Supporters of space exploration gather at Telus Spark to watch Joshua Kutryk blast off to start tour on International Space Station

Ray Bielecki was in the basement of his parents’ home in 1969 when he watched the Apollo 11 mission land on the moon, marking one of the biggest milestones in human achievement.

As he spoke Thursday, he saw himself in that afternoon, sitting in a “recreation” room, hearing updates from Walter Cronkite at CBS on a black-and-white TV. He was too young to understand what it meant for science. But he kept glancing back and forth from the screen to the window.

“I just couldn’t believe when I looked out the window that the moon was there and somebody was walking on it,” he said.

Nearly 70 years later, his eyes still reflected a childlike spark as he considered the latest space mission, which includes an Albertan.

On Thursday morning, NASA’s SpaceX operation sent a crew to the International Space Station on a commercial program, which was televised at Telus Spark in its Infinity Dome theatre.

One of the four crew members is Joshua Kutryk, a Royal Canadian Air Force colonel, engineer, and experimental test pilot who grew up in Fort Saskatchewan. Kutryk has also served as a fighter pilot, flying missions supporting NORAD, NATO, and the UN, with deployments to Libya and Afghanistan.

“That made me very, very proud, and that’s where, as a country, we should be going,” said Bielecki, who also leads Astronuts, a space education club for children between nine and 12.

The astronauts, the rest of whom were from the U.S. and Russia, shot up into space from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida inside a Crew Dragon capsule, which was propelled by a Falcon 9 Rocket.

For the next six months, they will conduct several experiments, including studying tissues that have been engineered in a laboratory starting from human stem cells. NASA states that the research would help improve medicine, disease modelling, and pharmaceutical testing.

The astronauts would also collaborate with researchers to examine crop production, which is crucial for longer-duration spaceflight missions.

“To my colleagues, friends, and family in both countries, the Canadian Space Agency and the Royal Canadian Air Force, thank you for everything you’ve done to get us here, the start of what will hopefully be a long, safe, and impactful mission,” Kutryk said from the capsule after the successful launch.

“To my family, Heather, Peter, and Nana, I miss you. And to everyone else, thank you for the support. It is time for Crew 13 to go to work.”

Maddie Bemrose, manager at Telus Spark, said she watched the mission with pride.

“For the first time in Canadian history and space history, we have a born and raised Albertan heading to space. Colonel Joshua Kuchick is from northern Alberta, where he was raised on a cattle farm and followed his dreams all the way to the International Space Station,” she said. “So it’s a pretty remarkable story.”

Duncan Buck was also at Telus Spark with his toddler son, watching the mission begin. “I think it gives a new dawn for space exploration, which is exciting,” said Buck, who has a PhD in quantum cosmology. “I hope we can discover more. And as an astronomer, as a cosmologist, whatever we can learn from being up there is phenomenal.”

The mission comes nearly six months after a major space project that involved another Canadian, Jeremy Hansen, who, with three others, flew around the moon to help prove that the specific spacecraft could safely carry humans to deep space and bring them back.

In May, during a public talk in Calgary, Kutryk noted that following Hansen’s mission, Canada is now the only other country alongside the United States to send humans farther and faster than anyone has ever gone in history.

“And it’s a result of what Canadians do in Canada for exploration, (like) things that we make, invent and innovate, and ultimately give to NASA and the world to help with exploration,” he said. “That’s why we’re invited to participate.”

Bilecki likened astronauts like Hansen and Kutryk to angels, advancing human understanding for the greater good.

“We have to make sure that everything that we’re learning up there … is going to benefit the Earth because the Earth needs help,” he said. “It has a fever right now, and those technologies are going to help people in general because we need those angels up there to bring it down to make it work here.”

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