Astronaut Chris Hadfield on 13 Moments That Changed His Life

In the days before selfies,

this was a cool selfie.

If 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.

[soft cymbals play]

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 Thomas Reiter,

a German cosmonaut on board 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

'cause 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.

[soft drums play]

In this picture,

I think I'm about five years old

and inside an instant Quaker Oats box.

My dad took this picture of me.

I 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 I got to be about nine years old,

that's when the very first two people walked on the moon.

[Neil Armstrong] One small step for man,

one giant leap for mankind.

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 taking 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.

[drums play]

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

in a little old two-seat airplane,

and his friend was getting sick in the back,

and my dad was like, We gotta 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!

And my Dad said, Well, look at this guy.

He's throwing up.

And they started talking,

and the guy offered him a job

'cause my dad was a brand new flight instructor.

And after my first space flight,

they named the airport after me,

and it's now Chris Hadfield Airport.

[drums play]

I decided to be an astronaut when I was nine 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 become a glider pilot.

I was only 15.

[drums play]

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 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.

Helena had given birth to him back in Ontario.

She'd moved out to Moose Jaw.

That's Kyle.

A hugely proud day.

Helena's so beautiful in this picture.

It's a good day.

[drums play]

I was a fighter pilot during the Cold War,

and 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.

So, I was sleeping in an alert facility

up in northern Quebec,

and the horn would go off in the middle of the night,

a 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, got in 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 bang it into the canopy

and not crash into anybody

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.

[guitar plays]

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.

[drums play]

I was so pleased when I got hired

as one of Canada's new astronauts

that I wasn't the only one with a mustache.

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 was 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 had only been astronauts for minutes [laughs]

when this picture was taken.

[drums play]

Oddly enough, one of the common questions is:

what does an astronaut do between space flights?

You know, as if we're sitting in a waiting room

or a lounge or something somewhere. [laughs]

But I was an astronaut for 21 years.

I was only in space for six months.

So, for 20 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 the spaceships were shaped like capsules,

and when Houston wants to talk to a spaceship,

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 space flight.

[drums play]

When I was a little kid in a 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 Canadarm,

Canadarm2, in fact, onto the space station.

[Man] By the way, Chris, your helmet-cam view

of the CGT looks like out of a training film.

I'd been training for it for four and a half years,

developing all of the procedures and everything

to be ready for this day

when I was outside on a space walk

helping to build the International Space Station.

When suddenly, exactly when this picture was taken,

one of my eyes was struck blind,

and was like, What's going on?

And my hand came up to rub my eye,

and of course I'm wearing a helmet,

boink off the helmet,

it's like how stupid is that?

Here I am an astronaut,

and I don't even know I can't rub my eye.

But without gravity,

the tears didn't drain.

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

'cause 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 gonna be for them

for 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

[makes hissing sound]

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,

the crusty stuff around my eyes as it evaporated, blinking.

Eventually, I could start to see again.

I told them, 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 anti-fog off my visor,

like a mixture of soap and oil,

I had gotten into my eye.

But since then, we've changed the anti-fog,

and so, we learned from it.

But it was my very first space walk

and a pretty interesting hurtle to have to cross

while trying to do my very first walk.

[guitar plays]

This picture is at Edwards Air Force Base

at the U.S. 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 want a chance to relax,

and we had parties every week,

but this guy in the cowboy hat,

his name's Rick Husband,

he was the Commander of Columbia.

[Man] Commander Rick Husband.

[Newscaster] Space shuttle Columbia

with a multitude of national

and international space research experience.

And 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 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.

We didn't even ask them to go outside on a space walk

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.

[drums play]

This is a Soyuz spaceship.

It's the third spaceship that I flew

after twice on space shuttles Atlantis and Endeavor.

This is the workhorse of taking people

to the space station and back.

Soyuz, it's a Russian word for union,

Sovetsky Soyuz, Soviet Union,

because it unifies the Earth and the space station,

and it's just barely big enough for three people,

it's just a tiny little capsule.

You want to make it as small as possible

'cause that makes it easier to push into space.

If you're claustrophobic,

this would not be a good job.

I mean, that's business class on a Soyuz right there.

That's as good as it's gonna get.

I was real lucky to be the pilot

or the co-pilot of the Soyuz,

and it was a great way to get to space

and a real nice tough, safe, reliable way

to get back to Earth.

[drums play]

This is a still from a YouTube video.

♪ In a most peculiar way ♪

♪ And the stars look very ♪

And that guitar is a Larrivee acoustic guitar,

a 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 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 gonna 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 a classic tune.

Lots of people want you to just make a version of it.

So, I floated 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, weighed back in,

and said, Dad, it's gotta be video, you know.

You're in space.

No one's gonna believe it if you don't have a video.

I was like, Evan, I'm the commander of a spaceship.

I'm busy up here, you know, I can't.

He said, If you don't do it,

you will regret it for the rest of your life.

So, I'm like, Okay.

So, a Saturday afternoon

when I was supposed to be doing something else,

I set this up,

and I took a camera and I just Velcroed it to the wall,

hit record,

I had a little iPad playing of the nice audio track

that I'd done with Em and Joe,

and I just sang along with myself

and did it 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 the Japanese module here,

then float around,

and just sing along once with myself,

and then I shipped it all down to the world.

♪ This is Ground Control to Major Tom ♪

♪ You've really made the grade ♪

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 Evan released it to the world,

and this video,

by the time I landed 12 hours later,

had been seen seven million times.

But for me, the best part was that Bowie loved it.

He saw it.

He said it was 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.

[upbeat electronic music]