The morning of Aug. 9, Canadian astronaut Dave Williams is scheduled to blast off into orbit aboard the space shuttle Endeavour, something akin to flying on a passenger jet bolted to a giant bomb with enough explosive power to flatten a small city.
At a speed in excess of 27,000 km/h, the shuttle will dock with the orbiting international space station, an act of pinpoint precision.
Fourteen days later, the shuttle will become yet another wonder -- the world's largest unpowered glider, soaring thousands of kilometres from space to land perfectly on a relative dust-speck of a Florida runway, all without the aid of engines or thrust of any kind.
FLYING MACHINE
When it comes to those magnificent men (and women) and their flying machine, nothing is left to chance and just about anything can go wrong.
The fact that catastrophe so rarely finds mankind's most dangerously complex adventure is a triumph of human invention and a tribute to astronauts.
Yet, while Williams' coming voyage, like all shuttle missions, will be a stunning feat of planning and precision, back home on the mothership planet, the Canadian space program is quietly changing course towards an unpredictable future.
So far, the main mission co-ordinates seem to be less money and more military.
First, as a matter of full disclosure, your faithful scribe is a longtime space junkie of sorts, having become addicted to the awe of it all during a hiatus from journalism back in the late 1990s, a career break that included working for a number of space-related organizations.
Back then, government funding was already abysmally tight, the entire Canadian Space Agency having had its budgets cut almost in half to a relatively paltry $300-odd million a year.
Today, that funding hasn't grown, shrinking relative to the country's overall wealth as each year passes.
Back in 2000, the space program was primarily an industrial support mechanism that funnelled federal funds into research and development of technologies and products optimally with both applications in space and commercial uses here on Earth.
The one use never mentioned was military.
Just for fun, we dug out the space agency's three-year "report on planning and priorities," presented to Parliament in March 2001 by the then Liberal industry minister, John Manley.
The documents boasted Canada's ability to use its orbiting satellites to help monitor the environment and manage Canada's natural resources.
But nowhere in the entire 42-page document did we find a single mention of using the space program for anything remotely military.
Everything referred to the "peaceful use of space" and meant just that.
Six months after Manley's report on Sept. 11, 2001, the world changed and the Canadian space program was apparently no exception.
At first, the use of space-based surveillance systems for national and international security was not touted publicly, presumably for fear of embroiling the largely apolitical space program in the very political debate over George Bush's proposed ballistic missile defence proposal.
Alas, times have definitely changed. As Sun Media's national correspondent Kathleen Harris reports elsewhere in the paper today, military applications of space technologies are now simply a fact of life, if not a primary reason for public funding.
Reviewing a substantial compendium of official space agency documents Harris obtained under the Access to Information Act, it is difficult to go more than a few pages without finding words such as "sovereignty and national security," and "supporting the implementation of foreign policy."
SPY SATELLITE
Translation: Canada has an extraordinary seeing-eye satellite called Radarsat that would fit very nicely into the Bush missile defence system for North America, and a new version about to be launched that could probably spot an enemy convoy in Afghanistan.
That Canada is now using its space program for military purposes should shock no one in a post 9/11 environment. But the implications of the militarization of space are enormous, particularly with respect to the risk of sparking a new arms race, and at the very least deserve an open and informed national debate.
