Astronaut Chris Hadfield on 13 Moments That Changed His Life | WIRED

in the days before selfies this was a cool selfie you look close you can see my mustache right there proud of it I shaved my mustache off once and my wife didn't like it so there's no question the mustache stays I'm Chris Hadfield we're gonna look at some moments from my life that helped turn me into Who I am today that is spaceship Atlantis that's the nose of a space shuttle you can just barely see Atlantis written there and that is my crew this is my first space flight STS 74 in the fall of 1995 and we had just come up and docked with the space station Mir and we had built a part of Mir and we were only docked for a few days but I realized hey if we get the angles right I could ask one of the MIR crew one of the three people living on Mir to get a camera and take a picture while we're docked so we waited until we came around the world the right way so the Sun was shining in our window I spoke to Tomas Reiter and German cosmonaut onboard the International Board the the Russian Space Station it was like okay take a bunch of pictures and then I went racing back down through all the tunnels into Atlantis and got everybody to stick their faces up into the Sun and it's incredibly bright it's like sticking your head into an oven because there's nothing between you and the Sun but that little pane of glass right there so it couldn't be more scorching an amazing human experience in this picture I think I'm about five years old and inside a an instant Quaker Oats box my dad took this picture of me I've spent most of my life in a box that's what we call the simulator as an astronaut we call it the box but just a few years after that when when I got to be about nine years old that's when the very first two people walked in there that little boy just a few years later that link between the fantasy of flying my little rocket ship box and the reality of three people climbing into a box and taken it to the moon and two of them climbing out of it and walking on the surface it made me believe that impossible things can happen and that maybe that's something that I could even do so when you see your kid playing in a box let them dream that's my brother Dave and I leaning against my dad's Ford at Sarnia Airport my dad was the very first pilot at Sarnia Airport he was taking a friend flying and his friend in the backseat and a little old two-seat airplane and his friend was getting sick in the back and my dad was like I were gonna land so he can throw up and he saw this Airport under construction so he put his airplane down sort of next to the runway with the big X on it and the manager came out and said hey you can't land here my dad's oh look at this guy he's throwing up and they started talking and the guy offered him a job because my dad was a brand-new flight instructor and after my first spaceflight they named the airport after me and it's now Chris Hadfield Airport I decided to be an astronaut when I was 9 years old and I had no idea how to be an astronaut I mean how do you make yourself into an astronaut but I thought astronauts fly so I should learn to fly so I joined Air Cadets at 13 years old I studied leadership I studied meteorology all sorts of stuff but then I passed all the exams and they chose me to to become a glider pilot I was only 15 this is graduation day I had just qualified as a military jet pilot there's a parade you get your wings on your uniform and it you can almost hear the sound of the doors opening in front of you of the choices that are about to come up as a result of work that you've done and our very first child had been born Hellena had given birth to him back in Ontario she'd moved out to Moose Jaw that's Kyle a hugely proud day Hellena is so beautiful in this picture it's a good day I was a fighter pilot during the Cold War regularly the soviets would come into canadian airspace sometimes they were just coming through the airspace on the way down to cuba sometimes they would come into Canadian airspace to practice cruise missile launches on North America I so I was sleeping in an alert facility up in northern Quebec and the horn would go off in the middle of the night great blaring horn and we would race jump into our Jets we had to be airborne from dead sleep to airborne in 12 minutes we raced gotten our jets we flew out and found these two bear bombers this was the very first f-18 intercept of a Soviet bear bomber and here on the left side of the f-18 we had this great big light that I could turn on with my baby finger so we came up in the dawn I threw my light on we could have a good look at it see whether they have hostile intent that day we were fully armed but they didn't have any hostile intent they were peaceful that day so there I am flying on Eric's wing trying to hold this enormous camera and focus and not banging into the canopy and not crash into anybody as I'm as I'm trying to get this picture it was my first role in combat it was me right at the very edge where one little mistake one incorrect judgment could have huge international consequences we just bumped the two nations next to each other for a little while and then we peeled away and they actually carried on and went down to Cuba this picture was taken at Edwards Air Force Base in California where I went to test pilot school and it's where I had a chance to not only be an engineer and be a fighter pilot but learn to be an engineering test pilot the most demanding year of my life I flew 32 different airplanes that year had to write a huge report about each one had to do all sorts of testing an intensely demanding physical and mental year and that night I won the award as the top test pilot and it was just so surreal a real great feeling of proven reward for a huge amount of work I was so pleased when I got hired as one of Canada's new astronauts that I wasn't the only one with a moustache that's Dave Williams and he's a bunch of different things a pilot and a software engineer but also a medical doctor and that's Mike McKay who is a robotics engineer and Julie Payette who was an electrical engineer and we are Canada's new astronauts we had had a huge national competition but finally for the four of us it came down to the day that the president of the brand-new Canadian Space Agency phoned us and said we would like you to be one of Canada's astronauts we'd only been astronauts for like minutes when this picture was taken oddly enough one of the common questions is what does an astronaut do between space flights you know as if we're like sitting in a waiting room or a lounge or something somewhere but I was an astronaut for 21 years I was only in space for six months so for twenty and a half years I was training and preparing and supporting other space flights I did a bunch of jobs I was chief of robotics I was working in payload safety I was chief of Space Station operations I was NASA's director in Russia but I was also someone who worked in Mission Control I was a Capcom capsule communicator back when those spaceships were shaped like capsules and when Houston wants to talk to a space ship you can't have 50 people on the radio I was sort of the trusted agent for the crew on earth and I did that for 25 shuttle flights in a row and I was NASA's chief Capcom so I ran that whole side of things it was the next best thing to spaceflight when I was a little kid in the box the thing I really wanted to do was walk in space not just fly a spaceship but go outside and I was lucky enough to be asked to help build this huge piece of hardware this enormous robotic arm called the Canada arm canadarm2 in fact onto the space station I'd been training for it for four and a half years developing all the procedures and everything to be ready for this day when I was outside on a spacewalk helping to build the International Space Station when suddenly exactly when this picture was taken one of my eyes was struck blind and I was like what's going on and and my hand came up to rub my eye and of course I'm wearing a helmet boink off the helmet is thinking how stupid is that Here I am an astronaut you don't even know I can't rub my eye but that without gravity that tears didn't drain they just this irritated eyeball tear just got bigger and bigger and bigger until it started dribbling like a tiny waterfall into my other eye and now both eyes were contaminated with something and then I had to stop working because I couldn't see what I was doing anymore I called down to Houston and I'd worked in Mission Control as a Capcom so I knew what a revelation that was going to be for them to me to call down and say Houston hey I've got some problem and both my eyes are blind what do you want me to do and they thought maybe out of my backpack here where my air purification equipment was maybe the chemical that takes the carbon dioxide out of the air it's called lithium hydroxide maybe that was getting in my eyes so they said open your purge valve and right here on the left hand side of my helmet I could reach up and turn a little valve and let my oxygen hiss out into space and at this moment I am held in place by my feet on the end of an arm I'm not touching anything else I'm blind and I'm listening to as my oxygen is squirting out into space and fortunately that fresh oxygen blowing in on the back of my helmet was enough to start evaporating the big balls of tears around my eyes to the crusty stuff around my eyes as it evaporated blinkin eventually I could start to see again I told him I'm okay shut my valve and then I got back to work and it turned out to be something really benign it was just the the the anti-fog off my visor like a mixture of soap and oil had gotten into my eye but since then we've changed the anti-fog and so we learned from it but it was it was my very first spacewalk and a pretty interesting hurdle to have to cross while trying to do my very first walk [Music] this picture is at Edwards Air Force Base at the US Air Force test pilot school it is an extremely difficult year you can see the pictures of all of the other graduates and airplanes that have been through that school and when you're working really hard and studying really hard you you want a chance to to relax and we had parties every week but this guy in the cowboy hat his name's Rick husband he was a commander of Columbia commander Rick husband in 2003 when Rick and his crew were coming back down through the atmosphere they'd had damage during launch and we all knew the vehicle was damaged but nobody knew how badly coming back down through the atmosphere that hole in the left wing allowed the huge heat and pressure of the plasma field around the vehicle to go into the wing and melt the spar and burn up everything inside the wing the left wing came off and the vehicle tumbled and came apart and Rick and all his crew were killed it was the result of our own decision making you know we we knew that his ship was damaged but we sort of said well we don't know how badly it's damaged and we really can't sort of do anything anyway so let's just assume it's okay and we didn't even ask them to go outside on a spacewalk to crawl over the big door of the shuttle and look around and see how big the hole in the wing was if we had moved heaven and earth maybe there would have been a way to rescue them and a couple years later when we changed a lot of things and the next shuttle flew it was triumphant sort of a way to venerate Rick and his crew and every ship that has ever flown in space since then has been better because of the sacrifice that Rick made I'm glad we got a chance to sing together too this is a soyuz spaceship it's the third spaceship that i flew after twice on space shuttles Atlantis and endeavour this is the workhorse of taking people to the space station and back Soyuz it's a Russian word for a union soviet ski soyuz Soviet Union because it unifies the earth and the space station and it's just barely big enough for three people and it's just a tiny little capsule you want to make it as small as possible because that makes it easier to push into space if you're claustrophobic this would not be a good job I mean that's that's business class on a Soyuz right there that's as good as it's going to get I was real lucky to be the like the pilot or the copilot of the Soyuz and and it was a great way to get to space and a real nice tough safe reliable way to get back to earth this is a still from a YouTube video and that guitar is a Larry vay acoustic guitar parlor guitar made in Vancouver Canada and it is up on the space station right now in fact it's been up there since the summer of 2001 and it's put there because lots of astronauts are musicians and we're a long way from home and it's nice on holidays and a tee at parties in the evening you know when you're just trying to be a group of people to play songs that we all love and know and my son who was really helping me with social media my son Evan said dad you should do a version of Space Oddity and I was like Space Oddity you can't cover Bowie you know it's like covering Bach or covering Supertramp or something it's not going to happen and besides Space Oddity is about an astronaut dying in space I don't want to sing that I'm living up here but my son far wiser in these things than I am he said dad I'll rewrite the words for you but you should just do it it's it's a classic tune lots of people want you to just make a version of it so I in my little sleeping pod and just did a little karaoke along with David listening to him in one ear singing into the microphone but then Evan my son Wade back in and said dad it's got to be video you know you're in space no one's gonna believe it if you don't have a video but that's like Evan I'm the commander of a space ship I'm busy up here you know I I I can't he said if you don't do it you will regret it for the rest of your life okay so a Saturday afternoon when I was supposed to be doing something else I set this up and I I took a camera and I just like velcroed it to the wall hit record I had a little pad playing of the nice audio track that I'd done with em and Joe and I just sang along with myself and dinner did floating and it took about I don't know an hour and a half floating around different places in the station sing along with myself here sing along over there float the guitar down them the Japanese module here and then float around and just sing along once with myself and then I shipped it all down control to Major Tom [Music] we got permission from Bowie and his organization who loved the audio track but on the night before I came home the video was done and haven't released it to the world and this video by the time I landed like 12 hours later had been seen seven million times and but for me the best part was that Bowie loved it he he saw it he said it was you know maybe the most poignant version of the song ever done I never got to meet him in person I wish I had but I'm delighted that Evan talked me into doing this I'm proud of how the song came out but for me the best part was that David Bowie finally got to fly in space which he'd always dreamed of I hope you enjoyed looking at these pictures with me you should do that sit down and go through pictures and remind yourself of the special moments in your life you

Channel: WIRED

Views: 1,490,641

Rating: 4.9663153 out of 5

Keywords: astronaut, astronauts, canadian, international space station, nasa, chris hadfield, space oddity, space oddity outer space, space oddity music video, astronaut training, chris hadfield history, chris hadfield astronaut, astronaut chris hadfield, chris hadfield interview, astronaut interview, chris hadfield 13 moments, canadian astronaut, nasa astronaut, astronaut facts, chris hadfield life, canadian astronaut chris hadfield, chris hadfield answers, wired

Id: TYMa0HWrFRU

Length: 16min 31sec (991 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 27 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/BeyondLost1]

Thanks for sharing

[u/TryingToBeHere]

I love John Cleese. He ia my favorite Moon-walker.

[u/oceansjb]

I like this guy , but I’ve been seeing him everywhere lately.