Did the folks Welcome to the conversations. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to fly in space, you know, to walk in space, to work in space. I can't imagine what it was like. But our next guest has done all of that. Chris Hadfield is an astronaut, and he's been an astronaut, he was a fighter pilot. He's a writer, plays music as well. He joins us, Chris Hadfield walking to the program.
My pleasure. Thanks.
And in addition to those like just seemingly incomprehensible things that I've done, I've also flown three rocket ships to leave Earth and then flown them back down to land. It's just it amazes me actually to think of some of the stuff that's possible in life.
Got amazing clarity in our vision. Here we're talking to you on zoom. Our radio listeners wouldn't understand that. But what camera are you using it?
Yeah?
I have a nice camera, and when COVID hit, I thought, gosh, if I can't be there in person, I should get a good so I could describe it for you. It's a Sony A seven R with an auto focus, pretty good zoom kind of lens, and so it provides a really nice crisp image. And I have a You probably have a nice microphone, but I have a good Roady studio microphone as well. I just if you can't be there in person, it's nice to get as close as you can. Way better than the cameras we had on
the Space station. They were pretty fuzzy and slow.
Where did it all start? I mean that you are a unique person to achieve the things you've done, and to qualify for the things you've done, to be selected for the things you've done. I'm always intrigued in this, the genesis of genius and high achievement. Where does it start?
Well, I'm no genius, but the genesis of the path of life that I followed. Well, obviously you know I'm the descendant of hundreds and hundreds of generations of folks who have chosen to explore instead of chosen to stay in one place. My great grandfather chose to leave his place of birth and travel to Canada and settle there, and he was hugely inspiring to me. My middle name is named for him, Austin, and then as a kid growing up, he was valued and revered. I knew him
when I was little. One of my first memories is running through rain drops and my great grandfather, Austin hadfield in his Yorkshire acts, which I don't know how to do, but he said, you ran so fast, you ran between the rain drops. It's my first memory in life. And my dad was a pilot, and so aviation was always something nearby.
At least I knew my dad flew. But what really got.
My attention was the chance to not just fly in the atmosphere, but to fly in space. Watching television, you know, with Star Trek, watching two thousand and one, a space odyssey that was, you know, when I was eight years old or nine years old or something, and they were terrific, sort of like X Men or you know, Guardians of the Galaxy, sort of this great, fantastic, cool, inspiring but fake idea. But what really convinced me was that at
the same time people were actually doing it. You know, Yuri Gagarin flew in space when I was just learning to walk, and then Al Shepherd flew just a month later, and then more and more people were flying in space. Valentino Tiroshkova went up and spent several days in space.
And then there was this race to the Moon and the summer that I turned ten years old with Mike Collins orbiting, the little ship undocked from Mike and descended down and landed on the surface of the Moon with Neil Armstrong at the controls and Buzz Aldrin beside him, and I just thought, this is my fantasy, but it's a reality. This is an actual thing that people do now for the first time in all of history, this is happening. Well, I'm alive, and this is maybe.
Something that I could do.
And so to me, there couldn't have been anything more inspiring than that human achievement and the realization that that was open to me if I chose to pursue a life that would allow it to happen.
And so yeah.
That's where I got my inspiration from.
So many questions from that little few sentences there. Firstly, did you make me al Armstrong?
Yes, yeah I did.
I was lucky enough to serve as an astronaut for twenty one years, so I met everybody, all of the cosmonauts. We also have a professional society called the Association of Space Explorers, and if you've if you've been above one hundred kilometers from the surface, and especially if you've orbited the world at least once, you can join. And so I know everybody from all of the nations of the world. I was president of the Association of Space Explorer and so yeah, I met Neil a few times. And it's
and Mike Collins and Buzz Buzz is still alive. And I know, but Buzz is in my phone. In fact, we could give Buzz a call. But uh uh, it's it's lovely to have a chance to meet the folks that were larger than life, that you you idolize, and to find out that they're just people and that they managed to do these things despite their imperfections and despite their humanness. Uh there there, they were just incredibly focused
and capable people. And I found that very satisfying and enabling and humbling and and I honor their achievements.
Yeah, I'm digressing, But did you have a chance to speak to Mike Collins. Mike Collins at one stage the loneliest man in the in the universe universe, I suppose you'd call it that when when he's capsule is on the other side of the moon and he's got no communication with the rest of the world. Did you have a chance to talk to those I did issues with that.
I didn't spend very much time with Mike, but I got to spend some time with him in Washington. Actually, it was during one of the people liked to notice that, Hey, it's been a round number since we did something, you know, it's been ten years, it's been twenty years, and it was one of the Apollo Landing anniversaries, and I was I think I went to.
The White House that day.
Anyway, it was just something in Washington, and Mike had gone on to head up the Smithsonian, that tremendous collection of museums in Washington, and I spent some time talking to him, and I'd read his book Carrying the Fire, which I think is still such an excellent capture of what it was like to do all those things, the type of mentality, his own views on it, the sardonic humor that he has, and I'd read his book a couple of times, and so it was just wonderful to
meet him and get to know him and to thank him for taking the risks that he did so that it would enable someone like me to have the courage to give it a try myself.
So you're this little kid watching Neil austrong Land on the moon and you're inspired to do it, But a billion other kids would have been inspired to the same. Why why you? Why were you ire to achieve that goal?
In truth, I watched Neil and Buzz step onto the surface of the moon about one hundred yards from where I am right now. Oddly enough, we didn't have a television at the time, but our neighbor did, and so I went over to the neighbor's place and there was a living room packed with people and my brother and I, you know, I was nine, my brother was eleven, and we were, you know, on a on a sofa. We were like on the back of it up again, with
our backs against the wall, watching it. And I couldn't believe. I guess I was just in awe struck wonder at what I was actually seeing, that this is this is possible.
And I remember that same week going outside and standing on the shore and looking up at the moon in the sky and trying to link those two events in my mind, and a lot of people, as you say, it was the most viewed event in human history at that time, something like one third of everybody on Earth was following along with Neil and Buzz and Mike, you know, which is crazy, just because it was the embodiment of human dreams and we've been wondering about the Moon forever
and a lot of people, I think dreamed about being an astronaut, or hoped to be an astronaut, or wanted to be an astronaut, and those are important first steps, but the actual critical step is to decide to be an astronaut, and that's an entirely different thing. I hope to be an Olympic athlete, but I've never decided to be one, and I'm never going to be one, because all I've got going is hope. But if I truly decided to be an athlete, even at this stage, then
it's still possible. There are some Olympic events that don't require the fitness of an eighteen year old, you know. There are some that are just like hand eye skills, yeah, archery or something, and so it's not impossible. It's probably beyond my ability. But when I was nine, just turning ten, I thought, I'm going to grow up to be something. Why don't I grow up to be that? That's the coolest thing going on that I can possibly imagine.
It.
Even to think about it gets my heart going, So I want to do that. So then if I decide to be an astronaut, then I realize what DoD Neil and Mike and Buzz do that I don't know how to do yet, and I need to start learning how to do those things. So they they train underwater for spacewalks, I need to learn to swim. I need to learn to scuba dive. They understand orbital mechanics and control theory. I need to go to university and study something complicated, so I need to do well in middle school and
high school. They fly in space, so I need to learn to fly. So as soon as I turned thirteen, I'm going to join the air Cadets and learn about meteorology and airmanship and then eventually learn to fly gliders and powered airplanes. And I never, I never once counted on being an astronaut, but I used the lure and the possibility of being an astronaut in order to help make all the little decisions of what I ought to
do next in life. And I found it a wonderful help, because if you don't know what you're dreaming of being. Then how do you choose what to do next? Is your life just the titillation of your nerve endings or is there anything beyond that? And so I was lucky enough at that early age to be hugely inspired by what other people had done, enough to use it to then guide the decisions for the rest of my life.
Chris Headfeld is my guest today. He will be an Adelaine on July third, and I know we won't be able to completely satisfy your curiosity, but he will July the third at the Convention Center. Chris Hadfield's Journey to the Cosmos back shortly. Folks talking to Chris Hadfield on conversations today, if you just tuned in a legendary astronaut, author, musician, He'll be an Adelaide on July the third at the
Convention Center. But if you just tuned in, he watched Lea Armstrong and buzzolden Land on the Moon, is inspired to be that and to do that, and decides to be an astronaut. But you must have been a smart kid, You must have been instinctively you know what I mean by that. We speak to these people who've got genius intellect, but they breezed through school. Did you breathe through school?
I'm Canadian and I went to a good school system. I'm lucky to have grown up in a country with a good, pretty much universal school system. And what we did when I was about second grade, third grade, they tried to identify the kids that were doing really well in school and maybe allow them to advance a grade rather than spend one more year slogging through grade three or third grade or whatever. And so they allowed me
to do grade three and four in one year. And they also went around to the schools where the kids were doing well, and they gave them aptitude tests and IQ tests and such. And they took even though I lived on a farm kind of out in the middle of nowhere, they thought, let's put together a thing, and they called it an enrichment program, sort of an experimental program.
And this poor school bus driver had to drive to all of these remote addresses where the kids had done well on an IQ test and pick us up individually and drive us for two hours each day each way to get to this school where and now they got this room full of kids who can do well on an IQ test and We had the same teacher for multiple years, and we didn't study reading and writing and arithmetic.
We did puzzles and we memorized Robert's service poems, and we played the stock market, and we went on field trips and it was pretty unusual education for grades five, six, and seven. And yeah, I never It wasn't until school got very complicated, you know, in postgraduate university that I really had to work hard. Most schooling came relatively straightforward to me, and so I didn't develop very good study habits.
You know, if it.
Comes easily, then you don't You don't really know how to build a brick wall if you don't know how to lay each individual brick along the way. And I really had to work hard when I got to mechanical engineering at university and realized I can't just intuitively fake this and pick it up. I've got to actually learn how to learn. And that really stood me in good stead.
Then when I did postgraduate degrees and became a test pilot, which was one of the most academically complicated years of my life, and then the twenty one years I served as at ASTRONA. So yeah, to be an astronaut you need a healthy body. You need a good, active, curious mind, a burning desire, and then a work ethic that that will keep you happily motivated for decades.
You do more than talk at these functions, don't you. You've got brniand audio visual obviously, photography is a passion of yours, and i'd imagine you do that. Well, you play guitar and see, yeah, which which we'll get to it, we'll get we'll get to that in a minute. But so all the way through you go and fly in the American the American Navy.
Yeah, I was on exchange. I was posted as a military where posted to go fly on exchange with Yeah, So I was a test pilot with the United States Air Force and I did an exchange tour as a test pilot with the United States Navy, even though I
was a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force. And then after all that, I got selected by the Canadian Space Agency and then they posted me, uh detailed me maybe as right word to NASA, and I worked as a Canadian but within the NASA Astronaut Corps for twenty one years.
Tell us about that your famous for accepting a Russian BOMBA when you're doing the no red vision did I did.
Australia and Canada both fly F eighteens, and I was one of the very first Canadian F eighteen pilots. When the airplanes were just coming off the assembly line, I would get into an airplane that had seven hours on it, you know, the airplane had just done one acceptance flight, it had flown to Cold Lake, Alberta. And then I was climbing into fly it. So very lucky brand new airplanes.
And the first deployment or role that I had with the Royal Canadian Air Force was as a combat fighter pilot during the Cold War, and at the time, the Soviets were practicing attacks on North America and they had these big heavy bombers that are called Bear bombers. They had various models of them, some for anti submarine but some of them were for releasing cruise missiles and they could carry fifteen or sixteen cruise missiles in the belly
of these bombers. And so I would be sleeping in the quick reaction facility with my jet in the room next to me, plugged in and alive, and the horn would go off in the middle of the night. A big blaring clackson on the wall, and you would leap out of bed from sound to sleep, throw on your flight suit in your g suit, race climb up the ladder, jump into the airplane, be doing up your straps and starting the engine simultaneously to be airborne twelve minutes after
the alarm had got off. You had to be airborne within twelve minutes. So you imagine tonight when you go to bed at three o'clock in the morning, if your fire alarm went and you had to be actually taking off the ground in your at eighteen twelve minutes after waking up, and then race out over the Atlantic and intercept the Soviet bombers before they could get to the line where.
They could release their cruise missiles.
And normally they were just like on their way down to Cuba, and they were just taking a shortcut through Canadian airspace, so normally it wasn't actually a big threat. But when the horn went off, you don't know, and you're a fully armed F eighteen with two heat seeking missiles and two radar seeking missiles and a nose full of bullets, and so it's deadly serious. And I did
that eight different times. I did the very first intercept of Soviet bombers with at F eighteen, and it was fascinating, challenging, exciting, daunting, a little bit nerve wracking because it was the very first time, but this amazing feeling of getting closer and closer, coming up from behind, pulling up on the wingtip of this huge lumbering bomber with big counter rotating propellers, roaring.
You could hear it through the glass of my cockpit and the and my my helmet itself, this big throbbing roar, this huge bomber, and trying to figure out why are they here today and what is their real purpose? And trying to look through the windows and see what there was up to.
Did you speak can you speak to them? You know?
Differenties.
However, one of my intercepts was on Christmas Eve and we were scrambled on Christmas Eve, raced out over the Atlantic, flew on their wing, and as we peeled off, they were continuing south, and so we handed off to some American interceptors that were coming up. As we peeled off on our radio frequency, we heard many Christmas so like they knew what frequency they were on we were on, and I didn't speak Russia at the time. I since
lived in Russia for about five years. I was NASA's director in Russia, and I a director of operations in Russia and I and I was the pilot of a Russian spaceship. So I learned to speak Russian reasonably well.
But at the.
Time I didn't, you know, I didn't speak any and so it was quite It made me laugh to hear Merry Christmas with a thick Russian accent over my radio frequency.
Chris Hadfield is my guest, folks, legendary Canadian astronaut. He will be at the convention Center on Chris Hadfield's Journey to the Cosmos. Tickets at ticket Tech. I'm sure you'll be entertained. We'll be back shortly. Welcome back. Everybody's talking to Chris Hadfield on conversations today. He's a retired astronautic in space. He's worked in space, He's played guitar in space. He'll be at the Adelaide Convention Center on July the third.
You get accepted into the obviously the astronaut program in the Canadian wonder how do you actually get the gig of commanding a space shuttle on a trip to the International Space Station. How does that work out? How do you do that?
It's a long road ho for sure, and a lot of a lot of luck needed, but mostly a lot of hard work when you well, when the application process went out in Canada, coast to coast, there were five three hundred and thirty people applied and we didn't know how many they would they would accept, and it was going to be a six month selection process. But I went through each of the wickets and it was nerve wracking, but eventually they chose four of us out of.
Fifty three hundred and.
So of the four of us, I was immediately sent down to start training with NASA because I had an international operational flying background. And then I started training with NASA and had a year of astronaut candidate training. It's just sort of the basics. You know, orbital mechanics, how space shuttles work, how space stations work, how all of
these things, the fundamental skills that you need. And then once you've graduated from the astronaut candidate phase, then you are eligible to start doing various work within the office and your eligible for flight assignment. And I worked various jobs. I worked at in Florida getting Cruise ready to launch
and welcoming Cruise when they came back. But eventually I got called into the Chief Astronaut's office and in the corner of the building that the astronaut program is in and telling me that I'd been selected for a Space Shuttle flight and we were going to go help build the Russian space station Mir.
And so now.
There's well, I forget what it was sixteen months of intense training seven days a week for the next sixteen months to get ready to go and help build Mir,
their space station. So there I am going to be operating the Canadian arm to attach on board the American Shuttle to attach a huge new Russian section to the Russian space station Mir, and on all the training that goes along with that, studying Russian language, I'm traveling to rush to understand the crop, complex docking systems, just endless, endless work, all focused on the November day when we're going to be on board Space Shuttle Atlantis and launch.
So it's and it.
Is both a tremendously long slog of training and education, multiple university degrees and languages and theory and complexity completely unrecognized and unheralded, but all focusing on this incredible graduation day when the engines of Space Shuttle Avantis are going to light below you and take you on the greatest
adventure that you can imagine. So that process, those little watershed days when when you're selected as an astronaut or when you're assigned to a spaceflight, each of those has to be taken as a huge reward on the path to the ultimate dream of a boy like me to fly in space.
So two of the car it's two of your quotes that I've heard that fascinate me. The Shuttle is the most complicated flying machine ever built. I hadn't thought about that, you know, I would have thought that, you know, the Moon module would. So can you give me a brief appreciation space a Space Shuttle, and then I'll get to the second quote.
Sure, the Space Shuttle launched as a rocket ship, and then it flew as its own space station, and it could stay in space for almost three weeks as sort of an independent, self contained, self powered space station. And then at the end of all that, that same machine that launched as a rocket, that flew as a space station, you know, turned it around, slowed it down, and you flew it as an airplane back to land on a
runway with like tires on a runway. And it was really primitive technology because it was designed in the late sixties and early seventies. So the computers, the main general purpose computers that controlled the Space Shuttle, had one hundred and twenty eight K of memory k not megabytes, but kilobytes, this little, tiny, primitive old computer. But that's the best they had at the time when they locked in the design of the Space Shuttle, So that meant the cockpit
was incredibly manual. There were about five hundred switches in the cockpit of the shuttle, and the combination of failures that could cause a shuttle to not make it successfully to orbit was staggering. And to be able to successfully fly the shuttle and take it through launch and then rendezvous and docking and then undocking and then deorbit and landing was such a myriad of skill sets and to be part of the crew that the flight crew took
four people to fly it. The commander is the only one with hands of the controls, but four people to keep track of all those systems for all the things it could inevitably at any time go wrong.
I'll be lates to the second qualit with the prospect of going up in a spice shuttle, You're no, You're going to be either floating gloriously in spice within minutes or you'll be dead within minutes. Should be all the floating gloriously in spice or you'll be dead. It's pretty yeah, traumatic thought to contemplate.
It's true, Parnsey, But everything worth doing in life has risk, everything, and you just have to decide what risks are worth taking. And you do it often unconsciously, like how am I going to get to work today? Or what am I going to do this weekend? Or should on vacation? Should I go bungee jumping? Or should I get married or should I whatever? Everything worth doing in life has risk, and you need to decide if something is worth taking a risk for, then how am I going to try
and minimize the risk. And I decided when I was nine years old that exploring the universe was worth taking a risk for, and so that changed everything for me. My job is not to worry and to rub my rabbit's foot, or to pray or whatever, or to shiver, but my job is now now that I've decided this is a risk worth taking. My job is to change who I am so that my skill set is as high as I could make it, so I can be part of the team of people that's going to succeed
at this thing. And you recognize that what you're doing is risky. But I used to be a test pilot, where people die on a regular basis. We need test pilots in society. But there are professions where we just sort of expect people to die, like soldiers or police officers or firefighters. You know, it's tragic, but there are some jobs that have the service, jobs that have risk, and astronauts one of those. But I just thought, hey, I'm going to die eventually, you know, get over it.
That's okay. But it's the life that I lead that really matters. And this is really important to me. This is a risk worth taking. I'm going to work for decades in order to be part of a group of people that hopefully can beat the odds and actually safely get to space and the.
Odds of dying.
That day in November on my first space flight, we're one in thirty eight of dying in the first nine minutes of that flight, one in thirty next time in your crowd of people, and you look around at thirty eight people and think, you know, one of us is going to die today if we choose to do these things.
Would you do that thing? Would you?
You know? And so it was an intriguing set of odds. But we were good qualified people, and the folks that built the machine did a nice job, and we safely got to space and back and it was absolutely worth taking the risk. But I think it's important not to fool yourself there. We're going to be floating effortlessly in space or we're going to be dead. But either way, this is a risk I'm willing to take, and my job is way more important than just being afraid.
Chris Hadfield is my guest folks. Retired astronaut, but he does all sorts of things. He's an amazing speaker. I've listened to some of the talks that he's done. He'll be here on July the third at the convention Center. You can get your tickets through Ticketech. Chris Hadfield's Guide to the Cosmos. We'll get him into the space station. We're getting walking in space, we're getting blind in space, not with alcohol, but with vision back shortly talking to
Chris Hadfield on Conversations Today. If you just tuned in, you need to go back and listen to the start on the podcast. He's an astronaut, he's flying space shuttles. He's a commander of a space miss he goes to the International Space Station. What's it like living? I mean, you're up there for two or three months. I mean some have been there a lot longer, but you're up You're a commander of a mission in the International Space Station and you're there for two or three months. Things
like weightlessness, I'm fascinated by that. Do you how do you adjusted that? Yeah?
I was there for almost six months, so around the world two thousand, six hundred and fifty times, and as you say, weightless for every second of that. Weightlessness is the most joyful, liberating, hilarious change of rules.
That you could imagine.
Imagine in the studio where you're sitting right now, if suddenly you could fly, you could just effortlessly, with the tiniest push of.
Your finger fly around the room and it never ended.
Or if you wanted to go outside, you just you know, push yourself through the door and soar out, you know, out into the emptiness of everything. It's it's spectacular. It is so much fun. It's easier than a bird. The bird has to flapping its wings. You are now a superhero who has a super power and you can fly. And I marveled at it and played with it and celebrated it for the every second of the almost six months that I was living on board the spaceship. But
it's not just the weightlessness, Qurnzy. It is that you are going around the world every ninety minutes, so the whole world is pouring by underneath you, and it doesn't look like a map. It looks like this gorgeous Christmas ornament of color and texture. And the angle between you and the sun and the Earth is constantly changing because of your speed, So the shadows are moving and the textures are being revealed, and so there's this mesmerizingly gorgeous.
Spectacle out the window.
And you're part of Out of the eight billion people that are alive, there are just maybe three or six of you that are actually in a position to experiences right now. So the feeling of just wonder and privilege and rarity of the event is with you all the time, and you know, you're running two hundred experiments and fixing the toilet and occasionally doing spacewalks, and you know, living your.
Life up there.
But at no point did I take it for granted, nor did I lose sight of the amazing good fortune that I had to be one of the crew on board the International Space Station, even when I was the commander.
Like, so I'm going to take you back to Earth now, but I'm coming back to this by shuttle. What's it like when you have to experience gravity after having six months of witlessness.
It's so criminally unfair, Like it's just it was, it's so weird, Like you get so used to weightlessness because it's effortless. Your heart shrinks and your you know, you can fly and you never have to lift a finger, you don't have to your head up. You know, it's just so wonderful and liberating. And now suddenly this invisible oppressor is literally grinding you into the ground. It's trying to crush you under this unseen heel, and it's just
like you have to lift your arm up. I even noticed as soon as I get back, I'd forgotten that my tongue has weight and I started to talk and I'm like, how was going on? This feels weird because my lips and tongue I'd forgotten I'd had a weightless tongue for six months.
And it's just it just seems so.
Like, why are all these people putting up with this? Why are we taking this like sheep? You know you could be weightless, and yet here we are letting this, this invisible force drive us into the dirt. And it's actually quite nauseating because your balance system isn't used to it. And even though you're strong because you've been working out two hours every day, your skeleton has gotten weaker because
it wasn't fighting gravity every day. And so I'd lost about eight percent of my skeleton and my hips and my upper femur, my upper bone, and my legs. So I had osteoporosis. So I had a great risk of breaking my hip if I fell. Actually, two of my astronaut friends have fallen within a few weeks of landing and broken their hip just because the bones are more fragile. So you have to be careful when you get back,
and you can recover from all those things. It takes a while, but it is imminently worth the experience regardless, and if you have to do a little rehab at the end, so what, I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
If find us for playing music in space, people can go to YouTube and see Chris head Through playing David Bowie's Space Ondity. The complication of playing guitar. It didn't sound as simple as it sounds. What intrigues me? How did you get that old caistral banking to it?
Well, I've always been a musician, and I played trombone and elementary.
And high schoo and university.
But guitar is a wonderful instrument because it's so portable and you can make a lot of sound with the guitar. And there's a guitar permanently on the space station. It was put there by the NASA psychiatrists because art is important for mental health and music is important. It predates history, so it's wonderful to have the guitar up there, and there's always at least one astronaut plays a little bit
of guitar. But I decided, at other people's sort of prompting, to try and do a version of Space Oddity, which is a complicated song, and Bowie was just a legend of.
A music creator and an artist.
But I did a vocal track, and then I loved the prescience or the vision that Bowie had had of what it was going to feel like to fly in space. He wrote that song before We walked in the Moon, when he was just like nineteen or twenty years old. And yet when I sang it in space as he'd been there, and that's what really convinced me when I listened to my own sort of karaoke track of singing along with David, and then I put the guitar music underneath.
And as you say, playing guitar is weird without gravity, because there's nothing to hold the guitar in front of you. It's not hanging from a strap.
It's not being.
Pushed onto your leg by gravity and with your left hand. For the guitar players, when you move on up and down the frontboard, the guitar just moves left or right with you.
There's nothing.
So if you watch me in those videos playing guitar, I have it pinched under my bicep to hold it so that the guitar has some stability so I can play it and then once I had I just use garage band on an iPad to get a click track and get enough. And then once I had that, then I sent it to some friends on Earth and they they put other instrumental instrumentals in with it, just to fill it out as a full song. But it's my voice and my guitar work, and then my my band
back on Earth. And and then I floated around one day singing along with myself one a couple hours on a Saturday when when I had a little bit of free time, and uh and made that video. My son actually made that video, and I'm just you know, it was just sort of a father son project with some of my musician friends. And and hundreds of millions of people have seen that video because I think it allows them to maybe more intuitively see what it's actually like to live on board of spaceship.
I don't think we can ever get that feeling. It's like when you walk in space. I mean you've walked in space, or you've floated in space. The link, the tiny link to the station and it's so fragile you could be floating away. I mean, did that thought ever question money? You you went blind? You you were blinded temporarily. And when you're on your space walk, I know you try it, but Dan and saw it was there a field.
Well, yeah, Cornsy, I had contamination inside my suit. But imagine with you sitting there right now, if you've got something in your left eye, and you know how, like a bug flew into your left eye, and you know how it feels. Your eye just suddenly it's the most important part of your body because it hurts so much. The eyes are such valuable sensors in our body that they have a lot of pain receptors in them because
your body wants you to protect your eyes. But if one of them suddenly is malfunctioning and hurt, then it shuts and it tears up like crazy because your body's trying to flush the bug out of there with tears. But without gravity, the tears don't fall, the tears don't drain, they just get bigger and bigger. So now you have this bigger and bigger ball of contaminated tear or buggy tear on your eye. And it actually crossed the bridge of my nose and goosed across into my other eye,
and then both my eyes were blinded. And so there I was like, if it happened while you were sitting at your desk, you know, you'd be annoyed and you'd be trying to find a tissue and trying to wipe your eyes and maybe calling for somebody to help you or whatever. But I was out on a spacewalk and I couldn't even rub my eyes because they were inside my helmet, and so what do you do? So I called down a mission control and told them that something
contamination had blinded both my eyes. But I wasn't I was more irritated than anything, because every time you blink, you're blinded, and you don't suddenly die. You know, you can close your eyes for a few seconds and everything doesn't go away. You know, it's just you have four other senses. So being realistic, it's like, yeah, okay, I can't see, but there's a pretty good chance I'm going to see again as soon as I get this guck
out of my eyes, whatever it is. But there was no nice way to get it out of my eyes, And what I ended up doing was opening this one way valve on my neck, a little bit like a Frankenstein bolt on the side of my neck. I open up this valve, and that actually let the contaminated air flow out of my helmet into space while the new, clean, fresh, dry oxygen float in behind my head, up across my head, down across my eyes to help evaporate the contaminated tears
and then float out to space. It was a very weird feeling listening to as my oxygen, my little oxygen tank is trying to repressurize the entire universe. But eventually my eyes it was still blurry, but I could see well enough, and I closed the valve and got back to work, and it turned out it was just the anti fog, the mixture of m oil and soap that we used to keep the visor from fogging up. But if you put oil and soap in your eye, you know,
it hurts and your eyes can't see. And we actually changed to Johnson's No More Tears, which we probably should have used right from the beginning.
But the rest of.
The spacewalk, though, and your eyes are your greatest sense to see where you are. You can't taste it, you can't touch it. You know, you can't really hear space. I mean, the main sense that is letting you know where you are is the incredible spectrale. That's spectacle that's
pouring in through your eyes. And while I was south of Australia in the nighttime, just a little south of Tasmania, we went through the Southern Lights while I was outside of my spacewalk, and I had the lights shut off at the time, so I actually got to see the amazing and almost unprecedented human spectacle of surfing through the aurora of the world, of having it poor past me in the spaceship while I was outside. It's just unbelievably gorgeous and otherworldly.
And yet this is me. You know this, This is actually happening to me right now. I can see this.
And how am I going to incorporate this with the rest of my life? How am I going to this brief moment in time. How am I going to capture this properly so that later, you know, when I have a chance to really think about all the events of my life, I can somehow put it into context.
And I still marvel at it.
I read where you said if you were offered the opportunity to take a mission to Mars, you would jump at that opportunity, even if the chances of coming back, returning back to Earth with zero Do you still believe that? Would you still do that?
Yeah? Sure?
I mean is it really that important where you spend the last day of your life? I mean, I find it way more important to think about where what I have a chance to accomplish in my life.
And obviously, you know.
I need to think of family, and I wouldn't want to go and never see my wife, or my kids or my new grandchildren ever again, and so I need
to think about that. But the opportunity to do something right on the edge of human capability and the edge of human experience, and that isn't just a stunt where you know, you're just doing something that just to you know, get likes on the Internet, but where you're actually pushing the edge of what is possible and opening a door that can never be closed again that other people will be able to follow through and they will eventually get to the point where they can take it for granted,
like the magic of flying an airplane, where you don't even think about how crazy and magical it is, and yet thousands of people flying in air every day, and so to be on the avant garde of that and to be inventing and helping to improve the machines that allow us to do it, to the discovery of all the things you're going to have to find to make it possible, and then the wonder of somehow managing to land in a place that humans have never been before,
and then to start setting up the basic existence that is going to be a human settlement somewhere besides our own planet. We've been doing it on the space station for the last twenty five years, and we're right in the cusp now. I'm not just exploring the Moon, but starting to settle the Moon. A couple of four of my friends are going to the Moon next in February probably, and the Chinese have said categorically they'll be walking in the Moon by twenty thirty.
So that's happening right now. And Mars. It's still a lot further.
Away than most people think, but Mars is within our capability right now.
We need to make.
Better spaceships at better engines so that we don't kill everybody every time. We've never been closer.
There's so many questions I answered. Hopefully Chris can answer them for you. On July the third, Chris Hadfield's Journey to the Cosmos July the third at the convention set up such a great chat, Chris, Thank you so much for joining me.
ANSI I really enjoyed it.
It's a real pleasure to spend a little time with you, and I am greatly looking forward to being Adelaide on July third and talking to everybody there and answering questions with the audience and playing some music and showing some images that'll take your breathway.
It's going to be a fun night. Thank you, sir.
Thanks Chris, Chris Hadfield, Thank you folks for joining us.