Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada April’s Boarding Pass

MESSAGE FROM THE CEO

We celebrated the International Day of Human Space Flight this week. It marks 60 years since the first human space flight for the exploration of the universe beyond Earth.

I was living in Moscow and serving as a foreign diplomat with the United Nations on April 12, 2011, when the UN National Assembly declared the special day to mark the commemoration of the space era of mankind.

Yuri Gagarin was the first man to orbit the earth and tributes and massive monuments to him, the cosmonauts and the space program abound. Two that come to mind are the 350-feet tall Monument to the Conquerors of Space and the 139-foot tall Yuri Gagarin statue in a square on Leninsky Prospekt. The statue sits atop a pedestal designed to be reminiscent of rocket exhaust and is made of titanium and weighs 12 tons.

A little-known fact is that in 1963, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to orbit the Earth.

In 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first person to step foot on the moon and that event inspired me to have a fascination with the space program to this day.

It is our mission to build on inspiring youth to pursue careers in aviation and aerospace and our new Museum will do just that.

Sincerely,
Terry Slobodian
President & CEO

AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRIS HADFIELD

This week we celebrated the International Day of Human Space Flight (Monday, April 12th).

In October 2019, the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada was honoured to have an interview with Chris Hadfield, one of Canada’s most well-known astronauts.

Chris Austin Hadfield flew three missions in space, establishing a number of Canadian firsts along the way. These include first Canadian mission specialist; first Canadian to operate the Canadarm in space; first and only Canadian to visit the Russian Mir Space Station; first spacewalks (two) by a Canadian; and first Canadian commander of the International Space Station. He retired from the Canadian Space Agency in 2013.

One of the more memorable excerpts from our interview with Chris on his fear of heights:

“The real question is, what do you do with your fear? Just because you’re afraid, it doesn’t mean that you should never attain any heights in your life. The real question is, how do you recognize that fear is just a warning of danger, and how can you change who you are so that you can probably face the danger and still do the things that are worth doing in one? See, that’s the very essence of a life well-lived. And everything worth doing in life has risk, whether it’s heights or anything else. So the fundamental question is, how are you going to manage your life and manage yourself so that the things that are important to you that have risk can still be done without damage? And that’s taken me all the way up to commanding a space station and all the other things that I’ve done.”

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