Local astronaut to become 4th Canadian woman to go to space

A local astronaut is going to space.

Dr. Shawna Pandya will become the fourth Canadian woman to go to space — the first one to do it on a commercial flight crew.

She joined CTV Morning Live's Kent Morrison to talk about her journey and her mission.

Kent Morrison: A University of Alberta lecturer will soon become the fourth Canadian woman to go to space. The first to do it on a commercial flight crew. Dr. Shawna Pandya has degrees in neuroscience, space entrepreneurship, medicine and wellness. Also a martial artist, also an advanced diver, a skydiver, and a pilot in training. Frankly, the list of accomplishments and your resume is too long to get to. But you're also going to space on the Virgin Galactic new Delta space crew as early as 2026. Congratulations. Now as we read through the list of your resume and your accomplishments, it seems like you've had this mission to have everything you need to finally go to space. Has that been your goal for some time?

Dr. Shawna Pandya: Ever since I was a kid, I grew up watching Dr. Roberta Bondar, the first Canadian woman in space, and I thought, that's what I want to do. And so I just thought, OK, to be like her I just need to do what she does. So I thought she's a neuroscientist, a physician, and then an astronaut. So I'll go study neuroscience, be a physician, and then hopefully an astronaut. And it seems to have worked out so far.

Kent: Yeah, you're gonna do this in a couple of years, which is fantastic. What went through your mind when you got the call that you were gonna go to space?

Dr. Pandya: Oh, my gosh. I think the smile says it all. I haven't stopped smiling since the announcement came out two weeks ago. It's incredibly exciting. The only thing better than going to space is going to space with a team that you've trained with and worked with for years and who you consider really close friends, which is the case with me.

Kent: Let's talk about this mission that you're on. And this is different now that we have this new era of commercial spaceflight. So can you explain to people at home what you're going to be doing and how this flight works?

Dr. Pandya: I will be going up on the new Delta class of spacecraft with Virgin Galactic to enter operations as early as 2026. This is considered a suborbital mission. So it's a same-day mission, which means we have a very focused period of time to leverage zero gravity, microgravity, to do some very cool science in the biomedical and physical sciences realms.

Kent: What specifically are you going to be trying to do while you're up there?

Dr. Pandya: We'll be building off the heritage of the science we did on our first mission. And I was the lead on one of our payloads, which includes a continuous glucose monitor. We were the first team in the world to send up one of these monitors to space and suborbital flight. And the reason this is important is many fold. We know that longer duration spaceflight can lead to pre-diabetic changes in astronauts. But we don't know how quickly that occurs. We know that at the space agency level, for example, through NASA or the Canadian Space Agency, having diabetes is considered a disqualifying trade. That's not necessarily the case in commercial spaceflight. So by proving the safety of this continuous glucose monitor in spaceflight, we're making space more accessible. And then finally, having access to the physiology of glucose changes in space, which is considered an extreme environment, can help us better understand the pathophysiology of disease states such as diabetes back here on Earth.

Kent: That's very important work. What do you have to do from now until 2026 when this is going to take off? Is it a lot of physical preparation? Or what's the work like now till then?

Dr. Pandya: Yeah, there's a lot to be done. We're working around the clock as a team. This includes everything from working and down selecting our final science and payloads. So the biomedical payloads and the physical sciences payloads I just mentioned, we're still refining the final list of that. Working as a coordinated crew in zero gravity. We've worked with the National Research Council of Canada doing Zero-G flights for nearly a decade now. We'll be doing the same thing in Ottawa next month at their flight research laboratory. There's a lot of team coordination, deconfliction, choreography to make sure that you know your movements inside out when it comes to working in the Zero-G environment.

Kent: Just quickly before you go. For anybody who's watching at home who may have a dream just like you did as a little girl, what would you say to them?

Dr. Pandya: I would say that pick what you love, work really, really, really hard to get there. Work ethic is free and then just go after what you want because there's space for everyone and you just need to make space for yourself.