Chris Hadfield's Post-Space Odyssey

On this week’s TechKnow,  Phil Torres chats with one of his all-time idols and internet sensations, former Commander of the International Space Station,  Chris Hadfield. 

Known for his audacious and talented musical performances and his viral videos of what life inside the ISS is really like, Commander Hadfield takes some time to tell TechKnow about what motivates him now and what’s the next great unknown he wants to tackle. Hadfield also explains the roots for his inherent space curiosity illustrated in his latest book “You Are Here.”

Phil Torres, "TechKnow" host: On the ISS, you are working in a small space, but you are somehow connected to the entire globe?

Chris Hadfield: You feel really connected. You know when you listen to the popular music about space flight, if you listen to the words of Rocket Man by Elton John or Space Oddity by David Bowie or Astronaut by Simple Plan, it’s metaphor for loneliness but it’s not lonely at all. You are going around the whole world every 90 minutes.  You see all seven billion people constantly and on the radio you are talking to people, engineers, and astronauts and scientists from all around the world so it’s busy. You feel more like you are a dispatcher in Grand Central Station than you do feel loneliness. 

Phil Torres: You have a way of really connecting to the human side of space travel, how do you think you do that?

Hadfield: When I was a kid, they were first going to the moon. In fact in July 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking on the moon, I was watching it.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was the first great reality TV.  No matter what happened to those guys on the moon, NASA just said we are going to show this to the whole world, if these guys swear, if they crash, if they make a stupid mistake, if they succeed, we are going to share this with the world in real time. It was also immensely impactful.  So I think it kind of convinced me, even as a nine or ten year old boy, that if you are going to be lucky to have a really rare and magnificent experience, share it with people. Don’t keep it to yourself.  

Phil Torres: What is the main difference between the first time you arrived in space and looked at Earth versus this last time when you left the space station and you knew that that would be maybe the last time ever you looked at Earth from space?

Hadfield: If you and I had just ridden on a rocket ship and the engines had just shut off and we had just gone weightless, both of us, the first thing we want to do is float over to the window and look at the world. The natural initial reaction is we would want to point out things to each other that were familiar to us. We would go “hey, look there is Paris, France. I went there when I was 10 years old and sat on the banks of the Seine and had a croissant.”  That part right there is how you start seeing the world. It is sort of like looking at old photographs, but that fades really quickly and after a while you start to see Paris differently. You don’t see it through the filter of your own personal experience.

Phil Torres:  So it takes some of the most advanced technology that man has ever created just to get that kind of deep realization that we are all in this together?

Hadfield:  It occurred to me that we are all buddy breathing out of the same scuba tank. It’s worth thinking about.  Extensive travel as anybody who has done it really changes your perspective of the world. It’s hard to hate, to blindly hate some subset of our own species.  It’s much easier to hate when you are ignorant. I really think the necessity to see things globally is vital if we want to break down some of the natural localized barriers that all of us are subject to and a lot of us are raised with.  The more people can actually see the world for what it is and not just through the filter of a local set of biases, I think the better chance we all have for making good decisions.