Season 4, Episode 2: Canadian Astronaut Roberta Bondar, and A Space for Birds

The year was 1969.  I was a month shy of my ninth birthday.  It was way past my bedtime, though it was only 10pm.  In my memory of the event, it was the middle of the night.  Along with my family, gathered around the black-and-white television in my parent's bedroom, we watched the broadcast of the Apollo 11 moon landing.  At 10:56pm EDT time we witnessed, along with the rest of the world, a grainy, gray-scale image of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the lunar surface and say, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”  Neil left out a single syllable,  word, “a”.  He had meant to say “That’s one small step for A man.” That man being him.  Still, it didn’t matter to anyone watching or listening at the time.  The universe had changed.  Humans from earth had stepped foot onto another world.

Thousands of kids at the time wanted to become astronauts and join the space program. I wasn’t one of them. Yes, I loved all things space, watched Star Trek, and followed every NASA launch.  I remember Skylab and Mir, the Space Shuttle and Hubble.  I geek out on videos from the International Space Station and have followed the Artemis program for years, finally seeing Artemis II launch, orbit the moon and splash down safely this April, nearly 55 years after Apollo 17, splashed down in December of 1972, ending human missions to the moon for over half a century.

My life took a different path in 1969, having watched the Miracle Mets win the World Series and see them celebrate on the field, on that same black-and-white television in my parents bedroom, a couple of months later.  I chose to pursue a life that would eventually get me on the field at some nebulous future date, when a team I was involved with won a World Series.  I made it to that dreamed of future from my childhood in October of 1992, as I ran onto the field when the Toronto Blue Jays won their first World Series.  Today’s guest, on the other hand, did everything in her power to become an astronaut and earlier that same year, flew on the Space Shuttle Discovery, mission STS-42, as the first neurologist and Canadian woman in space.  I even crossed paths with Roberta Bondar when she threw out the first pitch at a Toronto Blue Jays baseball game, soon after her shuttle flight.

Two people from very different walks of life, with two very different goals, take different paths and end up in the same place all those years later.  But it didn’t end there.  In 2022, when I was up in Sault Ste. Marie, I