

“You’ve smeared the vehicle,” Birchnall says.

The system starts to close. The snares tighten the two spacecraft over the next minute. We watch, in silence.

“We have a nice secure hold of the vehicle,” Birchnall announces.

“We’ll hand over to Houston, and we will let them go ahead and take over and get that berth to the space station, and in a couple of hours, the astronauts will be able to open the hatch.”

“So it was a success?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says.

“Though I think, based on what you did, I probably have a lot of meetings to go to now.”

What do you think about the article? Write to me at hnorth@postmedia.com

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