Canadian astronaut recounts summer space voyage

He had been entrusted with 325 wishes from hospitalized children across Canada, including 50 wishes from children and teens who received care at the Montreal Children's Hospital. The children's wishes were brought into low-earth orbit to the stars, where they could sparkle over the earth.

Last week, some of the kids at the hospital got a chance to thank Williams for the favour when he paid a visit and showed a video presentation he had created, based on his trip into space.

Williams, who is an astronaut for the Canadian Space Agency, blasted off from Cape Canaveral on Aug. 8 aboard the space shuttle Endeavour. The goal of the 13-day mission was to build and maintain the International Space Station.

During the voyage, he performed three spacewalks, spending 17 hours and 47 minutes outside the space station, which is a Canadian record. Although he was born in Saskatchewan, Williams spent his youth in the West Island community of Beaconsfield.

He went on to graduate from the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University in 1983. As a result of his having participated in 2001 in Aquarius, the world's only underwater research laboratory, Williams is the first Canadian to have lived and worked in space and under the ocean.

Describing how it feels to blast off with the shuttle rocket boosters' 7 million pounds of thrust underneath, he said, "There's no question in your mind you're going some place really fast." He pointed out that it takes more than eight minutes to break through the various layers of the earth's atmosphere at 25 times the speed of sound, before finally reaching space.

After performing an important repair to a gyroscope outside the shuttle during one of his spacewalks, Williams said his apprehension while waiting to find out if the repair worked was "even more stressful than getting your final anatomy mark in Med One. I was sitting there going, 'is it going work?' And fortunately when they powered it up, everything worked fine. We had done everything correctly, so it worked out well."

Williams said he started dreaming of becoming an astronaut when he was seven years old. However, in those days, the early 1960s, Canada had no space flight program, and so he put the idea aside. By 1992, when Canada finally had a space agency and was holding its second selection process for astronauts, he was working as the director of the emergency department of the Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, and decided to apply.

The International Space Station, which is currently being assembled, is a collaborative effort by several of the world's nations, including Canada. Williams said that after this project, space agencies are contemplating a new expedition to the moon in 2019 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, which was the first manned landing on the moon.