An Alberta astronaut will go to space this year. It took hard work, dreaming and ‘a lot of luck’

Alberta-born astronaut Joshua Kutryk will be part of NASA's upcoming SpaceX Crew-13 mission. CTV News Edmonton's Miriam Valdes-Carletti has the details.

An Albertan astronaut will soon join the ranks of Canadians to take on groundbreaking space missions.

Joshua Kutryk, who began his career as a pilot and later became a Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut, has been dreaming about space since he was six years old.

“I was always fascinated by exploration. I still am. I like reading about ocean explorers, Arctic explorers, space explorers, of course,” he told CTV News Edmonton.

He’ll be a long way from his first home — a cattle farm in eastern Alberta — in about six months. He’s joining a crew of three other astronauts on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission as a specialist.

Kutryk will be conducting health-focused research to try to understand how humans could live on the moon.

“Space is not good for the human (body) because of the radiation and the microgravity, and we deteriorate … We can study aging problems, cancer treatments, we study deterioration with the cardiovascular system and brain changes.”

‘Amazing wealth of opportunity’

The trip launches on the heels of the Artemis II expedition, humanity’s first lunar voyage in more than half a century and a successful push toward a landing projected in two years’ time.

Millions of people watched that journey — some Edmonton students even took to writing astronaut Jeremy Hansen, the first Canadian and non-American to participate in a moon mission.

Grade 4 and 5 students from Greenview School tracked the Artemis II journey and came up with scientific questions to ask their idols, like, “How many backflips did you do while in space?”

The CSA told teacher Chantel Usher that Hansen would “absolutely” receive the letters from her students.

“When they found out that they had a voice and they were going to use it, they took it and ran with it,” she told CTV News Edmonton. “They researched everything they could. They made their own space board games. They really latched onto this idea that it’s bringing Canada together.”

Kutryk says the kids’ dreams aren’t far from what his own were.

“I always considered (space exploration) something that I was very unlikely to do, and I even feel that a bit today sitting here a couple months from launch,” he said. “It’s something that takes a lot of work and a lot of dreaming and a lot of dedication, but it also takes a lot of luck.”

But what his six-year-old self had in common with anyone now working in the CSA, he said, was a passion for space followed through with an “enormous energy” and patience to put in the work. The nature of exploration, he added, is still evolving.

“What I see is opportunity. Space is that metaphor where we call it the next new ocean … it’s just this amazing wealth of opportunity for countries that are positioned to go out and get it, and Canada certainly is right now.”

Kutryk launches no earlier than mid-September from Florida with NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov.

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Miriam Valdes-Carletti