The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 581 - Chris Hadfield

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Oct. 10, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

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Edition 581 - Chris Hadfield

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	Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
	Thank you very much for being part of my show.
	Thank you for the emails.
	Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for the hard work that he does on all of this.
	A very, very special guest on this edition of The Unexplained Online.
	This is an extended version of the conversation that you might have heard on the radio, on my radio show.
	Chris Hadfield, astronaut, a man with a face internationally recognizable, Canadian astronaut, and a guy who's had an astonishing life.
	He's done everything, and now he's an author, as you will hear.
	So I'm not going to say any more this time, apart from thanking you for being part of my show.
	Let's hear my conversation with astronaut Chris Hadfield.
	This is going to be one of the most special ones I think we've ever done, because I'm not going to talk very much right now.
	The special guest in this hour is astronaut Chris Hadfield, veteran astronaut, commander of the International Space Station, man of the shuttle, man of space, first Canadian to walk in space, and one of the most recognizable faces of the space program.
	Chris Hadfield, thank you very much for coming on.
	I am pleased to be chatting with you, Howard.
	It is true, though, I'm looking now because we're doing this by Zoom and you're sending me a picture at a picture of you, very nice photograph.
	If I was to show that photograph, I think, on the streets of where I live here, I would say that probably upwards of 75% of people would say Chris Hatfield.
	You are that recognizable.
	How does that feel?
	It's bizarre.
	It's interesting, you know, and I think you're right.
	I walk around and either I can immediately see recognition in people's eyes or there's a little wake of murmur after I've gone by.
	With social media, you amazingly see little pop-ups of where you've been and going, hey, I'm pretty sure I saw Chris Hatfield.
	So the way I've learned to treat it, Howard, is it's like I'm always at a family reunion and everyone is my second cousin.
	I just treat it that way, you know?
	And if they're bold enough to come up and say hello, then, you know, that's fine.
	But of course, you never, I mean, we'll get into this later, but you're never off then.
	That must mean that wherever you go, whether you're going down the supermarket, you're going for gasoline, whatever it is, there's no downtime, is there?
	Well, I think I'm one of the very few people who is slightly thankful to the pandemic for the ability to be able to wear a mask in public.
	So it's actually freed me up to be anonymous.
	So as trivial as that sounds, actually, yeah, I can now walk everywhere because just from my eyes and eyebrows, without people seeing my mustache, I'm not quite as recognizable.
	Well, of course, doing space, you know, you're well used to wearing things that cover your face to save your life, aren't you?
	I was a fighter pilot in the Cold War, where, of course, you wear a high-pressure oxygen gas mask.
	And then I was a test pilot in multiple airplanes after that.
	So those are masks.
	Yeah, pretty much, you know, I've been a scuba diver and then a hard hat diver and a Nitrox diver and then multiple spaceships.
	And all of those require some sort of mask for safety to keep you alive, especially when there's an emergency.
	Yeah, so I think I probably am a little more used to wearing masks than most folks.
	Do all of those things that you've done, and we will go through your life story, if indeed we have time for it because there are so many things in it, do they indicate, should they indicate to a person like me talking to you about your life and times and everything, that you're a bit bored with things that don't involve risk to your life?
	No, I think I'm the opposite, Howard.
	I am not a thrill seeker at all.
	I am very willing to take a risk for something that I think is worthwhile, you know, but I would never take a risk just for the thrill of it.
	In fact, I don't know any astronaut who would.
	That's not the point of it.
	You know, we're not bungee jumpers.
	We are spaceship pilots.
	You know, and so it's quite different.
	And I'm quite measured in the risks that I take.
	But I think that helps because when I decide to take a risk, it changes my whole role.
	It's not just crossing my fingers and rubbing my lucky rabbit's foot from then on.
	It's okay, I'm going to take this risk.
	And now I'm going to do everything I can between now and the moment it happens to improve my odds of surviving and prevailing and doing things right.
	So yeah, it's just a different attitude towards why you have risk in your life.
	I've wanted to ask you this question for years, and I've been trying to get you on the show for years.
	So I'm really pleased to be able to do that now.
	Does it help to be a Canadian in space?
	You know, I would like to think that if, which I won't, if I ever got onto the International Space Station, I'd like to think that at least one of the people there with me is a Canadian because, you know, you're even-tempered people, you're calm in a crisis, and, you know, Canadians are clever people.
	What a delightful thing to say and to ask.
	In my case, you know, I can't say generically maybe, but in my case, it definitely did help for several reasons.
	One, Canada is, I mean, the two big players are the United States and Russia, you know, formerly the Soviet Union.
	And Canada is actually physically in between the United States and Russia.
	So geographically, we're sort of a middleman, but also sort of philosophically to some degree.
	We are neither an American nor Russian.
	I speak American quite convincingly.
	So Americans consider me naturally an ally, but my Russian isn't bad either.
	And so over time, the Russians considered me not an American, but some sort of intermediary ally.
	And then I think it also gave me some freedom.
	I wasn't beholden to the Russian Roscosmos space program, and I wasn't beholden to the American NASA program.
	I was working for the much smaller and more nimble Canadian space agency.
	And so, yeah, I think it definitely had some advantages.
	And I would rather be Canadian than any other nationality on Earth.
	Although, if we had the opportunity, I would love to fly with a Brit like yourself.
	Well, sadly, we haven't got time For me to tell you my Canada story, but my father, because we're of the same kind of vintage, for reasons that I don't think have ever been too publicized, for part of his army career, served in the Canadian military.
	They drafted a bunch of Brits into the Canadian military.
	So my dad, when I was a little kid, had a uniform that had the maple leaf on it and Canada on his, you know, on the on the shoulder.
	And that's a story that's got to be told one of these days.
	I served on exchange with the U.S. Air Force and with the U.S. Navy.
	And as a Canadian, I was a member of the NASA Astronaut Corps.
	So I've always had a Canadian flag somewhere, but at times I've been working for other organizations as well.
	In fact, I was NASA's director of operations in Russia.
	I represented NASA in Russia.
	I didn't even work for NASA.
	You know, I was just sort of detailed to them.
	So, yeah, but there's always been the pride of where I'm from.
	And I think Canada does a remarkable job as a smaller weighted country in being a good influence in the world.
	And the Canadian government has on its website, because I looked at it today, the most beautiful biography.
	It's the most concise and it's the loveliest biography that I've ever seen of anybody.
	Geez, you've done an awful lot.
	I'd like to be able to, in this segment, talk through some of that.
	I don't think we'll get through all of it.
	So look, I'm a consensus politician.
	If you're up for this, then I want to do it this way if we can.
	First of all, I'd like to talk about your story.
	Then in the sort of second segment, we'll do a big chunk on the book and your career as an author.
	And then I've got a bunch, as soon as I mentioned that you were coming on the show, I got a bunch of emails and various messages in various ways from listeners who would like to put questions to you.
	Does that work?
	That works perfectly.
	That makes me a consensus politician as well, I guess.
	I'll say.
	Well, you're a Canadian, that's why.
	Okay.
	One of the things that I think you've done more than most is popularize space and educate people about space.
	So I want to play a little mix that I did just before we did this.
	And bear in mind that I'm recording all of this at home, so I'm hoping this is going to work.
	This is you brushing your teeth on the International Space Station and a little bit of something else.
	It just goes to show the levels that you have reached when you're popularizing and educating about space.
	So this is Chris Adfield on the International Space Station brushing his teeth.
	And this is what we're going to put on our toothpaste.
	So let me get a ball of water here.
	Okay, and get my toothbrush wet.
	Toothbrushes soak up water nicely.
	So now I have a nice wet toothbrush.
	So I'm partway there.
	Got my toothbrush wet.
	Now I just need to put some toothpaste on it and get cleaning my teeth.
	So I'm going to suck the water off it because where else would it go?
	Nice wet toothbrush.
	Grab some toothpaste.
	We just use standard toothpaste in space.
	Squeeze a little on, not too much, because you're going to have to clean it up later.
	Okay, so there's my toothpaste on my toothbrush.
	It's wet.
	It's ready to go.
	It's loaded.
	Brush my teeth just like normal.
	Ground control to major tongue.
	Ground control to major tongue.
	I tell you what, Chris, I can't tell you how glad I am that that actually works.
	That was beautifully edited.
	I like the way you led from one end to the other.
	Very nice.
	And yes, I did both those things on board the space station.
	You did.
	That video of you singing the David Bowie song, I think up to now it's had north of 50 million plays and views.
	That's amazing.
	Yeah, just where my son posted it, it said that many, but the number of replays and other sites that it lives on, you know, it's hundreds of millions.
	And it's part of the reason that so many people around the world recognize who I am, to have done a music video that hundreds of millions of people have seen.
	Did you ever get to meet David Bowie?
	Just electronically, unfortunately.
	He was in the latter couple of years of his life.
	And I had to get his permission, obviously, to make that video.
	You can't just steal someone else's artwork.
	But he was extremely gracious and witty and acerbic and fun to deal with.
	But he loved that version of the song.
	And I think he always pictured himself as someone who could fly in space.
	You can see the recurring theme right to the very last album that he made.
	And so for him to see a song that he wrote when he was just turning 20, to then see that song performed in the place he always dreamed of going and in sort of an updated way, it just, he was really delighted with it.
	And for me, that was the best part.
	And I managed to please and delight David Bowie in the last couple of years of his life.
	Wonderful man.
	And like you, a very cool dude.
	I'd have loved to have seen the two of you together.
	I met him once and they said to me, okay, you can ask him anything.
	So I said, how do you feel that everybody does a David Bowie impression?
	And he just turned to me and said, how do you feel about everybody doing a Howard Hughes impression?
	And he was as quick as anything.
	But he was such a cool guy.
	That's the one thing I remember.
	But that version of that song was brilliantly done.
	Was the vocal actually recorded up on the ISS?
	Yeah, that's the whole point of it.
	The whole thing.
	The vocal and the guitar were recorded on the ISS.
	And then a friend of mine was in David Bowie's band for a few years, one of the singers in his band.
	And she put that piano part on the front.
	And then another friend of hers put the other instrumental parts in afterwards.
	But yeah, I sang like karaoke up there doing the vocal and then the little guitar riff that's in there, just the strumming part.
	But yeah, it came out far nicer than I thought it would.
	And it's been lovely to see the global reaction.
	And I think, Howard, it also lets people in just sort of intuitively on the quiet wonder and grace of being weightless and living on board a spaceship.
	You know, music can do things that the written word or even the spoken word cannot.
	I can tell from that that you love music.
	The acoustic in that cupola, when you're singing in the cupola, looking down on Earth, is just perfect.
	It's lovely.
	Yeah, it worked out very well.
	And yeah, I sure didn't.
	It's the only Bowie tune I've ever covered.
	I had to learn it While I was in orbit, you know, he was such a complex musician.
	A friend of mine on the day that Bowie died said there was a whole bunch of cover bands this week who are going to learn just how complicated David Bowie's tunes were because he was a terrific artist and creative force and a smart guy.
	His forethought to the things that have happened in the world, it's really worth listening to.
	So yeah, I'm glad our lives overlapped slightly in that way, but mostly to have honored his body of work.
	I love the way that you spin a guitar down one of the corridors, one of the walkways, whatever they call them on the ISS.
	It's all rather lovely.
	Now, listen, we must get into your story.
	Let's tell your life story first, if we can.
	Let's see how we can.
	I don't know how we're going to compress it because I've got pages and pages of it here.
	But the first few lines of it are Chris Hadfield is one of the most seasoned and accomplished astronauts in the world, the top graduate of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School 1988, U.S. Navy Test Pilot 1991.
	Colonel Hadfield was CAPCOM for 25 shuttle missions.
	And NASA's Director of Operations in Russia, which you referred to just before, you served as commander of the ISS, the International Space Station, while conducting a record-setting number of scientific experiments and overseeing an emergency spacewalk.
	And that is only the beginning of it, really.
	And I don't know how you begin to compress a life like that.
	But have a try, would you?
	Sure.
	I decided to be an astronaut when I was a kid.
	I was just so impressed with science fiction and Star Trek, but also the race to the moon, the Apollo program.
	And I just thought if that's an option, that's what I want to do.
	And so I became a pilot and an engineer, went to several universities.
	As you say, I not only became a fighter pilot during the Cold War, but also a test pilot.
	And Canada trains one test pilot a year for the whole country.
	And I went, did the, it's a one year, it's like a PhD in flying.
	I did it with the U.S. Air Force.
	And then I did a tour on exchange as a U.S. Navy test pilot, including going out to aircraft carriers.
	But then after all of those things, got selected as an astronaut by the Canadian Space Agency, who immediately sent me down to Houston.
	And I spent 21 years serving as an astronaut, which included three space flights and then a bunch of work on the ground, running various things in Houston.
	And then, as you say, I spent about five years in Russia as well.
	And on the third flight, I was actually the pilot of a Russian spaceship.
	So learned to speak Russian well enough to be able to do that.
	And so, yeah.
	And then since then, you know, I've done a lot of things.
	I work in business and I've written four books and I did a BBC series and a National Geographic series with Will Smith.
	And I teach at university and I've even toured with Bowie's band.
	They've asked me to come and tour with them prior to the pandemic, of course.
	So a whole richness of it.
	I even had a sleepover at Windsor Castle with the Queen and Prince Philip.
	So just a ridiculous richness of experiences throughout my life.
	And my wife and I have been together since high school when we were in a play, The Man Who Came to Dinner.
	We were in a play together.
	So we've known each other our whole lives.
	Three children and a new puppy.
	And no, life is interesting.
	And I just sort of view it all as one long continuum with some amazing highlights and a huge thrust of exciting things that I'm involved in right now.
	So it seems to me that you lived the American dream from Canada.
	Is that the American dream?
	I think it's probably a lot of fun.
	Well, you know, you're an album.
	I think if you'd asked a young person in the 60s, maybe the 70s, what perfection was, then, you know, you would be an astronaut.
	You'd have a wonderful wife and family and a great personal life.
	And it would all be, you know, hunky-dory.
	That, I think, is what I used to read about in the magazines.
	I don't know, Chris, it's an awful lot.
	A long time ago, but I think so.
	Okay, there's a lot of detail in there, and we're not going to have anything like time to unpick it in great detail because there is so much of it.
	But what shines through all of that is that you talk matter-of-factly about situations where you were selected to do things, where I don't know if you've ever worked out the odds, but the number of people standing behind you and also wanting to do that was pretty large, but you were selected.
	You've been used to winning, I think.
	Well, I worked really hard to win, and I recognized early on that they weren't just going to pull ping-pong balls out of a spinning drum and say, hey, you get to fly in space.
	And in fact, that would have spoiled the experience.
	Imagine if you were there and you went to that lovely open park that's in front of Buckingham Palace and a jet helicopter landed and you got into the jet helicopter and three minutes later, somehow it took you to the top of Mount Everest and you stepped out and you were at Mount Everest for 30 seconds and took a picture and then back in and then suddenly you were back in the city in London.
	You would have been to the top of Everest, but you would have kind of missed the entire point of it and the entire experience.
	And so I recognized early on that it's not just the end game that matters, but it's about changing who I am to do all these things that I find exciting and interesting and then contributing.
	You know, the 21 years that I served as an astronaut, I helped change how we fly in space.
	I helped design the cockpit of the space shuttle.
	I helped change procedures for how we fly the Russian Soyuz.
	I helped build the Russian space station, Mir, orbiting the world.
	And then I commanded the International Space Station.
	So not just personal, but professionally contributory.
	And all of that experience has now sort of helped me shape my own impressions of the world and the abilities I have now to teach and to, I did a masterclass, which is a wonderful vehicle in order to be able at somewhere near the peak of your life to be able to really talk about what you did and why and how other people may be able to learn from it.
	So yeah, there was lots of competition along the way, but I always took It seriously and tried to get as ready as I possibly could, and brought my best game to every individual match.
	And that has, I failed as much as I've succeeded, but the successes have been the stuff of dreams for me.
	And I just marvel at the sequence of events so far.
	And the beauty of it is, you know, I'm nowhere near the end of the road either.
	So yeah, it's been fascinating.
	The training as a military pilot, before we talk about astronaut training, that I guess, and I know from having interviewed people around the space program before, including people like Edgar Mitchell, who was a wonderful man.
	We lost him sadly 10 years ago.
	But I did get some time with him when we talked about flying.
	That's the thing that teaches you to handle risky situations efficiently, so efficiently that you survive them.
	How was all of that for you?
	Were you often in situations as a flyer where you had to quickly work out, if I don't do this now, I'm going to die?
	Yes, even if you just become a private pilot, you know, if you just join the air cadets and just fly a glider, you have already changed yourself and separated yourself from 99% of everybody else you're going to walk by in the street.
	And it's not just because you know how to move the control stick around.
	It's all of the thought process and the preparation and the professionalism and the complexity of it.
	And that's just for flying a very simple little bug smasher of an airplane.
	The more complex and capable the airplane gets, then the greater the responsibility and the public trust.
	And I was a fighter pilot in the Cold War with a fully armed airplane with heat-seeking and radar-seeking missiles and a nose full of bullets intercepting armed Soviet bombers just off the coast of Canada and the United States.
	So that level of responsibility.
	And then as a test pilot, test pilots die all the time because it's a wickedly unforgiving profession, but somebody has to do it.
	And so, yes, I have been faced with lots of serious problems, airplanes badly misbehaving, where I had to call on all of my preparation and my own particular innate sense of what was happening in order to figure out and get safely back on the ground again.
	But touch wood, I've never had to eject so far, and I've never bent an airplane after an entire life of flying them.
	And so all of those, as Ed Mitchell would have told you, of course, those are just to try and build up the judgment and the skill set and the confidence so that then you can fly a brand new complicated spaceship.
	Not one that's already been proven and simple, you know, like SpaceX is doing now, which is great that it's that level.
	But there's still an awful lot of new things going on out there that require that complexity.
	And, you know, that's why astronaut selection is so rigorous and why we want that particular set of backgrounds in order to go operate something new and dangerous.
	We're talking with Chris Hadfield, astronaut, on the Unexplained at Talk Radio and also on the Unexplained podcast of theunexplained.co.uk.
	So Chris Hadfield, you know, we've only just started the life story, so let's dive in here.
	Astronaut training.
	Now, that is the one that sorts the men from the boys, isn't it?
	How did you find that?
	The hardest part is getting selected, Howard.
	The current NASA and European Space Agency selections have 20 or 30,000 people applying for a handful of positions, you know, maybe six or eight or maybe 10.
	And so they can be extremely choosy, people with tremendous technical qualifications, but also the right personality and the right physicality.
	But all of that is just to get through the door on the day, you know, when they hand you a badge and you walk into whichever space center you're working at.
	In my case, it was the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
	And you look around at your new classmates and you realize, I'm going to go to space with some of these people.
	And some of these people are going to die in the effort here.
	And this is a whole generation of work coming up, you know, 20 plus years that this is now going to define what I'm going to be doing.
	And for the rest of my life also, I won't just be a person who had that job once.
	I will be an astronaut.
	That's one of the rarest professions on the earth.
	So yeah, you have all of that going, but it's maybe a little different than you think.
	We do have a one or two year trial period where if it's different than you thought, and so therefore you don't want to do it, or if the space agency realized that they thought they'd hired the right person, but in fact they didn't, then each of us has the opportunity to bow out in the first year or two.
	And the training is intense and complicated and eternal.
	But almost everybody passes because the space agency has already done their selection.
	And now their job is to get you ready and to start teaching you orbital mechanics and control theory and all of the things that you're going to need to successfully man a space station or start settling the moon.
	And all of that stuff that you have to go through, like the vomit comet and all the rest of it.
	One thing I think we need to lead it to now.
	Talk to me about the very first time that you exited this thin dome that surrounds this planet and you were able to look beyond it.
	Can you remember that?
	I'm sure you can.
	And how did that feel?
	My first launch was in November, November the 12th.
	So the weather down in Florida, it was on a space shuttle called the space shuttle Atlantis, and we were going up to help build the Russian space station Mir.
	Launch is wildly powerful.
	The space shuttle had power that boggles the mind.
	The numbers are so big.
	The space shuttle had 80 million horsepower.
	You know, a car has, you know, 200 horsepower, or a powerful car, maybe 500, 80 million horsepower.
	And so it takes, but it only takes about nine minutes, you know, less time than you and I have been chatting.
	But you start out lying on your back, you're inside a cockpit, which, you know, after a lifetime of preparation just feels sort of like your office.
	This is where you work.
	You're wearing extremely uncomfortable clothing, you know, a pressure suit and a huge helmet and all the other gear that might protect you in your parachute, you know, in case the vehicle really behaved badly.
	But the engines begin to light, you know, and you're super focused.
	I wasn't so much nervous as I was just so eagerly ready for all of this after a lifetime of preparation to happen.
	But when the engines start to light six seconds before they're running enough to pull you away from the world, it's unmistakable.
	It's as if an enormous truck or lorry has just crashed into your vehicle.
	There's this huge surge of response to the onslaught of power pouring out the back.
	But all five engines light and you're getting hurtled up off the world and it shakes you so hard your teeth are rattling.
	You can't focus.
	And crushing you in your chair simultaneously bulling its way through the speed of sound in 45 seconds.
	In two minutes, you're above the air and the solid rockets are out of fuel and they explode off.
	And now it's just your three liquid engines.
	And so it's smooth, but getting heavier and heavier and heavier as if more and more people were piling on top of you or you were lying on your back and someone was pouring cement on you until eventually you can barely breathe and the vehicle is accelerating wildly.
	But right at the end of it, when you hit Mach 25, 25 times the speed of sound, the vehicle has gotten you to just the right speed and altitude and direction, and the engine shut off and you're weightless.
	It's an amazing ride, Howard.
	And that is, I mean, it's not an anti-climax, but that's a hell of a throttling back.
	What goes through your mind at that point?
	It sounds to me as if the ride up there is so breathtaking and so powerful and so visceral.
	There's no time to think about anything, including what might go wrong.
	And we know what could go wrong with the shuttle because sadly we've seen it.
	No time to think about that.
	But once that quiet hits you, what's that like?
	Yeah, your entire focus during launch is getting ready for things to go wrong.
	And each window you get through of speed and altitude opens up new things and how you would respond.
	So you're super focused and you're not thinking about, you know, where you are or some sort of third person.
	You're very focused on making the machine work.
	But you're right.
	When the engines shut off, it's quiet and you're there.
	And the immediate reaction of everybody is to laugh, partially with relief, because the odds of me dying that day, that November 12th, were one in 38.
	So to have cheated those odds through our own wiles and cleverness and hard work and luck, that of course gives a sense of relief.
	And also, you're now in space.
	So it's an achievement that can never be taken away now.
	So it's a threshold to have crossed.
	But weightlessness is also funny.
	You know, everything floats.
	If where you're sitting at home right now recording this, if everything in the room, including yourself, started floating around, you would laugh.
	It's, you know, it's trippy.
	It's just hilarious.
	Even though you've been prepared for it.
	Well, you can't really be prepared for weightlessness.
	You know, you can have momentary brief seconds of it in some of our training vehicles, but it's completely different.
	You know, it's the reality of it's magic.
	It's a superpower.
	You know, you can now fly effortlessly for however long you're going to be up there.
	So that's a lot of fun.
	And you have a huge amount of work to do immediately to convert the shuttle from being a rocket to turn it into a little spaceship.
	And there's all sorts of rigorous things that have to happen.
	But as soon as you glance out the window, by the time you can get to the window to make sure the external tank is separated properly, and even though you launched from Cape Canaveral, the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, by the time you get to the window with a camera, you are over Ireland and the UK and coming fast up on Europe.
	You're going five miles a second, you know, which just think about that.
	Think of something the size of an airliner was right beside you right now and one second later, it was five miles away.
	You don't even have time to think about it.
	No, that's just, it changes your whole perspective.
	And when I remember floating at the window, my job was to take pictures of the big external gas tank that we jettisoned.
	But being able to look straight down and see London, where I used to live, and then Dublin on the left and up to Belfast and I could see Edinburgh.
	But then looking to my right, I could see Paris and down to Rome and the sweep of the Alps.
	And up to the left, I could see Hamburg and up to Copenhagen.
	And if you look carefully, all the way up to Stockholm in a glance.
	And it's just a face slap of overwhelming beauty and newness.
	And is there time to have profound thoughts in that situation?
	It's a profound situation, but can you have the profound thoughts?
	I don't know how the profound moments in your life have evolved, but mine are often through later reflection or when I've seen something enough time for it to really percolate into who I am.
	Fortunately, over my three space flights, I went around the world about 2,650 times.
	So there was room for profundity over the months and a half a year that I lived off the Earth.
	I would have thought so.
	At first, it's as if you walk into the most riotous bar Or fairground in existence where you're just being assaulted on all sides.
	You know, you're more just trying to pick out what's familiar at first because there's way too much stimulus going on.
	After a while, you get better at looking at the world and starting to sense the reality of what's happening below you and what this all means.
	This is going to be, and it's only necessarily this way because of the time factor, but it's probably going to be the most crass question you've ever heard.
	But I'm sure you've heard it before.
	What's it like being on the International Space Station, let alone to command it?
	It's delightful.
	Number one, you're weightless, so you can fly everywhere.
	And that's a wonderful way to live.
	You have tremendous purpose.
	The space station, you're running 200 experiments simultaneously.
	So your days are absolutely chock full of setting up experiments and fixing broken machinery and helping these go and talking to the primary investigators back on Earth, all the scientists around the world.
	And, you know, so there's a great higher purpose to what you're doing.
	And you're there with a bunch of supremely qualified people from all around the world.
	So it's this little tower of the babble of languages and ideas and religions and a real crossroads of the world.
	And every time you drift past a window, another continent is racing by at 17,500 miles an hour.
	So you cross North America in nine minutes.
	You can see all of that geology and geography.
	And you get a new sunrise or sunset every 46 minutes.
	So there's the magic of that happening.
	And you have an incredible feeling of privilege and awe to be one out of how many are there of us, 7.8 billion of us now?
	You are one of the tiny, tiny little group in the most rare of all professions who are right now, like the people up on the space station as we speak, who are getting to experience this whole new perspective of the world and what lies beyond it.
	So it's Alice in Wonderland the entire time.
	And you are the lucky focus of all of that.
	And then it's really just up to you to decide how to do the best job possible and make the most of it for all the external people, but also for yourself.
	Well, it seems to me that you savored every moment of it, without a doubt.
	And I can quite understand why.
	You had, according to that biography I read, to make an emergency spacewalk.
	What was that all about?
	One of the cosmonauts came up to me one day.
	I was working on an experiment at one of the little laboratory stations.
	And his name is Pavel Vinogralev.
	And he came up to me quite excited, babbling in Russian, you know, at high-speed Russian.
	And what he was telling me was that there was something going on outside like fireworks or sparks flying out of our vehicle.
	And I really needed to come and have a look.
	And when I got there, way out on the left end, because the space station is enormous.
	It's bigger than a soccer pitch and or, you know, football pitch or whatever.
	And we were leaking something.
	And I thought perhaps we'd been hit by a little meteorite and it had broken one of the lines.
	But it turned out just one of the seals had failed and we were spewing the main coolant of the whole spaceship.
	And as soon as you run out of coolant, you know, just like in your car, everything's going to overheat and you will no longer proceed.
	In this case, as soon as the station starts to overheat, if you can't solve it, then you're going to have to abandon ship.
	So did you think for a second this is my Apollo 11 moment?
	No, no, that's a ridiculous Hollywood way to look at things.
	You don't have somebody else's moment.
	This is your responsibility.
	This is why you trained.
	You know, this is a new challenge.
	I mean, we had things fail every day.
	You know, we had an operating system upgrade and we lost communication with Earth.
	Everything on the ship died and the space station was tumbling through space and we had to do an emergency reboot and bring the whole station back to life.
	No, your whole job there is to be the person that can solve these problems.
	So the real question was, what do we know and how are we going to fix it?
	And talked to Houston and talked to my crew, who was the most experienced and who knew that part of the ship the best and what could be causing the problem.
	So yeah, it was a great moment for command, but we had to do the right thing.
	And we did.
	I sent out two of my crew members who had helped build that part of the space station several years before.
	So I had a couple real aces up my sleeve.
	And I sent out Tom.
	And Tom's going to space on Halloween for another flight up to space station.
	And Chris, Chris Cassidy, who's the subject of a new Disney series, I think, that's just coming out.
	But those are the two guys I sent out.
	And they were like kids in a candy store.
	They got to have a spacewalk unexpected on no notice, just as long as it took to build the procedures.
	And they did all the right work.
	They removed the big leaking section and we powered down everything and everything we'd trained for for decades.
	And they got the new one installed and did everything just right.
	And we very carefully repressed.
	And it's ammonia.
	It's liquid ammonia.
	It's a very nasty liquid that we transport heat around with.
	But we repressurized our liquid ammonia system and no more leaks.
	We'd solved it.
	We fixed it.
	And so there was great celebration.
	And I mean, that's why we were there.
	You know, it's not just a joyride.
	You know, it is your life's work.
	And so, yeah, tremendous, you know, amongst everything else, to still have the reserves of capacity and rest and competence and teamwork, to be able to go do that at the end of six months in space.
	It was tremendously validating and rewarding.
	And amongst all the rest of my career, it's one of the many things that I take great comfort in and great pride in to have been ready at that moment to do battle as needed in order to win.
	And you have to be constantly prepared.
	And when I said it was an Apollo 11 moment, I meant really from the terms of what might go wrong.
	But as you say, there's no time to think about any of that.
	What you have to deal with are the challenges that present themselves.
	You have to be ready for it, which you've just said, and then you have to get on with it, which you did, which is an astonishing thing because most of us couldn't do that.
	What's it like to walk in space?
	Coolest thing ever.
	I think, Howard, if you get a chance to do a spacewalk, boy, absolutely do it.
	And the reason is, obviously, it's joyful to be outside of a spaceship.
	Imagine if you were in one of the tall buildings downtown and maybe on one of the upper floors.
	Say you're on the whatever, the 40th floor of a building, but you're sitting at your desk and you look out the window and you can see whatever, if it's in London, you can see the Thames snaking through the city.
	But if you just move a couple body lengths sideways, you would be on the outside of that building, clinging to the outside of the glass like Spider-Man or something.
	And even though you're only maybe, you know, two meters or one meter away, you're having an entirely different experience of what it's like to be in that place.
	Well, it's sort of like that, only wildly magnified to be out on a spacewalk.
	Because from inside the ship, you're still somewhat cocooned and safe.
	But when you open up the hatch and grab it with both hands and pull yourself bodily out into the universe, the difference is overwhelming.
	You're now alone in three dimensions and surrounded by the eternity of the absolutely bottomless velvety blackness of it.
	And beside you is this silent, spinning kaleidoscope of a three-dimensional orb next to you of every color and texture you can imagine of the Earth.
	But you're separate from it.
	You don't feel like you're of Earth at all.
	It's just a planet, like looking at the moon.
	You don't look at the moon and think, hey, I'm on the moon.
	The moon is something separate from you.
	And suddenly, psychologically, the earth is completely separate from you.
	And so I felt tiny.
	I felt privileged.
	I felt wonder.
	But I also felt kind of huge because, you know, all of the work and all of the risk and all of the support and the huge teams.
	And yet it was, you know, me, my hands, my eyes, my thoughts out there seeing this.
	And we had a huge number of things to do.
	We don't just go outside for fun, you know, building and fixing and repairing.
	And it's quite risky doing a spacewalk, but also just a magnificent human experience and giving us a perspective on the world that we've only dreamed about for tens of thousands of years.
	So it's an amazing thing to have been able to do.
	And I got to do it twice.
	Wow.
	I can tell why you became an author, why you've become an author now.
	You have a wonderful way with words.
	I want to talk about the book coming next.
	We're talking with Chris Hadfield here at Joint Production with Talk Radio the Unexplained and my webcast, my podcast, theUnexplained at the Unexplained.tv.
	So we're talking with Chris Hadfield.
	Just quickly, Chris, one of the many things that you've done in your career was to anchor the Russian side of the operation.
	We've only got a limited amount of time, sadly, but I'd love to know about that.
	When I joined the space agency, the Soviet Union was in the process of falling apart, and no one knew what was going to become of their space program.
	And there was a great fear that all of those world-leading, brilliant rocket scientists might be tempted by some of the less reputable organizations and nations around the world.
	And so the United States made a concerted effort to keep the Russian Space Agency going and to invite the Russians to be part of the International Space Station.
	Brilliant move, excellent move, because it also, I couldn't conceive of working with the Russians when I joined.
	They'd been the enemy in the Cold War.
	They'd been my enemy as a Cold War pilot, and yet now we were going to cooperate.
	And I was suddenly sitting in Russian classes learning the Russian alphabet and learning to speak Russian.
	And I had no idea that this was going to be part of my job as an astronaut.
	But just a short time afterwards, I was assigned to help build the Russian space station Mir, to use the Canadian robot arm and fly on an American shuttle to build a big section like the size of a bus onto the Russian space station Mir.
	And then to be asked to go be NASA's director of operations in Russia, living in Star City, which in Russian is Sviozny Gorodok, which means like starry village, starry town.
	But the Americans said that means star city, which sounds much more official.
	But I lived in Star City for almost five years, all told, and I was NASA's director for a year and a half there.
	And it was wondrous.
	It's a beautiful little place, quite removed from Moscow.
	I walked to work every day through the woods, and I had a team of Russians working for me and lots of Americans and the other countries as well.
	And then interfacing with all of the training facilities there.
	And they are so properly prideful because they trained Yuri Gagarin, the first human to fly in space.
	In fact, I had an apartment in the same building that Yuri's apartment was in, although he passed away.
	But Valentina Tereshkova had the apartment downstairs and other cosmonauts were in the apartments around me.
	And all of the training facilities and this deep traditions and the way that they prepare people, it's much more philosophical than Russians are far more philosophical than Americans.
	Canada is slightly leaning towards a Russian mentality, but still, you know, Russia has been a nation for a thousand years, and they have a real sense of that, and it's taught and ingrained into who they are.
	We just don't have any of that in North America at all.
	We're a much more transient and less self-aware group of people.
	It's not to say that I like Russian politics, I think it's a scourge on the world, but I really got to know maybe what it's like to live in Russia.
	And I got to know lots of Russian people.
	And you've got a really rare insight into it all.
	Their love of it and their pride in it and their recognition of their own foibles and the fact that because the land has no natural borders, they've been invaded countless times.
	And so there's sort of a whole different mentality to what does safety look like and how do you need strong people in charge of your political system to give you just your fundamental sense that things will be okay and there'll be a sense of security.
	So yeah, I'm by no means any sort of expert, but to at least my own satisfaction, I got a much deeper understanding of the Russian people and Russian history.
	And I got to be part of what they were doing and to pilot a Russian spaceship on my third flight, speaking Russian 100%, flying, training and flying as what they call the Bortengenir Adin, which is really sort of like the pilot of a Russian Soyuz spaceship.
	So yeah, a great richness in my life and a deepening of understanding of another part of the world and something I'm very grateful for.
	I'm really grateful to you for being willing to talk about all of this.
	You know, a lot of people who've written books, they want to get you onto the book really quickly.
	Now, look, we don't have a lot of time to talk about the book, but I want to make that time count.
	I've read through the book today.
	I think it's beautifully written.
	It's aided greatly by your experience because it exudes reality.
	So first question on the book, which is called The Apollo Murders.
	This is the one that is out on the 12th of October.
	Why did you become an author?
	Why did you want to do that?
	When I was a boy watching people go to the space, there were two things.
	There was a Soviet program and the NASA, the American program.
	And the Soviets were so closed about it, and they would only tell people what happened afterwards with a sanitized version of the successes.
	But NASA, they just said, shoot, this is too important just to keep to ourselves.
	And they allowed the whole thing to be broadcast live.
	And if Buzz Aldrin swore or someone made a stupid mistake or someone was killed or Apollo 13 happened, everyone was going to see it and learn from it.
	And so I think that influenced my thinking that if I ever got to be an astronaut, that I'm not going to keep it to myself.
	I am going to write and perform music about it.
	I'm going to make videos about it that maybe Howard can play later on his show.
	I'm going to talk to people.
	I'm going to educate.
	I'm going to be a professor at school.
	I'm going to work with, I just, I've been so lucky and privileged to have done these things.
	You know, it's why I did a masterclass and the other series that I've done to try and find every means possible to allow other people to benefit from this, what is still a very rare experience.
	And that includes writing.
	And I've written four books, but my latest allowed me a whole bunch more latitude because I decided to write a thriller fiction book so I could really get into what is it like?
	How do people react?
	How imperfect are astronauts?
	How do they respond when things are going well and when things are going badly?
	What do they value?
	And so in a mix of real characters, and the book is over half real characters, then the characters that I created, it allowed me to tell a thread of a story that I think is really, you know, of its own right.
	And the people that are recommending the book, Frederick Forsyth loves the book, and James Cameron and Andy Weird, all kinds of people who should know better.
	I can quite see that.
	Reading through the book, and I had to do it quickly.
	But a journalist, I'm looking for the way that it's written.
	And you have, as an author doing that, you have to decide how far can I go?
	How far beyond what we know was the reality can I go?
	So this is Apollo 18.
	It's a mission that didn't happen, a secret Apollo mission.
	And there are all sorts of cross-currents with the Russians who have a presence on the moon, and they've got a spy space station over Earth called Al-Maz.
	There are all sorts of things happening there.
	But into this, you beautifully weave the technical detail that only you can know because you've been there and done it.
	And real characters like the BuzzCut guy, Gene Krantz, the Apollo controller, the guy we see in all the newsreels of that.
	And even people like President Richard Nixon and his chief of staff as well, Holdeman, who was involved in Watergate, wasn't he?
	All of those things you've been able to build in here.
	Yes, and Henry Kissinger and Russian equivalents at the time, right up to Brezhnev and several of the characters, there was one of my characters, Gablukhailatipov.
	He's a real guy who drove the rover around on the moon.
	And he's a character in the book.
	And the book is intensely based on things that could have happened.
	When James Cameron read it, he said, you know, tell people this is a wondrous adventure story of things that just might have happened.
	Well, I kept hearing, and I'm sorry to jump in with Chris Adfield, but I kept hearing the music of John Barry swell up.
	It was very Ian Fleming 007.
	I kept hearing that in my head.
	Well, I'm pleased because I worked hard on making the book as credible and believable as possible.
	And, you know, why wouldn't I?
	I've done a lot of those things.
	But I'm delighted with the book and the reaction that I'm seeing.
	But I think people will learn a lot, not only about, you know, the fact that there was a secret spy Soviet space station that was actually armed with a huge machine gun mounted on the outside that the Soviets fired in space, or that there was this rover that mysteriously malfunctioned on the surface of the moon in the spring of 73.
	And those real threads provided the backbone of the book.
	And then I just wove a plot through it of characters that the final climax, of course, coming back to Splashdown, is pretty gripping.
	And it's been a lot of fun seeing the reaction in other people's eyes now as they read through the book.
	I loved it.
	It's going to be a movie.
	And I wish you well with it, Chris.
	Can I rapidly get to some listener questions?
	And if you could do very quick answers to each of these, because I can see the Zoom minutes ticking down on us.
	Jonathan asks, the ISS, when will it be retired?
	We've been hearing reports recently, haven't we, that it's got problems, structural problems.
	When do you think the ISS will finish?
	Well, every building on Earth has structural problems, so I wouldn't get too worried about people who don't know what they're talking about reporting.
	The space station, the first piece was launched in 98, and it was designed for 30 years.
	But most of the pieces were launched quite a bit after 1998.
	So, you know, the first piece reaches just sort of its definite guaranteed design life in 2028.
	But, you know, it'll probably be extended after that.
	At some point, it'll just enough things will be breaking that it won't be economically safe or feasible to do anymore.
	But I expect we'll be living on the space station for another decade or so.
	People confuse political cycles with what's actually going on.
	But every new president or new whoever they stick in charge of the Rust cosmos over in Russia, you know, they all have to say posturing things.
	But the reality is it's the biggest thing we've ever built in orbit.
	It's hugely successful.
	It's looking at, you know, the abs, the fundamental nature of the universe itself.
	And the crew up there is doing magnificent work.
	And I expect it'll be up there another decade or so.
	Quick answer to this, appreciated, Chris.
	Mel and an expat, Scottish expat living in Edmonton, Canada, both want to know about your thoughts on UFOs.
	Have you spoken to any of your fellow flyers in space about that?
	Do you believe that there might be something else out there?
	I think is the summation of those questions.
	No one has ever seen life anywhere except from Earth.
	Categorical, simple, full stop.
	I expect there's life somewhere else.
	The numbers are overwhelming, but we've never found any evidence.
	It's why we're exploring.
	It's why we're drilling on Mars.
	But, you know, it's a fun thing to think about and imagine about.
	But the hard evidence is so far, it's just us.
	And I think it puts a big weight of responsibility on our shoulders to decide how we should behave.
	Rob and Craig ask questions about music.
	Actually, no, it's Craig and John rather ask questions about music.
	Craig asks about your duet with The Bare Naked Ladies, which I was watching today on YouTube.
	And John just wants to know about playing the guitar on the ISS.
	Does it sound the same?
	Yeah, I've co-written with several other musicians, some of them famous, including The Bare Naked Ladies, and I've toured with them also.
	Playing guitar without gravity is hard.
	The guitar doesn't sit on your knee.
	It doesn't suspend from your strap.
	And if you watch carefully during my videos playing up there, you can see that I'm pinching the guitar under the flesh of my right bicep just so the guitar won't take off as I play it.
	And my left hand, your muscle memory relies on gravity.
	So I kept overshooting when I was going up and down the neck on bar chords.
	But you can learn how to play guitar in space, and it's a fun place to sing.
	Scott in Dallas, Texas asks, do you get to keep the spacesuit?
	No, I mean, it belongs to the government.
	I was a government employee the whole time.
	So, no, you don't just steal things from the government.
	No, no.
	And there are multiple, multiple spacesuits, you know, depending on what phase you're at.
	So no, that's just not how it works.
	Nice question from Scott in Dallas.
	One from me.
	What do you think about William Shatner going into Space Age 90?
	I think it's great.
	William's a Canadian.
	He's from Montreal.
	I've done several things with Bill, and he's a super hardworking guy.
	He's 90.
	He still works, you know, full days, seven days a week.
	And he's a terrific journeyman actor.
	He's great experience.
	He's a lot of fun as a person.
	And I think it's delightful that instead of just pretending, now he's actually going to have a chance to get to the edge of space and be weightless for a while.
	So I'm delighted for him.
	I'm looking forward to congratulating him on the experience.
	Do you think that we'll ever get to the stage, not maybe in our lifetimes, where the common man, the ordinary person will get the chance to taste space?
	When I was born, Howard, no one, when you and I were born, no one had flown in space.
	It's all brand new.
	And we've gone from barely, crazily just on the edge possible to now where William Shatner's going for a ride.
	So you don't have to extrapolate that arc very far to realize the answer to your question is yes.
	It's always going to be going to, you don't have to pay for your ticket, but the tickets are going to become less and less expensive as the technology gets better and better.
	So yeah, so long as you can buy right now, it's still very expensive, but so were most things when they were brand new.
	Yeah, I think it's a really good trajectory.
	And the more people that we can have actually see the reality of the world and feel a greater sense of responsibility and stewardship for it, the better we'll all be served.
	As you said earlier in this conversation, and you're a dynamo to talk with and a pleasure to talk with too, if I may say so, at the back end of this.
	You're absolutely certain that you have much still to do.
	What are the highlights of that which you would like to do now?
	Having done all the stuff that you have done, what do you want to do next?
	Well, I want to, when I came back, I mean, if you'd just spent half a year in space, Howard, what would you do?
	You know, how would you choose what you're going to do for the rest of your life?
	And what I don't want to do is squander all of the things that I've learned.
	And so I deliberately chose what I'm doing now, and I want to do them for the next 30 years.
	And that is to share, to teach, to help other people make different decisions, to contribute to the quality of life for as many people as possible in a sustainable way.
	And so I work with companies.
	I run a huge technology incubator.
	I run the whole space side of that.
	I'm on the board of the advisory board to a bunch of companies, several of which are space-related, but several of which that aren't.
	I'm an adjunct professor at university.
	I'm learning to write fiction, and my first thriller novel seems to be doing extremely well.
	So I'm in the process of writing a follow-on novel as well.
	And I'm always looking for new challenges and new things that I can try and set myself to, where I will learn, and hopefully it'll contribute to what other people are doing as well.
	I think it's a wonderful way to conduct life.
	It's how I've always been guided.
	And it doesn't end just because your spaceship thumps back to Earth.
	True enough.
	No argument from me on that one.
	If they make the Apollo murders into a film, which I think they might do a movie of this, would you like a cameo role in it?
	Oh, sure, that'd be fun.
	Why not?
	And a lot of authors and people do.
	I know Chuck Yeager was in The Right Stuff, you know, which was such a lovely come around, but I'm not worried about that.
	If we do make a movie, and I'm pretty sure we will out of the Apollo murders, lots of people have expressed interest.
	I just need it to be a good movie.
	I can't afford to go to the theater and cringe at a movie that has my name on it.
	So we're not in a hurry to make a bad movie.
	I want to make sure that if we do make a movie from the book, and I think the plot line definitely lends itself to it, I want it to be a movie that everyone looks at and says that is a good space movie.
	I'm sure it will be.
	And I think one way that it would work, and you've done many things, I think sure you could turn your hand to this.
	Maybe you should produce and direct it.
	Oh, no, I'll leave that.
	That's a huge.
	I mean, I've talked to, you know, James Cameron, Jim Cameron about it, and he's a tremendously, and he would love to make a version of it, but he's busy doing his avatar sequels and Terminator again, I think.
	So he's got a full plate and he's already, you know, touching 70.
	So I don't think Jim's going to do it.
	But, you know, never say never.
	And if the book lends itself to it, I will do all I can to make sure that we do it right.
	Chris Hadfield, I've really thoroughly enjoyed this last hour.
	Your people gave me an hour with you, and we've had that full hour, and you've been very gracious about the whole thing.
	And I still feel that I'd like to do another hour.
	Maybe we'll get the chance to speak again.
	I would love to do that.
	Thank you for speaking with me.
	It's a small planet.
	I'm sure we will see each other again.
	And it was a real pleasure to speak to someone who is as prepared and professional and pleasant to talk to as you are, Howard.
	Thank you very much.
	Well, that's very kind.
	I mean, it sounds like a mutual appreciation society here, but you are the perfect guest.
	So, you know, I would love to speak with you again.
	And as you say, this is a small planet, Chris.
	Thank you so much.
	Take care.
	I have to say that's one of the conversations that I will remember for a very long time.
	Chris Hadfield, astronaut, an all-round good guy.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained, and please stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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