CANADA’S SOCIAL ASTRONAUT
Chris Hadfield has become a Twitter supernova and now he has a book to boot.
An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth Chris Hadfield Random House
Chris Hadfield has a concise description of stepping out of a shuttle to do a spacewalk, finally seeing space without a spaceship all around him.
“Feral,” he calls it — like sitting calmly in a living room and suddenly being face-to-face with a tiger.
The funny thing about Chris Hadfield’s book is that no one has written one like it before.
Canadians have a huge appetite for space stories, especially those that tell about the human experience rather than the technology. Yet the stories mostly go untold.
Many people, for instance, won’t remember that Hadfield is the second Canadian to go on a long mission aboard the International Space Station. Bob Thirsk preceded him, but the Canadian Space Agency banned almost all media contact before, during and even after that mission.
Then Hadfield came along, and he found Twitter. He used it long before the launch, too. My favourite tweets were the ones during training, where he told and showed how astronauts and cosmonauts prepare, and how they live during training.
And now there’s a book. It isn’t about adventure, in the traditional sense. It’s more about how a small group of people prepare to tackle an expedition and minimize the adventure side of things. And where he’s had moments of crisis, they aren’t things that most of us would recognize as hugely important.
For example, in training to be an RCAF fighter pilot he had one bad flight with an instructor, and was almost sent for extra training — step one toward getting kicked out of the program. (The instructor relented and let him continue. Otherwise, no fighter career, and no astronaut career.)
Then there was the soap incident. On his first spacewalk, Hadfield got something in his eye. He actually tried to rub his eye while wearing a visor. It started to sting, his eyes ran, he went temporarily blind. They made him vent oxygen from his helmet into space to blow away the irritant, and even considered ending the spacewalk in case it was a leaking chemical that might kill him. Luckily his vision cleared a little and he kept going.
The chemical turned out to be the anti-fog cleaner that they wipe their visors with. He had left a little soapy residue.
I remember watching that moment live on NASA’s TV coverage of the spacewalk. While Hadfield minimized it at the time, it was a sensitive moment, a Canadian installing the Canadarm2 on the space station. No one wanted to cancel that.
There are insights here into the tremendous focus of the space business. One astronaut saying: “There is nothing more important than what you are doing right now.” Another: “There’s no situation so bad that you can’t make it worse.” That’s not pessimism; it’s how they stay sharp. An unprepared astronaut, he notes, is a dead astronaut.
He tells candidly about the balance of a high-pressure space career and family life. NASA must deal with questions like what to do if an astronaut dies in space, as there’s no storage for bodies. (Float the astronaut away on a last spacewalk? Let him/her burn up in a discarded supply ship? And what are the chances that the kids will find out through news coverage?)
This is the side of Canada’s space program missing for so many years. Communiqués approved by the minister’s office cut out the human side, the type of story where you can imagine an astronaut coming home at the end of a day and saying, “Hey, guess what happened to me today!” Yet this is what people most want to understand about space.
Hadfield doesn’t see the space station mission or his flight about the shuttles and Mir as his only achievements. He has a special pride in having to served as a capcom, firmly on the ground.
A capcom (short for capsule communicator) is the one person at Mission Control who speaks directly to a crew in space. Tradition says this has to be an astronaut; a crew with a problem wants someone who knows the feeling of being in orbit (or, in astronaut language, on orbit.) Hadfield served 25 missions as a capcom, which means knowingly intimately what each mission is about and helping crews get through them. He was NASA’s chief capcom for a while, an unusual honour for a non-U.S. citizen.
He was also NASA’s director of operations in Russia for two years, which says a huge amount about NASA’s trust in him, and his close affinity for Russian language, culture and people.
Yet what we will remember most is his tremendous ability to show us the tiny, beautiful details, in Twitter and YouTube.
I talked to his wife, Helene, while he was in orbit and she summed it up perfectly: “He just thinks everything is so great and cool and wonderful and he wants people to feel it too.”