Chris Hadfield: Prepared for Anything

Published by Interrobang Staff at November 10, 2013

Astronaut Chris Hadfield was the first Canadian to walk in space. In a time when fewer people are paying attention to the space program than ever before, Hadfield became famous by keeping the world posted about his space travels via twitter and other social media outlets. He also combined his musical talents with his space flights; he was the first person to record a song in space in 2012, and then he recorded a duet with Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies while he was in space, but it was his rendition of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” performed on board the International Space Station that went viral with over 15 million YouTube views. He stopped by the SiriusXM studios recently to talk about his experiences, and his new book, “An Astronaut’s Guide to Life On Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination and Being Prepared for Anything.” Excerpts from the interview appear below, and you can hear the interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio.

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Ron Bennington: Well, I feel like I know you, because I was following so much of what was happening on YouTube, and you and I grew up about the same time, where we used to look at astronauts on a daily basis. We lived through the Apollo Missions, and it was such a great thing because it felt like we all were a part of that, and it’s gotten away from that for awhile.

Chris Hadfield: It occurred to me recently, that first moon landing was the original reality TV. It’s what it was, it was honest, uncensored, unscripted, really interesting human experience, and presented to everybody in the world just exactly as it was going on, and had a huge reaction, as a result.

Ron Bennington: It was a fantastic bonding experience for the people of the world, because we all said, “Look what we’re doing…”

Chris Hadfield: Look what we can do, when we do things right. It’s pretty amazing.

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Chris Hadfield Talks About Direction In People’s Lives

Ron Bennington: What I’ve always admired about the space program is that we aimed big, we went after it, and I think that your life is a living example. When you aim big, you end up solving so many problems to get there.

Chris Hadfield: Yeah, I had no idea what it was going to turn out like, of course. I was just a little kid heading in a direction that I thought would be really interesting and cool, and might even work out. But, what I learned was keeping that long term goal in mind means that when you’re making all of those little decisions that you make regardless, you kind of almost unconsciously move your life along in a direction that suits you. You don’t even think about it. But, you’re moving yourself closer and closer toward that big end game and you move into jobs, and hobbies, and friends, and places that naturally suits you anyway. It’s really, the other thing is, those little decision and small events that happen, those actually are your life. Not if you’re ever commanding a spaceship in the end, but it’s those years in between, that’s your life. And if you’re heading in a direction that you like, then you tend to enjoy your life more, I think.

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Chris Hadfield Talks About His Attitude Towards Life

Ron Bennington: I wish I would have read this book when I was younger, because I think young people could read this, and pick up some of those concepts that designing your life does not mean making the end goal. Your life would not have been wasted if something would have come up, and there were a million things that could have come up,

Chris Hadfield: There were a million things that did come up…

Ron Bennington: But, you wouldn’t have felt like it was a wasted life?

hadfield book cover Chris Hadfield: Well, I consciously and unconsciously made a point of enjoying what I was doing along the way. I never said to myself – well, I could have said, because my idol was Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, they walked on the moon, and what I resolved when I was nine was, “I want to walk on the moon.” I still haven’t walked on the moon, so I could say, “pssshhh, I’m a failure,” right? I didn’t get to do what I dreamed about doing. But, instead, I tried to look at the whole thing and say: “Right now I am an engineer, I finished University – that’s a cool thing; I’m a fighter pilot – I’m flying F-18s, intercepting bombers off the coast of North America; after that, I’m a test pilot and I love what I’m doing at every single step along the way, and maybe someday, I’ll get to be an astronaut, but I can’t really control that, but what I’m doing right now, the skills I’ve gained along the way, this is a really cool thing that I’m doing and I’m loving it. If I get to do something else, great, but don’t say, “well yeah, I got to do this, but I never get to do that, and therefore I’m defining myself as a loser or a failure, or I’m even disappointed in myself.”’ Take pride in what has happened all along. It sounds kind of Boy Scout-ish, the attitude that dictates your life and how you view yourself and it’s good to have a long term goal in mind, but it’s even better to finish every single day going, “That was a great day, I’m really proud of what I did today, that was fun.”

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Chris Hadfield Talks About Finding The Joy In Hard Work And Adversity

Ron Bennington: There are so many things in the book that you take on, that some people would find humbling or beneath you and you put enjoyment into that work as well.

Chris Hadfield: Yeah, I really try to – let’s look at an example: I grew up on a farm and we grew corn and we stored a lot of the corn just in the barn. One day, we had the whole day working, we were having dinner, Dad went out to put a thermometer down into the corn because if it’s a little bit wet it will start to get heated and rot. And he came back in and said, “The corn is heating, we need to start shoveling and digging out the wet hot corn from the bottom and bringing it to the top to dry.” And as a family we went out and we shoveled corn all night. All night long. And that could have been like the worst day of my life, right? Miserable, hard, slogging, unending work, but we just kind of went, “Hey, we’re saving the day, we’re doing a cool thing here, we are working as a family.” We played games doing it, we all laughed about it, we took little breaks, we hurt our backs and our arms. And, at the end of it, after we had aerated the corn enough, we’d given it that drying, we’d saved a crop of corn. But, everyone in the family would look back as that was a hard physical day, but it wasn’t a miserable day just because it was really hard work, that was a triumph of a day, that was a great day. Almost because we just deliberately chose to define it that way.

Ron Bennington: And now you have that memory, you have a memory that you can hold onto which also comes up with challenges – no matter what you go after in life, the more struggle, I think the more you’re able to appreciate.

Chris Hadfield: Well, it gives you more opportunity to teach from it, for sure. And, you need to decide: How am I going to react to this thing? That’s really the only thing that you control. How am I going to react to this thing? This thing is happening, I’ve tried to set myself up as best as possible, I’ve tried to pay attention in advance, I’ve tried to get myself ready for this thing. But, all I can really control in how I react to things, is my personal feeling about it. I can’t control big events. So, I’ve spent my whole life trying to get ready, be ready in advance. Sweat the small stuff, think about the little details, visualize the stuff in advance. Not show up as an idiot, not show up unprepared, not show up going, “Well, I hope that doesn’t happen, because I haven’t thought about it.” Instead, do that stuff in advance, but then when you are there, make the most of it, do what you can and control your own reactions.

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Chris Hadfield Talks About The Miracle of Planet Earth

Ron Bennington: One thing that I got from watching your YouTubes because the oddest thing is that it doesn’t seem like you are that high above Earth, is seeing space in the back drop there, of how little breathable air there is in the known universe. Talk about a miracle, right?

Chris Hadfield: I was looking at one of the volcanoes around the world. My son, who did a lot of the social media, his name is Evan, he sent me an email and said, “Hey, Dad, Mount Etna is erupting, take a picture of Mount Etna,” down in Southern Italy. So, I did. While I was looking at Mount Etna, because it’s squirting stuff from the hot interior of the Earth, up into the atmosphere, I just started looking at this little, tiny slot, that we live in. In between the part of the magma that is cooled to a crust like on top of porridge – that’s where we live, this little cooled part on top. And above us, this incredibly thin atmosphere, where half of the air is in the first three miles. Basically, the only zone we can live in – we can’t live above 15,000 – 16,000 feet, half of our air, and really the entire livable zone is three miles. Think about how close three miles is, and that’s where we live, in that little skim of dirt and the three miles, and that’s it. That’s the space ship we all live on. That’s what keeps us alive. Walking around it looks like a guarantee, right? It looks endless, and boy, when you see it from above you realize what a lucky little sliver of habitable volume that we actually live in.

Ron Bennington: And that’s in the known universe, that’s everywhere that we’ve discovered so far. There is this tiny little thing, we’re there, and what are we doing? We’re bitching, we’re fighting, we’re shooting at each other, it’s amazing when you think – and talking about miracles, as if this one miracle in the universe wasn’t more than we could have ever hoped for.

Chris Hadfield: We get so wrapped up in our self-importance and so wrapped up in what is going on this afternoon, and the walls that are around us. Whether it’s our house or our property, or the fence that we put up, or the town, or whatever, how big your circle of consciousness is, and I wish – I did my best to invite people on board to see it, but I wish everybody could go for a hundred trips around the world in three or four days and just see where we live, and get a little perspective. And I’m not stupid or naive, possessions are valuable, and life is fragile, and there is competition for resources. It’s a complicated, age old, worldwide problem, but at the same time, we make some heinous decisions because we lack a bigger perspective. It’s maybe one of the biggest benefits of space exploration that we have, as it is one of the few things that really gives us a view of the whole world, all at once.

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Chris Hadfield Talks About Man Going To Mars

Ron Bennington: Do you think we can pull everybody together to look at that next big thing? Can we go to Mars? Can we go beyond?

Chris Hadfield: Oh, absolutely, it’s inevitable. A lot of people despair because of what is going on this afternoon, or this week, or even this month, or maybe this political cycle. There are always lots of reasons to despair or be cynical. That’s the easiest thing going, right? I can be cynical and despair at a drop of a hat, that’s just really a poor study of past patterns and history. After the Apollo Program – we started canceling moon landings before we even got Neil and Buzz onto the moon. We were, as an agency, and a nation, and a people, we were canceling the last moon landings before we’d even gotten there, just because of the outside pressures. I talked to Scott Crossfield who was the first man to Mach 2, one of the original great test pilots and he lived in what I thought, was the heyday of test flying: the 50’s in Edwards, out on a lake bed and they were breaking the sound barrier and testing all of these X- planes. I just thought, “Man, I wish I’d been a test pilot, then,” I talked to Scott about it and he said, “Oh, it was terrible. All the good projects were canceled for lack of funding, we never got to finish anything and had to argue with management all the time.” I found that really heartening, that’s really good to hear, that the golden age of test flying wasn’t golden at all, it was just like test flying is now. When you start putting on the rose-colored glasses, it makes the stuff you’re going through today a little harder to take. In reality, it’s just life. And the work that they did back then to do something magnificent requires just as much work today. If you’re going through a cycle, it’s just a cycle, but we have people permanently living off of Earth. We left Earth thirteen years ago, this month is the thirteenth anniversary of permanent habitation on the Space Station, that’s kind of a big thing. And we have probes going everywhere. We found in every cubic foot of the dirt on Mars, there’s a quart of water. We found that out about two weeks ago, with the Curiosity Probe that’s driving around. That means Mars has oceans of water, just underneath the surface. That’s a pretty interesting discovery, if we’re looking for life somewhere else in the universe. So, we’re finding out stuff all the time through the things that have gotten us this far. And yeah, it’s not perfect, but it was never perfect.

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Ron Bennington: An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything,Thank you so much Commander, it was great to have you stop in here.

Chris Hadfield: Thanks a lot, a real treat to talk to you.

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