An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth Read online

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  COPYRIGHT © 2013 CHRIS HADFIELD

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2013 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United States by Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, New York, and in the United Kingdom by Pan Macmillan, London. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint from the following: “World In My Eyes,” Words and music by Martin Gore, © 1990 EMI MUSIC PUBLISHING LTD. This arrangement © 2013 EMI MUSIC PUBLISHING LTD. All rights in the U.S. and Canada controlled and administered by EMI BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

  Reprinted with permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Hadfield, Chris An astronaut’s guide to life on earth / Chris Hadfield.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-345-81272-8

  1. Hadfield, Chris. 2. Astronauts—Canada—Biography. 3. Astronautics—Anecdotes.

  I. Title.

  TL789.85.H33A3 2013 629.450092 C2013-904948-7

  Jacket images: (space) © Radius Images/Corbis; (earth) © Bettmann/CORBIS; (astronaut) © Hello Lovely/Corbis.

  Interior image credits: this page, Chris Hadfield on mission STS-100 spacewalk, credit: NASA; this page–this page, cyclone off the African coast, credit: NASA/Chris Hadfield; this page–this page, moonrise, credit: NASA/Chris Hadfield; this page–this page, Soyuz landing, credit: NASA/Carla Cioffi

  v3.1

  To Helene, with love.

  Your confidence, impetus and endless help

  made these dreams come true.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction: Mission Impossible

  Part I – PRE-LAUNCH

  1: The Trip Takes a Lifetime

  2: Have an Attitude

  3: The Power of Negative Thinking

  4: Sweat the Small Stuff

  5: The Last People in the World

  6: What’s the Next Thing That Could Kill Me?

  Part II – LIFTOFF

  7: Tranquility Base, Kazakhstan

  8: How to Get Blasted (and Feel Good the Next Day)

  9: Aim to Be a Zero

  10: Life off Earth

  11: Square Astronaut, Round Hole

  Photo Insert

  Part III – COMING DOWN TO EARTH

  12: Soft Landings

  13: Climbing Down the Ladder

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

  THE WINDOWS OF A SPACESHIP casually frame miracles. Every 92 minutes, another sunrise: a layer cake that starts with orange, then a thick wedge of blue, then the richest, darkest icing decorated with stars. The secret patterns of our planet are revealed: mountains bump up rudely from orderly plains, forests are green gashes edged with snow, rivers glint in the sunlight, twisting and turning like silvery worms. Continents splay themselves out whole, surrounded by islands sprinkled across the sea like delicate shards of shattered eggshells.

  Floating in the airlock before my first spacewalk, I knew I was on the verge of even rarer beauty. To drift outside, fully immersed in the spectacle of the universe while holding onto a spaceship orbiting Earth at 17,500 miles per hour—it was a moment I’d been dreaming of and working toward most of my life. But poised on the edge of the sublime, I faced a somewhat ridiculous dilemma: How best to get out there? The hatch was small and circular, but with all my tools strapped to my chest and a huge pack of oxygen tanks and electronics strapped onto my back, I was square. Square astronaut, round hole.

  The cinematic moment I’d envisioned when I first became an astronaut, the one where the soundtrack swelled while I elegantly pushed off into the jet-black ink of infinite space, would not be happening. Instead, I’d have to wiggle out awkwardly and patiently, focused less on the magical than the mundane: trying to avoid snagging my spacesuit or getting snarled in my tether and presenting myself to the universe trussed up like a roped calf.

  Gingerly, I pushed myself out headfirst to see the world in a way only a few dozen humans have, wearing a sturdy jetpack with its own thrusting system and joystick so that if all else failed, I could fire my thrusters, powered by a pressurized tank of nitrogen, and steer back to safety. A pinnacle of experience, an unexpected path.

  Square astronaut, round hole. It’s the story of my life, really: trying to figure out how to get where I want to go when just getting out the door seems impossible. On paper, my career trajectory looks preordained: engineer, fighter pilot, test pilot, astronaut. Typical path for someone in this line of work, straight as a ruler. But that’s not how it really was. There were hairpin curves and dead ends all the way along. I wasn’t destined to be an astronaut. I had to turn myself into one.

  I started when I was 9 years old and my family was spending the summer at our cottage on Stag Island in Ontario. My dad, an airline pilot, was mostly away, flying, but my mom was there, reading in the cool shade of a tall oak whenever she wasn’t chasing after the five of us. My older brother, Dave, and I were in constant motion, water-skiing in the mornings, dodging chores and sneaking off to canoe and swim in the afternoons. We didn’t have a television set but our neighbors did, and very late on the evening of July 20, 1969, we traipsed across the clearing between our cottages and jammed ourselves into their living room along with just about everybody else on the island. Dave and I perched on the back of a sofa and craned our necks to see the screen. Slowly, methodically, a man descended the leg of a spaceship and carefully stepped onto the surface of the Moon. The image was grainy, but I knew exactly what we were seeing: the impossible, made possible. The room erupted in amazement. The adults shook hands, the kids yelped and whooped. Somehow, we felt as if we were up there with Neil Armstrong, changing the world.

  Later, walking back to our cottage, I looked up at the Moon. It was no longer a distant, unknowable orb but a place where people walked, talked, worked and even slept. At that moment, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I was going to follow in the footsteps so boldly imprinted just moments before. Roaring around in a rocket, exploring space, pushing the boundaries of knowledge and human capability—I knew, with absolute clarity, that I wanted to be an astronaut.

  I also knew, as did every kid in Canada, that it was impossible. Astronauts were American. NASA only accepted applications from U.S. citizens, and Canada didn’t even have a space agency. But … just the day before, it had been impossible to walk on the Moon. Neil Armstrong hadn’t let that stop him. Maybe someday it would be possible for me to go too, and if that day ever came, I wanted to be ready.

  I was old enough to understand that getting ready wasn’t simply a matter of playing “space mission” with my brothers in our bunk beds, underneath a big National Geographic poster of the Moon. But there was no program I could enroll in, no manual I could read, no one even to ask. There was only one option, I decided. I had to imagine what an astronaut might do if he were 9 years old, then do the exact same thing. I could get started immediately. Would an astronaut e
at his vegetables or have potato chips instead? Sleep in late or get up early to read a book?

  I didn’t announce to my parents or my brothers and sisters that I wanted to be an astronaut. That would’ve elicited approximately the same reaction as announcing that I wanted to be a movie star. But from that night forward, my dream provided direction to my life. I recognized even as a 9-year-old that I had a lot of choices and my decisions mattered. What I did each day would determine the kind of person I’d become.

  I’d always enjoyed school, but when fall came, I threw myself into it with a new sense of purpose. I was in an enrichment program that year and the next, where we were taught to think more critically and analytically, to question rather than simply try to get the right answers. We memorized Robert Service poems, rattled off the French alphabet as quickly as we could, solved mind-bending puzzles, mock-played the stock market (I bought shares in a seed company on a hunch—not a profitable one, it turned out). Really, we learned how to learn.

  It’s not difficult to make yourself work hard when you want something the way I wanted to be an astronaut, but it sure helps to grow up on a corn farm. When I was 7 years old we’d moved from Sarnia to Milton, not all that far from the Toronto airport my dad flew in and out of, and my parents bought a farm. Both of them had grown up on farms and viewed the downtime in a pilot’s schedule as a wonderful opportunity to work themselves to the bone while carrying on the family tradition. Between working the land and looking after five kids, they were far too busy to hover over any of us. They simply expected that if we really wanted something, we’d push ourselves accordingly—after we’d finished our chores.

  That we were responsible for the consequences of our own actions was just a given. One day in my early teens, I drove up a hedgerow with our tractor a little too confidently—showing off to myself, basically. Just when I got to feeling I was about the best tractor driver around, I hooked the drawbar behind the tractor on a fence post, breaking the bar. I was furious at myself and embarrassed, but my father wasn’t the kind of father who said, “That’s all right, son, you go play. I’ll take over.” He was the kind who told me sternly that I’d better learn how to weld that bar back together, then head right back out to the field with it to finish my job. He helped me with the welding and I reattached the bar and carried on. Later that same day, when I broke the bar again in exactly the same way, no one needed to yell at me. I was so frustrated about my own foolishness that I started yelling at myself. Then I asked my father to help me weld the bar back together again and headed out to the fields a third time, quite a bit more cautiously.

  Growing up on a farm was great for instilling patience, which was necessary given our rural location. Getting to the enrichment program involved a 2-hour bus ride each way. By the time I was in high school and on the bus only 2 hours a day, total, I felt lucky. On the plus side, I’d long ago got in the habit of using travel time to read and study—I kept trying to do the things an astronaut would do, though it wasn’t an exercise in grim obsession. Determined as I was to be ready, just in case I ever got to go to space, I was equally determined to enjoy myself. If my choices had been making me miserable, I couldn’t have continued. I lack the gene for martyrdom.

  Fortunately, my interests dovetailed perfectly with those of the Apollo-era astronauts. Most were fighter pilots and test pilots; I also loved airplanes. When I was 13, just as Dave had and my younger brother and sisters would later, I’d joined Air Cadets, which is sort of like a cross between Boy Scouts and the Air Force: you learn about military discipline and leadership, and you’re taught how to fly. At 15 I got my glider license, and at 16, I started learning to fly powered planes. I loved the sensation, the speed, the challenge of trying to execute maneuvers with some degree of elegance. I wanted to be a better pilot not only because it fit in with the just-in-case astronaut scenario, but because I loved flying.

  Of course, I had other interests, too: reading science fiction, playing guitar, water-skiing. I also skied downhill competitively, and what I loved about racing was the same thing I loved about flying: learning to manage speed and power effectively, so that you can tear along, concentrating on making the next turn or swoop or glide, yet still be enough in control that you don’t wipe out. In my late teens I even became an instructor, but although skiing all day was a ridiculously fun way to make money, I knew that spending a few years bumming around on the hills would not help me become an astronaut.

  Throughout all this I never felt that I’d be a failure in life if I didn’t get to space. Since the odds of becoming an astronaut were nonexistent, I knew it would be pretty silly to hang my sense of self-worth on it. My attitude was more, “It’s probably not going to happen, but I should do things that keep me moving in the right direction, just in case—and I should be sure those things interest me, so that whatever happens, I’m happy.”

  Back then, much more than today, the route to NASA was via the military, so after high school I decided to apply to military college. At the very least, I’d wind up with a good education and an opportunity to serve my country (plus, I’d be paid to go to school). At college I majored in mechanical engineering, thinking that if I didn’t make it as a military pilot, maybe I could be an engineer—I’d always liked figuring out how things work. And as I studied and worked numbers, my eyes would sometimes drift up to the picture of the Space Shuttle I’d hung over my desk.

  The Christmas of 1981, six months before graduation, I did something that likely influenced the course of my life more than anything else I’ve done. I got married. Helene and I had been dating since high school, and she’d already graduated from university and was a rising star at the insurance agency where she worked—so successful that we were able to buy a house in Kitchener, Ontario, before we even got married. During our first two years of wedded bliss, we were apart for almost 18 months. I went to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, to begin basic jet training with the Canadian Forces; Helene gave birth to our first child, Kyle, and began raising him alone in Kitchener because a recession had made it impossible to sell our house; we came very close to bankruptcy. Helene gave up her job and she and Kyle moved to Moose Jaw to live in base housing—and then I was posted to Cold Lake, Alberta, to learn to fly fighters, first CF-5s, then CF-18s. It was, in other words, the kind of opening chapter that makes or breaks a marriage, and the stress didn’t decrease when, in 1983, the Canadian government recruited and selected its first six astronauts. My dream finally seemed marginally more possible. From that point onward, I was even more motivated to focus on my career; one reason our marriage has flourished is that Helene enthusiastically endorses the concept of going all out in the pursuit of a goal.

  A lot of people who meet us remark that it can’t be easy being married to a highly driven, take-charge overachiever who views moving house as a sport, and I have to confess that it is not—being married to Helene has at times been difficult for me. She’s intimidatingly capable. Parachute her into any city in the world and within 24 hours she’ll have lined up an apartment, furnished it with IKEA stuff she gaily assembled herself and scored tickets to the sold-out concert. She raised our three children, often functioning as a single parent because of the amount of time I was on the road, while holding down a variety of demanding jobs, from running the SAP system of a large company to working as a professional chef. She is an über-doer, exactly the kind of person you want riding shotgun when you’re chasing a big goal and also trying to have a life. While achieving both things may not take a village, it sure does take a team.

  This became extremely clear to me when I was finishing my training to fly fighters and was told I’d be posted to Germany. Helene was very pregnant with our second child, and we were excited about the prospect of moving to Europe. We were already mentally vacationing in Paris with our beautifully behaved, trilingual children when word came down that there had been a change of plans. We were going to Bagotville, Quebec, where I’d fly CF-18s for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NOR
AD), intercepting Soviet aircraft that strayed into Canadian airspace. It was a great opportunity to be posted to a brand-new squadron, and Bagotville has much to recommend it, but it is very cold in the winter and it is not Europe in any season. The next three years were difficult for our family. We were still reeling financially, I was flying fighters (not a low-stress occupation) and Helene was at home with two rambunctious little boys—Evan was born just days before we moved to Bagotville—and no real career prospects. Then, when Evan was 7 months old, she discovered she was pregnant again. At the time, it felt to both of us less like a happy accident than the last straw. I looked around, trying to picture what life would be like for us at 45, and thought it would be really hard if I continued to fly fighters. The squadron commanders were working their tails off for not much more money than I was already making; the workload was enormous, there was very little recognition and there was nothing even vaguely cushy about the job. Aside from anything else, being a fighter pilot is dangerous. We were losing at least one close friend every year.

  So when I heard Air Canada was hiring, I decided it was time to be realistic. Working for an airline would be an easier life for us, one whose rhythms I already knew well. I actually went to an initial class to get my civilian pilot ratings and then Helene intervened. She said, “You don’t really want to be an airline pilot. You wouldn’t be happy and then I wouldn’t be happy. Don’t give up on being an astronaut—I can’t let you do that to yourself or to us. Let’s wait just a little bit longer and see how things play out.”

  So I stayed on the squadron and eventually got a tiny taste of being a test pilot: when an airplane came out of maintenance, I would do the test flight. I was hooked. Fighter pilots live to fly, but while I love flying, I lived to understand airplanes: why they do certain things, how to make them perform even better. People on the squadron were genuinely puzzled when I said I wanted to go to test pilot school. Why would anyone give up the glory of being a fighter pilot to be an engineer, essentially? But the engineering aspects of the job were exactly what appealed to me, along with the opportunity to make high-performance aircraft safer.