David Saint-Jacques discusses Canadarm2 and the future of Canadian space robotics

Uploaded on May 3, 2019

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David Saint-Jacques discusses Canadarm2 and the future of Canadian space robotics

2019-05-03 - On board the International Space Station, Canadian Space Agency astronaut David Saint-Jacques discusses his thoughts on using Canadarm2 to capture a visiting vehicle and the future of Canadian space robotics. (Credits: Canadian Space Agency, NASA)

Question: One of your next challenges will be to operate Canadarm2 to catch the Dragon cargo ship. How do you feel about that?

David Saint-Jacques: What a privilege, what a privilege, being Canadian of course, this is, you know, it would be one of the highlights of the mission, and it is a dream for a Canadian astronaut to actually operate Canadarm2. This free capture of a cargo vehicle is an amazing challenge and an amazing feat of engineering we can all be proud of. Canadarm2 was not designed for that initially; it was a kind of a new challenge offered by NASA – do you think you guys could do this with your robotic arm, could you actually catch cargo vehicles – and our engineers rolled up their sleeves and figured out a way and kind of increased the capacity of Canadarm. I think it speaks to the Canadian ingenuity and our Canada spirit of inventivity and I think also it shows a path to the future, where exploration is going to be a mixture of human exploration and robotic exploration and with artificial intelligence we’re going to be able to kind of in a synergistic way completely expand our capacity to explore and to invent.

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