Experience with Emerging Technology

I did a fun interview with Experience magazine this week. The questions were thought-provoking. Besides asking me about my spaceflights, I was also asked about my thoughts on emerging technologies.

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Insights on Role Modelling

My wife and I were in Houston last month on business. We took the opportunity to visit with our son Elliot and daughter-in-law Yvette who live there. Elliot is a music performer (drums) and teacher. Yvette is a project officer. During our visit with them, Elliot recalled that I often spoke to him when he […]

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Remembering Apollo 11

In my opinion, the Apollo 11 moon landing was the highlight of the 20th century. It took everything that humanity had – a culmination of a decade of technology development – to pull together this capability to get us off the planet.

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Merging the Arts and the Sciences

Although I no longer serve as Chancellor of the University of Calgary, I remain in touch with my undergraduate school and help out when I can. I was pleased when Professor Mark Migotti of the Department of Philosophy invited me back to campus recently to meet with his Arts and Science Honours Academy students. The […]

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To Soar with the Eagles

Last month I visited with the Masters students of International Space University. Each year the university, based in Strasbourg, France, offers a one-year graduate studies program to about 40 international students – young professionals who wish to learn more about the space program and who aspire to push back frontiers. This year’s students have completed […]

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Planning for the Best; Preparing for the Worst

On December 3, David Saint-Jacques will launch with two crewmates from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station. David will spend six months aboard the Station as part of the ‘C3’ expedition, Canada’s third long-duration mission. Preparation for an ISS expedition is a significant undertaking requiring the […]

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Being Mindful of Everyday Encounters

Gathie Falk is a beloved and unconventional artist from Vancouver. She has a reputation in the art world for skillfully using a wide variety of media to venerate the ordinary. ‘Venerating the ordinary’ means that she incorporates commonplace objects into her artworks and invites us to reconsider the role of these objects in our lives. […]

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The Spirit of Innovation

I had the pleasure to meet Margaret Nazon at the opening of the Cosmos exhibition at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. Margaret is a contemporary artist and delightful woman from the Gwich’in First Nation in the Northwest Territories. Tsiigehtchic, the small (150 people) remote community where she lives, is situated on the Mackenzie River south […]

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Rendezvous of the Arts and Sciences

A new art exhibition entitled Cosmos opened Saturday at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. The exhibition features intriguing works by three esteemed Canadian artists – Gathie Falk, Margaret Nazon and Erik Olson – on the subject of space. A few months earlier, Melanie Kjorlien, Glenbow Vice President, approached me to submit a narrative about her […]

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Skills for Success in the Digital Economy

I dropped in last week on an educational workshop being held at the Vancouver office of SAP Canada. 40 Grade 6 to 9 students and their teachers from local schools were engaged in a hands-on project called Living Space. As I moved about their workspace, I noted that the students and teachers were coding tiny […]

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