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Interview with Chris Hadfield

Hi, I'm Chris Hadfield. I'm an astronaut with the Canadian Space Agency, and I'm standing next to a Canadian-built piece of hardware, that is absolutely key for the safe return to flight of the space shuttles.

I've been lucky enough to fly to space twice. On the first flight, we went to the Russian space station MIR. We built part of the Russian space station and my role was, in fact, to use the Canadarm-the arm that's on the space shuttle-to build a section of the Russian space station MIR.

On my second flight, we brought up Canadarm2, the space station arm. I went outside on spacewalks to help unfold it, bolt it together and wire it up and bring it to life, onboard the space station, where it has been building the ever-growing space station ever since.

And now for Return to Flight, I'm chief of robotics working in the astronaut office in Houston, as a Canadian. One of the things that we've been spending most of our time on, is this robotic extension here, a boom that will carry the lasers and grapple fixtures. It will allow us to extend the reach of Canadarm and Canadarm2 to have a look all around the outside of the shuttle, making sure that what happened to Columbia, never happens again.

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Behind me, the technicians are going through the final stages of assembly of the IBA, the Integrated Boom Assembly or, as the astronauts call it, the Boom. This is an amazing piece of hardware and it has a specific purpose.

After the Columbia accident, we had an absolute need to be able to inspect all the outside of the space shuttle. When Columbia burned up in the atmosphere, it was because of damage that we didn't know about. We couldn't see that damage, we couldn't verify how extensive it was and it was a horrific surprise. Since then, we've had the requirement to be able to inspect that area and all the other hard to reach areas of the space shuttle: that's the purpose of the IBA or the boom.

Here's how it works. The space shuttle arm can reach down and grab onto this anchor point right here, there will be a grapple fixture here, so the shuttle arm can grab right here and then there's another one of these, half-way along near where the technicians are working, where the station arm, Canadarm2 can grab onto. And between those two arms, they can lift it out of the shuttle bay, and point the business end, down at that end, at the areas that we want to inspect. And what is mounted on the far end-the business end-are lasers. Lasers that can look beyond the capability of the human eye, beyond the capability of a simple video camera, and look down to very small tolerances, on the most key fragile parts of the outside of the space shuttle, to look for the sort of damage, that might fatally wound the space shuttle, as it comes back inside the atmosphere.

It is the boom here, and the lasers on the end, one of them built by Neptec, here in Ottawa and the whole thing put together by MDA, this boom and those lasers are what is going to keep our astronauts safe on all the future shuttle flights.

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Picture yourself as the astronauts onboard the space shuttle. You launched yesterday, you're in orbit, it's the morning of your second day in space, it's the morning of flight day 2, and it's the day that you are planned to do the full inspection of the outside of the space shuttle. You are looking for damage. You're looking for cracks, any sort of punctures or holes that were caused by the heavy push up to the atmosphere on the launch.

The way you are going to look for those holes, is using this boom and the lasers on the far end. So here's what you are going to do. Get yourself in the back of the shuttle, grab on to the controls for Canadarm, the arm that is permanently attached to the space shuttle and reach out and grab onto the boom, lift it out of the bay, and then use it to probe around to all of the hard-to-reach areas of the shuttle like a huge dentist mirror, to be able to see into the parts of the space shuttle that you just can't see any other way.

00:57 It's a long, delicately choreographed sequence of manoeuvres, in order to be able to position this around all of the underwing and underbelly, and even all around the nose of the space shuttle, to be able to see the locations that are most susceptible to damage. And we have to use the lasers to look for hair-thin cracks or, worse case of course, large punctures, or damage like that.

01:22 On flight day four, we do the same type of inspection again, but we will then integrate the arm on the space station. So in fact the space station arm will reach to the middle of this boom, pick it out of the bay, hold it out in space, and another set of astronauts operating the shuttle Canadarm will grab it, a hand-off, like passing a baton from one arm to the other, so that the shuttle arm can reach all of those places. A Canadian arm on the shuttle and a Canadian arm on the station handing off this Canadian-made boom, were absolutely key to the safety of Return to Flight.

01:54 So what do you do with the information? The lasers have been sending all that data back along these wires, through the electrical connections and into the space shuttle itself. It's recorded onboard, relayed down to the ground, and then the scientists and technicians on Earth will have to look at that information and decide, whether any of the shuttle damage is critical or not. Is this something that can survive coming into the atmosphere, or is this something that we'll absolutely have to fix? If we have to fix it, then how are the astronauts going to get outside and use the repair equipment that we've developed to get to that part of the space shuttle that has the damage? We can ride on the end of Canadarm, we can ride on the end of Canadarm2, but if it's in a really hard-to-reach area, we may in fact, have to have astronauts holding on, or maybe even having their feet strapped in the foot restraints, but riding on the other end of this boom, so that it can fly them around like a cherry-picker, in position, so that they cannot only detect the damage, send that information to the ground, but then give it their absolute best shot at repairing it and returning safely back to Earth onboard the shuttle.

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We are standing in the David Florida Laboratory, in Ottawa and I'm standing next to the boom, the integrated boom assembly that is going to fly on the space shuttle for return to flight. This is a Canadian-built key part of the return to flight effort of the space shuttle, in order to make it safe for the next launch.

This has been built all across Canada, put together by MDA and the pieces are really key to how this is going to fulfill its functions in space. Overall, it's about 15 metres long, weighs about 250 kgs on Earth—weightless in space-and the pieces, some of them, are from back on the arm that is on the space shuttle. It's exactly the same arm that the space shuttle has been carrying since Marc Garneau flew back in the early 80's. And some of the pieces are brand new and built just for this particular boom. The boom is going to be used—carried up on the space shuttle—and used in conjunction with Canadarm, to look all around the outside of the space shuttle to make sure that we don't have another problem like we had, in Columbia's flight, two years ago.

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