Astronaut Chris Hadfield Answers the Web's Most Searched Questions | WIRED

my name is Chris Hadfield I'm doing the wired autocomplete interview let's begin what Chris Hadfield in the search engine here we go what inspired Chris Hadfield to become an astronaut the first people to walk in the moon when Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in July 20th 69 I thought if they could do that I could do that that inspired me what was Chris Hadfield education I went to a bunch of different schools but basically I'm a farmer and mechanical engineer and a pilot fighter pilot test pilot that's was my education become an astronaut what was Chris Hadfield first job I grew up on a farm but when you growing up on a farm it's not really sort of a job was just what you do every day after school my first real job was working in a scientific shipping warehouse when a school ordered scientific equipment I was the guy back in in the shipping department that would collect the the pig fetuses or the the weigh scale put him in a box and and mail them to your school that was my first job what did Chris Hadfield find in space did I find in space a new way to look at the world what did Chris Hadfield this is terrible English what did Chris Hadfield learned from going blind well I learned better English from this sensor during my first spacewalk there was contamination inside my space they've gotten both my eyes blinded me what did I learn from that number one don't panic panic doesn't really help especially if you're all alone in space and the second was you need to do a better job of cleaning the visor of your space helmet because it was actually the anti-fog and the visor that good into my eyes that made me go in blind so remember if you're doing a spacewalk clean your visor really carefully and don't let it get in your eyes and you probably won't go blind emerging from below as often Scrolls on a computer screen these are the questions that begin with where where Chris Hadfield where does Chris Hadfield live I live on earth wasn't always true but right now I live in Toronto Ontario Canada and I like it there it's a nice city it's well-run good place you get a chance live in Toronto where was Chris Hadfield born I was born about I don't know maybe a couple hundred yards from the US border right on the edge of Canada in a town called Sarnia Ontario in Sarnia General Hospital August 29th 1959 makes me a Virgo where is Chris Hadfield right now on earth I'm in Las Vegas baby and what happens here falls on the floor where did Chris Hadfield go in space I went around and around and around the world we launched out of Florida we're actually on my third flight we launched out of Kazakhstan just south of Russia you go straight up for a while then the spaceship turns over start going faster and faster and faster parallel to the surface of the earth so that the whole trajectory of the spaceship is to go around the world and if you can get going seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour five miles a second 25 times the speed of sound then you'll stay in space basically forever you'll just coast once you get there so that's what I did gotten three different rocket ships blasted off went around the world two thousand six hundred and fifty times so I went on a pretty amazing world tour more than Keith Richards I think all right oops all right this one at risk of putting shadows on my face says when Chris Hadfield when when Chris Hadfield let's choose him verb here when did Chris Hadfield first walk in space I first walked in space during my second spaceflight we were on board space shuttle Endeavour we were building the International Space Station imagine you're wearing the most uncomfortable clothes you've ever worn like like a big snow suit or something end gloves and a hat and big boots you can hardly move you grab on to both sides of the hatch and you sort of like maybe a chick coming out of an egg you know you have to sort of fight your way out but then you pull yourself out and you're weightless let go with one hand and you float around gently the other way and suddenly you've gone from this claustrophobic little dark place to now being surrounded by eternity where the whole world is silent next to you like this big magic globe but it's separate from you but all around you is the three dimensions of of everything and it's perfectly black it's it's unbelievable like you've given birth to yourself into a whole new place if you get a chance go on a space walk when was Chris Hadfield last Space Flight seven years ago right now I was onboard the International Space Station it was 2012 2013 it was so cool cuz I was up for half a year so we went halfway across the solar system like we went from one side of the Sun to the other while I was on board the ship pretty neat watch the whole world like swap ends what was winter in the northern hemisphere became spring got to watch the snow and everything move and things start turning green the time I was up there okay when will when will Chris Hadfield while drum roll please get out of space I don't even know what that question means maybe people out there searching on Google maybe they think I'm still in space I'm still spaced out well I know I've been back for seven years and happily so there's no choices we're all in space all the time where would I go space is all around us why Chris Hadfield all right why is Chris Hadfield a hero he's not why is Chris Hadfield important to Canada I was the first doing several things I was the first Canadian to do a spacewalk I was the first Canadian to command a space ship I was the first one to use the big robot arm and if you're Canadian you're really paying attention you'll notice the name of the robot arm is the canid arm so there's this great big arm with Canadian flags on it out in space being operated by a Canadian with a Canadian flag on her shoulder for the first time big ridiculously Canadian moment so I think that's why I'm important to Canada white why did Chris Hadfield retire because I got a Holt look at my hair because I was never gonna fly in space again and once you've done all the things you should do an astronaut it's time to go do something else why is Chris Hadfield Space Oddity an odd phraseology but I get a version of David Bowie's classic tune Space Oddity which was a play on the word Space Odyssey and I played it on guitar and recorded on the space station and lots of people have seen it it's actually a really beautiful song and David Bowie loved my version of it which was a huge compliment he said really nice things which was great why is Chris Hadfield under the ocean this you may not know I lived at the bottom of the ocean for like two weeks because living at the bottom of the ocean inside a habitat it's sort of like living in space inside a habitat it's a good way to train for the technical stuff but also psychologically if you can't immediately come up to the surface if you have to solve all your problems yourself it's not a bad psychological training ground for being an astronaut so if you see Chris Hadfield under the ocean that's probably why what Chris Hadfield okay let's choose a word what is Chris Hadfield famous for I think I'm most famous for strangely enough playing music I mean I'm an astronaut I've done spacewalks I was NASA's director of operations in Russia I intercepted Soviet bombers off the coast of North America during the height of the Cold War but I think I'm most famous for playing guitar and singing Space Oddity in orbit I've made a lot of effort to communicate with people using social media during my third spaceflight I made a bunch of videos if I go into any school around the world they've been watching those videos sort of as as part of their science classes the ease of of Twitter and such allowed me to communicate with so many people around the world almost on a one-on-one basis what is Chris Hadfield favorite color blue sort of a sky blue it's a nice place to be color around my eyes what awards because chris hadfield one how about a lot of awards in grade 8 I won the public speaking contest in my school in grade five I won the posture contest I was also the top test pilot at the US Air Force test pilot school and top test pilot in the US Navy the award that actually meant the most to me was as I was a test pilot they did this really complicated test to put a hydrogen burning engine for a hypersonic airplane out on the wing tip of an f-18 and I presented at the Society for experimental test pilots big annual conference and I won best project for for being a test pilot for the whole world and that kind of opened the doors to get chosen as an astronaut your life sort of trundles long you'd hit a big watershed and after that everything after is sort of the result of one moment in time or that might have been the one I'm most proud of one that had the biggest impact on my life anyway what is Chris Hadfield it's a little tiny one what is Chris Hadfield Oh IQ I don't know but I actually when I was a teenager I was kind of you know insecure like everybody and I wanted to join Mensa the organization of people that were that had high enough IQs and it turns out when I did the Mensa test Mikey was high enough to join Mensa but then once I join Mensa I didn't really know what to do next but it at the time it seemed important all right what languages does Chris Hadfield speak I speak English and then I'm from Canada and so we teach French in Canada a donkey pollen food for a COC aid and then as an astronaut I wanted to be able to fly a Russian spaceship and work with Russians and so you never do Puerto sceetos yeah I speak a little bit of Russian a little bit of German but I've kind of forgotten all of it how to eat in space Chris Hadfield well your food floats for one thing so you don't need a plate like a plate would be useless so what you do is you get your package you either make it cold or hot and there's just like this little easy bake oven where you can warm up to package you can't really cook it might be dehydrated food and then you slide it over a needle and you dial and you push a button and it fills up the package the right amount of water now you've got your package and you mix it up and your velcro it to the wall let it sit soak up the water and then you carefully slid it open because if you open it quick you'll get like a little spooky stuff all over the room so you don't want that so you carefully open so nothing comes flying out because nothing's gonna fall to the floor and then you get a spoon spoon is a great utensil and you want a a long spoon so we can go all the way to the back of the package and then you eat everything out of one package you don't like have peas and meat and potatoes and corn you just eat all of your piece first and they have to be creamed piece they don't float all over and then you ball it up super tight because you have to get rid of your garbage put it in the garbage and then you open your next thing which might be I don't know or tortilla so that's how we eat in space one thing at a time in its package it's sort of like I don't know eaten on the bus or eating on a camping trip or something here's a funny thing about being in space and that is because there's no gravity that means that the stuff in your nose and your sinuses never drains so it's sort of like you always have a head cold you can't really taste your food as much you know in here like this your food all sort of tastes bland because you're not smelling it you're not getting it in through all of your sensors so food and space taste sort of bland and the food that has the strongest spice naturally in it is shrimp cocktail because we've got cocktail sauce on which is you know a lot of horseradish now you wouldn't think you would have shrimp cocktail in a spaceship filled with a nice red hot sauce on it you bite into it it's got that nice crunch and then you get that surge of eye watering horseradish cocktail sauce and for a moment or two it clears your sinuses so my favorite space food was shrimp cocktail how to sleep in space Chris Hadfield first you have to decide when right because you're going around the world sixteen times a day so when is it night it's night every you know 45 minutes of course you're gonna get a sunrise every 90 minutes so you have to cover all the windows so the Sun doesn't get in your eyes and then you float into your little sleep pod and there's a sleeping bag tied to the wall with a string you you float in carefully you float into your sleeping bag it's got arm holes and then you could zip up your sleeping bag and now you're just sort of loading like a fish in an aquarium inside your sleeping bag you pull the little doors closed on your sleep pod you turn the fan down as low as you can don't want to suffocate but make it quiet and then you shut off the light and then you relax every muscle in your body and your arms float up and your knees float in your butt waist bends and your head comes forward and your whole body's perfectly relaxed and you don't need a pillow and you never have to roll over your shoulder doesn't get sore it's like the most calm and comfortable sleep you've ever had in your life I think if we start flying tourists in space it's gonna be feel like the space spa the best sleep you've ever had how to meet Chris Hadfield hmm well let's see I speak all over the world I'm constantly traveling I've been millions of people I don't just hide so if you want to meet me you could go to my website Chris Hadfield CA I think and see when I'm gonna be somewhere or you can send me a note we could eat meat I'm on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and such you could write me a nice letter I'd love to get a letter from you and if you draw me a really nice picture I'll stick it up on my fridge how long was Chris Hadfield commander of the International Space Station about two or three months we take turns and we go up in a little spaceship or the Russian one the Soyuz pretty soon we'll be going up and down on American ships built by Boeing and built by SpaceX but when I went we took turns there were new crews every three months so if you think about it we rotate who's in charge every two or three months okay this is a big question at least you know physically how did Chris Hadfield contribute to space exploration well when you're the first to do things people notice because if say for example there'd never been a Canadian who was the mission specialist which was like a fully integrated crew member on the space shuttle I was the first Canadian so that was sort of a big contribution for the 37 million people that live in Canada did a bunch of research while I was up there I helped run the 200 experiments on the space station I helped build two space stations that's kind of a you know with your hands kind of contribution but I was NASA's director of operations in Russia so I helped helped the space program across cosmos of Russia and NASA of the United States work and get along so I contributed there and I served as an astronaut for 21 years every single day for 21 years so that was that was a big contribution as well this question is unnamed it just has my name I can open it from right to left just for variety okay the first Canadian in space and now we have to choose the modifier was ah was Chris I'd field the first Canadian in space no the first Canadian space was Marc Garneau the second was Roberta Bondar the third was Steve McLane I was fourth fourth Canadian in space very proud did Chris Hadfield walk on the moon I never got the chance and we haven't had anybody walk in the moon since I was 12 soon we will there are their astronauts training right now and and we're building hardware right now for people to not just walk in the moon but actually start settling the moon start living there just like we live in Antarctica or some of the more remote parts of the world so what's happening so maybe I'll still get a chance to do what I dreamed about when I was a little boy okay here's the next question go to space with who did who did Chris Hadfield go to space with I went to space with Russians and German and Americans I think but that's all just kind of arbitrary I went to space with people from Earth okay one more question here in the unnamed section and that is is Chris Hadfield okay yeah thanks for asking okay part of what happens in space though is a lot of things degrade in your body you lose part of your skeleton your muscles sort of waste away because there's no gravity that you have to fight so your body gets lazy your heart gets smaller your balance system gets confused because there's no gravity some astronauts in fact their eyeballs because of the change in the internal fluid pressures of your body their eyeballs change shape so they see not as well after they've been in space but I've been back from space six or seven years now and my bones are dense my muscles are strong my eyeballs are okay everything seems to be alright my balance systems good so yeah I'm okay Thanks so that's a lot of questions about me how about you have any questions about I don't know astronauts in general all right oh cool what astronaut here we go what are the requirements to be an astronaut that may be changing right now because with Elon Musk and Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos and and other companies trying to allow anybody who can buy a ticket to be an astronaut or at least to fly in space I think that'll be good but up until now you had to kind of really be ready to fly a spaceship so if you want to fly a spaceship what are the requirements well you need to understand complicated things like orbital mechanics how do you maneuver in space how do you how do you make things accurately work how does a spacesuit work or the physiology of the human body or a little understanding of solar physics and rocket propulsion systems and communication systems and being able to reprogram the computers and plus it's an International Space Station so learn to speak some other languages and so there's a lot of requirements but the fundamental three things you need are number one a healthy body that fits in your spacesuit so not too big not too small and healthy number two the proven ability to learn complicated stuff so how do you know somebody can learn complicated stuff choose people with multiple university degrees who've proven that they can get a high score on a test or do original research and then the third people who can make good decisions so we choose people who have had complicated jobs like test pilots and medical doctors life or death where people have run programs in my case to become an astronaut I didn't really know what to do I'm from a country that doesn't have very many astronauts but I looked at the astronauts of the world and the cosmonauts and I thought okay everybody needs a university education so I went to four different universities and I did it all in technical mechanical engineering and I thought okay I need I look at you know Neil and Buzz and Sally Ride and and everybody and they have good healthy bodies so okay I need to keep my body in shape so think about what I eat and exercise a little bit and keep myself strong and then I thought astronauts fly in space you know that's a verb I can learn to fly I just have to do it so I started learning to fly when I was a teen I joined the Air Cadets they taught me to fly gliders and then powered airplanes and then I joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and flew a bunch airplanes eventually flew fighters as I was a sea f-18 pilot and then I went to test pilot school but the US Air Force and then was a test pilot with the US Navy then Canada had an astronaut recruitment and they hired me to be an astronaut so so I guessed right I was a kid what is astronaut ice cream made of you've probably tried to ask for an ice cream it you bite into it and it sort of melts in your mouth and crumbles it's like a block of cotton candy I think ice cream Western and ice cream is mostly made of sugar like whipped sugar the secret is we don't actually eat astronaut ice cream in space it's not really astronaut ice cream it's Science Center ice cream because if you think about when you bite into that astronaut ice cream it makes crumbs because it's that hard brittle sugary stuff and those crumbs would go everywhere without gravity they they'd be in your eyes you breathe them they'd be in the filters so it would be bad space food what is astronaut centrifuge when you fly a rocket ship because it's accelerating through the atmosphere so hard with the big engines pushing you you could push back in your chair and you sort of get crushed by the force of this rocket F equals MA right force equals mass times acceleration we've got that big force and you're a mass so you're getting accelerated and you feel that acceleration is like multiples of your own weight and the big rocket motors can crush you in your chair with like four or five times your weight and when you come back into the atmosphere and we're letting the air slow us down you can get crushed like with eight times your weight which is really brutal but how do you get ready for that well what we do is we get in a little simulated spaceship and that's on the end of this huge arm and it spins us around and around and around until we're getting pinned against the outside of this little thing and then we have to operate the spaceship and show we can do what we're supposed to do this thing is called a centrifuge depending on on how you operate your capsule coming home if you mess it up and you're gonna pull a whole bunch of gee you're gonna crushed a lot and you have to wear the the result of your mistakes so it's a really good reinforcing place to Train what kind of music do astronauts like astronauts come from everywhere we like all the music there is we actually disagree about music on board this astronaut likes music that has a melody that stays in your head and words that mean something and there's lots of astronauts who are musicians we keep musical instruments up on the space station there's a guitar up there there's a ukulele there's a keyboard powered by batteries so when we're relaxing in the evening or when it's somebody's birthday or when it's a holiday then we get together with the instruments on board and and play music it's just like you do on earth the next questions are where we're asked you're not where I think it's gonna say do know where is where is astronaut training astronaut training for the United States is primarily at the Johnson Space Center in Houston Texas are just outside of Houston and then in Russia it's at the Yuri Gagarin cosmonaut training center but then we also train in Canada at the Canadian Space Agency on the outskirts of Montreal and we train in Europe in Germany at the European astronaut Center which is just outside of Cologne Germany and then also in Japan because it's an International Space Station so everyone's got their own training and that one is in a little scientific training town called scuba all around the planet where astronauts feel the atmosphere begin that's cool you're floating weightless in space you turn your spaceship around backwards because you're going around the world in this perfect circle and you fire your big engine for like maybe four minutes and it changes you're perfectly circular orbit into kind of like an oval where there's a low part nano and a high part and that low part of your oval starts to just touch the top of the atmosphere like like if you stuck your hand out the window of the car not going too fast you can just feel a little bit of air pressure but you're going so fast where you're going five miles a second so even a tiny little bit of air really starts to slow you down and when you feel the top of the atmosphere the only way you can really feel it like is if you hold your checklist up and you let go of it and instead of just floating in front of you it now starts to gently fall towards the floor everything starts to behave like a feather and you're still kind of just hardly sitting in your seat that you're strapped into but with every passing second you start to see the effects of gravity more and more and we sort of really call atmospheric entry about four hundred thousand feet up we call that entry interface that's where you start to feel the atmosphere begin and if you look out the windows of the spaceship you can see that they're starting to get hot and as you come in it gets hotter and hotter and there's flames pouring all around until if you can imagine that you were somehow inside a blast furnace and the red and yellow flames are ripping all around your ship as that that huge deceleration is causing all the friction and pressure and drag that's that's what the atmosphere does to you a little later but the early wispy atmosphere 400,000 feet where astronauts hang out huh at the space bar yeah standard jokes well we have to live near our training equipment so most astronauts live close to the Yuri Gagarin cosmonaut training center in Star City Russia or the Johnson Space Center in Houston Texas there's a few obvious favorite places nearby to those space centers where where we go in the evening there was one classic called the outpost which was close to the Johnson Space Center and it had all sorts of sort of contraband paraphernalia old astronaut pictures and sign pictures and stuff people had brought back from space and stuck to the wall in this crappy old firetrap of a building eventually the fire inspector said now we you know we need to be grown-up about this and the outpost got torn down but for a lot of years that's where the astronauts hung out at the outpost these next questions by popular demand started with why why astronauts never cry in space well it's not because we're not sad actually sometimes you cry because you're happy and what I found actually it's such a rich experience that my emotions were closer to the surface the whole time I found myself laughing and crying way more often than I do on earth but you can't really cry without gravity gravity pushes the weight of the tears down out of your eye well without gravity then the tears are not gonna get drain out of your eye in fact they're just gonna stay in your eye until you can't really see properly and then you need a hanky or something to dry your eyes now if you watch the movie gravity I think when when Sandra Bullock was crying somehow her tears were propelled across the spaceship her tears were squirting across the room I don't know anybody who cries like that in space tears don't fall why astronaut not use pencil in space that's not true we do we use pencils in space all the time pencils don't care where where gravity is you can write up you can write down you can write sideways so we use pencils all the time we use grease pencils because grease pencils are really tough we use sharpies sharpies work great ballpoint pens don't work too well because you know take a pen and write upside down for a while if your pen won't write upside down like a lot of them do then it's not going to be a good pen to use in a place where there's no gravity I don't have a Sharpie but if I did I would cross oh not why astronaut use pencil in space a little bit of a caveman phrasing but we use pencil in space because pencil work all right why do astronauts exercise in space being in space is the ultimate lazy existence it's the ultimate place for a couch potato you don't have to fight gravity you don't have to lift a finger you don't have to hold your head up everything just floats nothing sags it's a great place to be but as a result of the fact that you don't have to fight gravity you can be super lazy even your heart gets lazy because it it doesn't need to lift the blood from the bottom of your feet all the way up to the top of your head it just has to push it through your blood vessels your heart actually gets smaller your muscles would waste away you wouldn't have this big skeleton fighting gravity so your skeleton would dissolve so we have to exercise in space because we're coming home again and we don't want to come back as like you know jellyfish so we exercise about two hours a day on the spaceship we have a stationary bicycle no seat because you don't need a seat it's more like I don't know a unicycle without a seat and then we have a treadmill that we can run on and there are big elastics that we wear on our hips and our shoulders to hold us down on the treadmill so we can run and pound away and then we have a resistive machine you can't lift weights because you're weightless so between the treadmill and the bicycle and the reason system exercise 2 hours a day you want to be conscious of your own sweat when you're weightless and so what we do is we keep a towel nearby and if you're good you can take the towel and just float it there in space next you and you workout for a while until you get in the sweaty and then you dry the sweat off and so your towel becomes sort of disgusting after a while and then you just velcro the towel to the wall and the sweat evaporates out of it it becomes humidity inside the spaceship that's collected in the dehumidifier and it's turned back into drinking water and getting onboard your sweat becomes becomes what you drink the next day yes long as you have a good purifier it works all right I came home the same weight is what I launched but with 20% less fat so 20% more muscle so it was good came back kind of ripped it was ok and my cardiovascular was good but I didn't keep the bone density up the bone density and my hips and my upper femur had I lost about eight and a half percent of my bone which is a lot and so you running a big risk of breaking your hip when you get back until your body goes whoa I'm back on earth and starts to build dense bones again why do astronauts go to the moon well so far only 12 astronauts have walked on the moon 24 astronauts have gone to the moon a lot of them just orbited it they didn't walk it's not like a lot of astronauts have kinds of the moon but why do astronauts go to the moon we went because in May of 1961 President John F Kennedy stood up and said we choose to go to the moon that's why we went it was a form of cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union it was proof that we could it was to challenge the the whole industrial capability of the United States like why climb Everest challenge yourself see if he can do it make it part of who you are but now that we've done it why go back to the moon I think now it's just like all exploration first prove that you can do it and then make it part of the experience eventually we'll go to the moon to stay and live just like everywhere else why do astronauts train underwater how do you simulate being weightless I mean sitting here in this chair I'm being crushed down all the time so it's a lousy simulation of weightlessness now we could all ride in the back of an airplane and have the airplane push over and have us all sort of float for a second in the back or if you got the airplane going like this if you could float for maybe 20 or 30 seconds and we do that because it's it's good for little short experiments but if you really want to Train like for a an eight hour spacewalk you can't do it in little 20-second segments so we decided a long time ago let's let's train underwater and we'll use the buoyancy of the water and then the weight of the suit to balance out and then it's sort of like being weightless it's not of course because if you go upside down in the water the blood still rushes to your head and you have the drag of the water moving through the water is way different than moving through the emptiness of space it's it's like you imagine how big a normal Olympic swimming pool is and then make it 45 feet deep that's what the space station swimming pool training pool is like we call it the neutral buoyancy laboratory all right how how astronaut how many astronauts have walked on the moon well it started with a Neil and Buzz it ended with Harrison Schmitt and jeans sermon Cernan so that's four and there were eight others in between Apollo 11 12 not 13 because they had problems in the weight of the moon 14 15 16 and 17 so 12 human beings have walked in the middle brave guys how astronaut communicate in space we talked to each other on board the spaceship and people are from all over the world so you have to choose a common language the majority of the International Space Station was built by english-speaking people and russian-speaking people so on board we speak primarily English but lots of Russian to sort of in a mixture of both is such as yoga voodoo Petroski but the Muslim will in the keep our genus Dancy so I had to learn to speak Russian because I was a member of a crew onboard the space station and the cosmonauts equivalently learned to speak English but that's just amongst ourselves we have to talk to earth so here's what you do you grab the microphone in the space station or you push a little transmit button on the wall and your voice goes through the air to a little microphone on the wall the microphone turns into an electric signal that then goes through the wires to a little digital thing that turns it into a digital signal and then that goes outside of the ship to a big antenna and we send it up to a geostationary satellite twenty you know two thousand miles away from the earth and it collects that signal from us and then redirects it down to a great big dish antenna somewhere on the planet like the ones in in New Mexico and then they collect that little digital faint signal and then they take that digital signal to send it through wires across the United States and it gets to the Johnson Space Center in Houston Texas where there's another little machine that takes a digital signal and turns it back into sort of a analog signal and then it comes through a wire up to a little speaker that shakes the same way that microphone did on the space station and moves the air molecules and they come across and goes to someone here and they hear you how long that takes depends on how far away we are sometimes we're on the other side of the world radio waves go basically at the speed of light 186,000 miles a second but that's still you know 186,000 miles it is the world is 25,000 miles around so if you got to go all the way out to 22,000 and back again and maybe even twice it can take a second or two so when I phoned my wife from the Space Station it would go through all of those links and then get you know through the Houston telephone system and it would ring on her phone but the delay was so long that she'd pick it up and she'd go hello and I go hello but by the time she said hello and it got to me and I said hello back to her it might be three seconds and she always thought it was like a sales call and she'd hang up on me so she actually got the numbers from NASA so that instead of it coming up as some unknown number it would say space so her phone would say space Oh space is calling and then she'd wait for me to answer the next question is how astronaut come back to earth when you say how do you get back to Earth your real question is how do you slow down you don't want to hit the world at seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour we don't have enough fuel to just like fire our rocket and slow down we couldn't bring that much fuel with us so we just used Frick we use the drag of the air to slow us down we just start to fall into the atmosphere and then once we're in the atmosphere it catches us and then we fly the spaceship as carefully as we can to not have too much drag or too much heat big s turns all the way down to let ourselves get aligned and then when we get close to the earth if your spaceship has wings like the space shuttle then you can land it on a runway but if your spaceship is just a little capsule like a gumdrop then it would just suck into the world so we have a great big parachute or maybe two or three parachutes and then you can land in the water which isn't too hard you've done a belly-flop water can be hard but waters a little more forgiving than dirt or rock so you can land your spaceship in the water and then run the risk of it sinking or you can have it land on land and if you're going to land on land you can use airbags on the bottom and that's what Boeing is doing now or you can have little Rockets that just before you hit the ground they go perfect and fire so that it slows you down just before you hit the ground and that's what we did in my third spaceflight and the Soyuz has little little retro rockets to cushion you or as the Russian let's call them soft landing rockets it's like Greenland or the Cape of Good Hope you don't believe the you know the sales pitch it's a pretty rough landing all right last questions how do astronauts poop I don't think you're asking how we poop I think it's how we use the toilet we poop like everybody okay I'm gonna get graphic here for a second how do you know when you have to poop on earth it's actually because of the weight of the poop inside you tells you hey it's time to poop you know how sometimes you're lying in bed and you're okay poetry to stand-up you go wow I really got a poop well if you're weightless and your body's not gonna tell you it's time to poop so you almost have to learn this new sort of fullness symptom that tells you it's time to poop you're counting on gravity because gravity is going to pull it away from you and without gravity even when you're done pooping the there's the poops just going to stay sort of sticking to you so we wear a rubber glove and sometimes you have to like physically separate the poop from your body but then taking the place of gravity to pull the poop down into the toilet is airflow we have air pulled down into the toilets got fans in it so and that works for the P as well so when you want to poop on the space station then you you wait till it's your turn in the toilet because there's a limited number of toilets on a spaceship two four six people go into the toilet it's look we have it's sort of like a little closed off area take your pants off completely because you don't want them floating around when you're on the toilet and then you sit on the toilet and it's got you could either hook your toes under some toe loops so that you don't float off the toilet or on the Space Shuttle we had sort of like a little seatbelt thing that claimed like imagine wearing a seatbelt so you don't float off your toilet but you don't want to float off the toilet partway through it be a mess then you turn the toilet on great loudest thing on the spaceship because of all those big fans to pull the air down into the toilet and then you pee and poop just like you do everywhere and the pee goes down into a sewage system that has purifiers and filters and gets turned back into drinking water again just like on earth except it's not quite as personal on earth and then your poop though goes down and gets pulled inside a tank it looks like a big milk bottle on the space station when you're done we use wet wipes because you don't have a sewage system so you don't have to use toilet paper get yourself nice and clean everything goes in there and then it goes down inside the toilet and then you clean up for the next person you put the lid on the toilet and when the milk-can is completely full of poop then we seal it with these great big knurled knob dogs on the top so that none of the smell will come out then we store it down in sort of a cold storage area in this station and then when one of the unmanned ships comes up with all the food and supplies and scientific equipment and then we fill it with all of our garbage including our solid waste or our poop and we seal that up and then when it undocks it separates from the station and and we fire it down into the atmosphere and then it it burns up in the atmosphere so the next time you wish on a shooting star think about maybe what you're looking at I'm Chris ad field thank you for being part of my wired autocomplete exercise I hope you learned a few things about spaceflight and maybe a little bit about Chris Hadfield astronaut

Channel: WIRED

Views: 2,883,633

Rating: 4.9592295 out of 5

Keywords: chris hadfield, astronaut chris hadfield, chris hadfield autocomplete, chris hadfield wired autocomplete, chris hadfield wired autocomplete interview, chris hadfield autocomplete interview wired, wired, wired autocomplete, chris hadfield interview, chris hadfield astronaut, chris hadfield space, wired interview, google interview chris hadfield, chris hadfield google, chris hadfield google interview, autocomplete interview, autocomplete interview chris hadfield

Id: t93UCj1hzu8

Length: 39min 48sec (2388 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/RigasTelRuun]

More importantly TIL The ISS has a phone number.

[u/CTHULHU_RDT]

I totally would have programmed in "SPACEHUSBAND"

Or "Chr.I.S.S. Calling"

[u/puntini]

He mentions this at the 34:38 mark of the video.

[u/DocWsky]

Hilarious, and ripe for some fun “yeah, but I never hung up on you when you were calling from space” moments

[u/sassydodo]

Fuck dem telemarketers trying to sell us those stupid space trips and Mars tours

[u/aphnx]

His book "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything" is an excellent read. How as a Canadian he was able to become an astronaut by keeping his eye on the ball and taking steps one by one to accomplish his goal.

[u/hetfield151]

Wouldnt it have been enough to tell her to wait 5 seconds before hanging up?

[u/Science-tastic]

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/713/

[u/chineric]

Telemarketers and their lies, now they're claiming that they are calling from outer space!