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Home , Expedition 35, Scott Carpenter

1 Contents

Introduction 3

1 The 6

2 Aboard the ISS 12

3 Poetry, Pictures and Song 19

4 Launch Pad 5, May 5, 1961 25

5 Truth and Beauty 31

6 A Spaceman for a New Space Age 37

Notes and Sources 40

Playlist 43

Acknowledgements 44

(Photo: Chris Hadfield/NASA) Introduction

The universe is wider than our views of it. —American author, poet, historian Henry David Thoreau

The story of Chris Hadfield, this one at least, isn’t a story about sci- ence or astronomy, at least not in the precise, painstakingly calcu- lated manner in which scientists speak and work and regard their complex disciplines. It’s not even particularly a story about Chris Hadfield, because although the Canadian astronaut is at the heart of it and the reason for its telling, it’s not a profile of a man in the proper sense of the word. Rather, it is a story about space, our place in it, and how Chris Hadfield is helping us define that, collectively and individually, as a nation and beyond. Space and the universe has long been the pre- occupation, not solely of and scientists, but also of writ- ers, philosophers, poets, songwriters, filmmakers and painters. The universe is nearly 14 billion years old and its observable portion — 93 billion light years in diameter — defines wonder, beauty and the unknown, and the intersection of science and spiri- tuality. Exploring space, as every astronaut who has ever made the journey knows, is about the search for something bigger than us. That rarefied group of 530 men and women know genuinely what it feels like to be up there and look down here. It started with Russian Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space on April 12, 1961, and continues today on the International Space Station with a group of six men, including a Canadian who is doing more for space and NASA’s image than anyone since took one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. My mother insists — although it’s quite unlikely — that the only

3 Chris Hadfield time she really got impatient with me was on the afternoon of July 20, 1969. She and 500 million other people around the world were glued to the black-and-white images being broadcast on television of Armstrong and landing on the moon. I was 2.

Buzz Aldrin in 1969 (Photo: Neil Armstrong/NASA)

“No Mommy moon!” I apparently shrieked, time and again. She ignored me as best she could but nearly 44 years later she vividly remembers the event. We were touring the Art Gal- lery of Ontario on a Sunday in August when news came that Arm- strong had died, and we sat for a while and let its meaning sink in. I was 10 when I received a Tasco telescope for my birthday. It

4 Chris Hadfield came with a logbook and I filled it religiously, charting the phases of the moon and the stars I spotted on clear nights in our country backyard. But as I got older my interest faded. Until Chris Hadfield reignited it. Today I’m glued to his Twitter feed, mooning over every breathtaking image. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, and so passionate a supporter of the space program that NASA named the first Shuttle Enterprise, once said, “Why are we now going into space? Well, why did we trouble to look past the next mountain? Our prime obligation to ourselves is to make the unknown known. We are on a journey to keep an appointment with whatever we are.” Chris Hadfield, just a regular kid from a southern Ontario farm family, knew from a young age he had that appointment. He kept it, and now he’s letting us tag along for the ride.

5 1 The Astronaut

The contemplation of celestial things will make a man both speak and think more sublimely and magnificently when he descends to human affairs. —Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero

Chris Hadfield writes poetry in space, 140 characters at a time. He makes photographs worthy of National Geographic and coffee table books from his spot in the cupola, a dome at the bottom of the International Space Station with seven windows that permit a stunning view of Earth. It’s where he has the most fun with his Nikon D2 and D3 SLR cameras and lenses ranging from 400 mm to fish eye. He shares these photographs with humility and a dutiful non- chalance that doing so is his mission because he is a man lucky enough to be somewhere most humans, at one time or another, have imagined: circling our planet at 17,500 miles an hour, 92 times a day. And still, despite the fact he will do this for about 150 days and pass around Earth nearly 14,000 times, not a single orbit has been less interesting than the last, and each becomes more precious. In space, even the routine is fascinating. Hadfield is 53 and on his third — and longest — space flight. Born in Sarnia and raised in Milton, he grew up on a corn farm, the son of an Air Canada pilot and knew he wanted to fly from a young age. He is not up there just to keep us earthlings entertained, though it must feel like a full-time job. He is aboard the International Space Station for five months as part of a six-man team “conducting sci- ence” as he calls it — more than 130 experiments into medical and material research.

6 Chris Hadfield

Hadfield says his sons helped acquaint him with social media — and his youngest, Evan, 27, helps spread his father’s Twitter posts across other sites such as Facebook and Tumblr, captivating even those with a mere passing interest in space. Among astronauts, Hadfield has an unprecedented social me- dia presence fuelled by his passionate desire to engage the public. He participated in dropping the puck for the Toronto Maple Leafs home opener (he is an obsessed and loyal fan). He has recorded songs with pop musicians (Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies), takes time out of his day to talk to songwriters (Sarah McLachlan) and posts videos about cooking in space to YouTube. Marc Garneau, the first Canadian in space aboard three shuttle missions — Challenger in 1984 and Endeavour in 1996 and 2000 (the latter two helping build the ISS) — has been glued to Had- field’s excellent adventure. “He has indeed made space cool again,” says Garneau, now campaigning for the federal Liberal Party leadership. Garneau has known Hadfield for 20 years. “He’s an excellent communicator and he’s really grabbing peo- ples’ attention and generating interest in space. “I wish tweeting had existed on my last flight. The pictures he’s sending… He’s been on television, he’s singing, he’s playing guitar. He’s showing a side of astronauts that people don’t usually think of. When people think of astronauts they think test pilots and en- gineers. He’s showing he can wax poetic about the experience of being in space, and he’s very eloquent.” Chris Hadfield’s father Roger took him on his first flights and instructed much of his early training. There are six pilots in the Hadfield family, and Chris was 13 when he joined the Royal Cana- dian Air Cadets on a scholarship for flight instruction. After graduating from high school and spending six months working as a ski instructor in Europe, Hadfield joined the Armed

7 Chris Hadfield

Forces in 1978. He graduated from Royal Military College with a degree in mechanical engineering, and in 1983, finished at the top of his class in basic jet training. This earned him a spot at the U.S. air School as an F-18 Hornet pilot. In 1988, he graduated again at the top of his class, an honour that allowed him to fly as a test pilot with the U.S. navy. In 1991, once again, Chris Hadfield was named their best pilot. The following year the named the 32-year-old Air Force captain an astronaut. Hadfield’s first two shuttle flights — Atlantis in 1995 and En- deavour in 2001 — were to Russia’s Space Station. He was rap- idly compiling a list of firsts — first Canadian to operate the Can- adarm in space; the only one to set foot on a Russian spacecraft; and the first to perform a spacewalk. “It was the most magnificent experience of my life,” he recalled recently. “Alone in a one-person spaceship (my suit), just holding on with my one hand, with the bottomless black universe on my left and the world pouring by in Technicolor on my right. I highly recommend it.” Ken Cameron, who flew with Hadfield aboard Atlantis, said the Canadian was in a unique position to be a diplomat in space and called his work “the foundation of the space station.” “He was good to have when we were dealing with the Russians,” the American astronaut says. “He’s a communicator. He under- stands, having dealt with a large culture to the south and a large culture to the other direction. Canada is right between Russia and the United States. On a map you don’t see it but from space. . . He was very effective as a communicator and a team builder, which was our job, getting comfortable with the Russians and helping them get comfortable with us.”

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8 Chris Hadfield

In mid-March Hadfield will become the first Canadian to serve as a commander of the International Space Station. “It’s like earning the gold medal at the Olympics,” he says. “It’s something for Canadians to take pride in. It’s something to point out to each other and say, ‘Hey, we do good things. We are capable, and we are respected.’” Spend any time on Chris Hadfield’s Twitter feed, his Facebook updates, or replaying his recent conversation with Star Trek’s Wil- liam Shatner, and it is quickly apparent he is a departure from the astronauts of the 1950s and 1960s who were immortalized in the 1983 film adapted from ’s magazine stories . He has wrestled complex space science from the elite and brought it down to Earth for the masses. He has shared what space looks like, even what it smells like: “The vacuum of space has no smell, but when you come in from a spacewalk the smells like , or gunpowder. It likely comes from the gentle off-gas- sing of the outer metal and fabric of our suits.” Space looks like “a glowing carpet of countless tiny perfect un- blinking lights in endless velvet, with the Milky Way as a glow- ing area of paler texture,” he’s written. And the prettiest thing is “the aurora — Northern and Southern lights. A fantastic continu- ous light show as we swing north and south, just shimmering and dancing there, demanding to be stared at.” On Feb. 8, Hadfield tweeted that he’d “just crossed N America in the night, from N of Vancouver to right over Boston. An incred- ible 9 minutes, aurora shimmering like magic.” Chris Hadfield is a renaissance rocket man, a musician, a lovely writer of meaningful tweets, a gifted photographer, a diplomat, a hockey fan and a soulful traveller who knows no bounds. There is nothing particularly macho about him, not from his trademark little moustache to the easy, respectful way he speaks with kids and

9 Chris Hadfield his playful sense of humour when floating in zero gravity with the world watching. He shows us the amazing cubbyholes of wonder that make up as if it were his mission. “Too many of us have lost the passion and emotion of the re- markable things we’ve done in space,” the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury said in 2003. “Let us not tear up the future, but rather again heed the creative metaphors that render space travel a religious experience. When the blast of a rocket launch slams you against the wall and all the rust is shaken off your body, you will hear the great shout of the universe and the joyful crying of people who have been changed by what they’ve seen.” Hadfield shows his followers many times each day how much he has been changed by what he’s seen from space, and by supply- ing a steady stream of photographs and profound thoughts from above, he is changing us. “It’s a startling miracle, every time, to look out of my window and see Earth,” he says.

10 Chris Hadfield

“Tonight’s finale, the full moon rises over the only planet we have ever called home,” Hadfield tweeted on Feb. 18 (Photo: Chris Hadfield/ NASA)

11 2 Aboard the ISS

“We believe that when men reached beyond this planet, they should leave their national differences behind them.” —U.S. President John F. Kennedy

Chris Hadfield left Kazakhstan crammed into a Soyuz capsule with two other astronauts on Dec. 19, 2012, bound for the ISS. They landed two days later. Hadfield recorded an original song and celebrated Christmas with the crew, enjoying a small tree, stock- ings and Santa hats. Then they all got down to serious work. “We run 130 experiments, pilot the ship and look beyond,” Hadfield says, and tweets many days about the on his ex- periments. The astronauts practise science every day — even on weekends. The experiments have titles straight out of science fiction — Re- versible Figures Experiment and the Neurospat, the Radi-N2 and the BCAT-C1. Hadfield says his favourite experiment is BCAT — in which he looks at the structure and behaviour of nanoparticles, and how they perform without the of gravity. “We’re finding out all sorts of things, looking at how to make materials better, like paint, that on Earth behave differently be- cause of gravity,” he says. “We’re trying to collect energy, collecting dark matter, trying to understand antimatter, trying to understand what the universe is made of, trying to understand the human body, how we balance, how we see, when you take away gravity a lot of things change. It’s a really good laboratory to study the body and help us understand the universe better and help us live better on Earth.” In between ongoing maintenance work — from managing the computers to cleaning the space toilet, otherwise known as the

12 Chris Hadfield waste and hygiene compartment — Hadfield has made time to practise his guitar, and make hundreds of photographs and beauti- ful observations about the marble that is Earth, hanging against the black blanket of space. Hadfield shares quarters with American astronauts Tom Marsh- burn and Kevin Ford, the commander who will hand off the ship to Hadfield March 14, as well as Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novits- kiy, Evgeny Tarelkin, and , a second genera- tion spaceman whose father, Yury, spent nearly a year aboard Mir in 1987. Fifteen nations participate in the ISS program: Canada, the U.S., , Russia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K. It’s a testament to how far the space program has come from its beginnings. “This place is built by the world and put together with the Unit- ed States as the foreman,” Hadfield says. “Fortunately we didn’t have to abandon it as we did Skylab, and because of cooperation with other countries people are here living and working. And, the United States will build another vehicle and that will come up here also. It’s by no means a lost way, it’s a natural path.” Skylab was a U.S. space station that operated from 1973 to 1979, but was abandoned when the shuttle intended to service it was not ready in time, and Skylab was burned up on re-entry to Earth. The ISS has often been referred to as a “castle in the sky.” The astronauts live on Greenwich Time, same as London, England. They are scheduled to sleep at the same time — from roughly 4:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. EST, and when they turn in they turn out most of the lights on board, as if they were at home. “It feels right to do it,” Hadfield says. Their sleep stations are small, padded and the size of a phone booth, completely private. “Like a bedroom without a b e d .”

13 Chris Hadfield

“I love sleeping weightless,” Hadfield says. “No mattress, no pil- low, no sore shoulder, no hot spots. Just relax every muscle in your body and drift off to sleep. “My dreams are the same, I think — the idle ramble of my re- charging brain, organizing my perceptions into fancy and drama. It’s when I’m awake that things are very different.” “Life goes on as per normal in space,” Canadian astronaut Jer- emy Hansen says. “It’s like working inside a house.”

Chris Hadfield aboard the International Space Station (Photo: Chris Hadfield/NASA)

The area where the astronauts live is roughly the size of a 747 airplane. Yet just living in space is an amazing daily feat. Hadfield and his colleagues shave with a standard razor, wiping the cream and whiskers on a cloth. “It works fine.” But they can’t shower or bathe, relying on soap and wet towels for hygiene. Space food has come a long way from the Russian cosmonauts who ate puréed meat squeezed from tubes and the Project Mer- cury astronauts who had freeze-dried powders and cubes. In 1965

14 Chris Hadfield

Gemini pilot brought a corned beef sandwich along from his commander because it was Grissom’s favou- rite food, but NASA was less than pleased. A congressional hear- ing was called, to make sure smuggled sandwiches never made it to space again. These days, ice cream has been sent to the ISS in a freezer on a commercial SpaceX flight intended to bring experiments back to Earth. Fruits and vegetables that do well in room are on the menu as are cultural specialties, from Kung Pao chicken, sushi and kimchi, all engineered for travel to and consumption in space. Lemon curd cake is a favourite of Hadfield’s. “We’re short on sin up here, so I think it’s OK,” he says. Waffles with Ca- nadian maple syrup were on board for Shrove Tuesday. Then there’s the need for exercise some might deem excessive — two scheduled hours a day of treadmill running, cycling and resistance bands. “Exercise in space is necessary because otherwise the astro- nauts would become like jellyfish,” says. Astronauts lose bone density at the rate of half a per cent to 2 per cent each month. It takes an astronaut who has been in space the length of Hadfield’s mission — about five months — two years to recover their pre-flight bone density according to Raffi Kuyum- jian, CSA chief medical officer in operational space medicine. Kuyumjian will travel to Russia to examine the Expedition 35 crew when they return to Earth in May. “Your body has a lot of changes when you take away gravity,” Hadfield says. “You don’t know how to balance. There’s no way to say which way is up. It all feels like you’re right side up. Your body gets very confused. Gravity doesn’t push the blood down to your feet anymore. Your fluid shifts. Everything moves up to your head. You get a big swollen head, and your body decides you don’t need

15 Chris Hadfield a strong skeleton anymore, so you start to lose that. “We exercise really hard to keep the skeleton and muscles strong. The rest of it, we just let get used to being in space. My legs get really skinny because gravity isn’t pushing the blood down.” Then there’s the whole business of going to the bathroom. Urine, which used to be ejected into space, has since 2008 been recycled into water than can be consumed.

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Between Twitter and the time he has spent talking with school- children and doing broadcast interviews, Hadfield has answered pretty much every question one could think to ask, from the prac- tical to the profound. On getting around: He hits his head “about once a day. I’m still learning. But sometimes now, I am graceful. I feel like an adapted ape swinging, through the jungle canopy … until I miss a handrail and crash into the wall.” On living in close quarters with five other spacemen: “Privacy here is about the same as how I grew up — one of five kids in a farmhouse. It’s never a problem.” On being in space for five months: “It’s not that much different than being on a long business trip. I talk to my family every day. Technology removes the sense of remoteness. We’re busy, happy and hardworking up here.” On whom he’d like to host up there: “For his insightful work on films Apollo 13 and From the Earth to the Moon, and for his per- sonality, I’d love to show the place to Tom Hanks.” On how to be an astronaut: “To be an astronaut you have to be healthy (eat your greens and exercise), smart (do your homework), and trustworthy (do your jobs well). Then you get the suit and rocket.” On his favourite thing to do in space: “Simply fly — to push off

16 Chris Hadfield and glide magically to the other end of the Station. It makes me smile to myself, every time.” On threats to the ISS: “Sometimes, we hear pings as tiny rocks hit our spaceship, and also the creaks and snaps of expanding met- al as we go in and out of sunlight. The solar panels are full of tiny holes from the micrometeorites. I watched a large meteor burn up between me and Australia, and to think of that hypersonic dumb lump of rock randomly hurtling into us instead sent a shiver up my back.” On fear: “The biggest danger is launch, all that power and accel- eration. Once we survive that, it’s just a steady threat of radiation, meteorite impacts and vehicle system failure like fire or ammonia breakthrough.” Fear in space is never far away. “The way I deal with fear is I define what it is that’s scaring me,” Hadfield says. “What I am in fear of is not knowing what to do next, to be responsible for a vehicle and not know the right ac- tions to take with my hands or the spaceship. I’ve spent my whole adult life trying to know my lines. I spent years learning to speak Russian and flying that spaceship. And even though it flew itself flawlessly up here, we were ready to jump in and do it all manu- ally and fly it home. Terrifying initially, but after years of training, practising everything, the fear diminishes, you feel like you’re on the crest of a wave of ability. “When people ask my wife if she’s scared of what I do for a liv- ing … I was a test pilot and (it’s a) far riskier profession. I basically lost one friend a year. “It was a risk I decided to take many years ago. To accomplish anything worthwhile in life takes risk. You can’t live a worthwhile life without taking risks. . . .I’m in a position to say the risks are infinitely worthwhile when you look at the view that’s just out this window behind me and the things that lie beyond.

17 Chris Hadfield

“The hardest part is being ready all the time for things to go badly. When things are going well it’s easy to be in charge, when nothing is broken. But you have to be ready all the time and you can’t be surprised when things go badly. That might mean if a me- teor came through the wall and we started losing , or we had a fire, or someone’s family got sick.” His father Roger nearly sniffs at the thought. “Driving along the 401 is more dangerous than flying around up there. Now, going up is tough, and coming back down is kind of rough too. But once you’re up there, you’re fine.” Hadfield is more than fine. He’s making us want to be up there with him.

18 3 Poetry, Pictures and Song

“We need to have people up there who can communicate what it feels like, not just pilots and engineers.” —Apollo 11 astronaut and moonwalker Buzz Aldrin

It may not be exaggeration to suggest that Chris Hadfield may be the best thing to happen to NASA since Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. Astronauts have had the ability to tweet from the space station since 2010, but no one has taken up social media the way Hadfield has. It became quickly apparent that he was good for space the mo- ment he arrived on board the ISS. He had just over 20,000 Twitter followers when he began his mission on Dec. 19. But when , the Canadian actor who played the fictional space captain Kirk on Star Trek, contacted Hadfield on Twitter, the astronaut’s social media presence cracked the strato- sphere. @Cmdr_Hadfield Are you tweeting from space? MBB (Shat- ner’s sign off, meaning “My best Bill.”) A few hours later Hadfield responded with a nod to the televi- sion space captain’s legacy: “@WilliamShatner: Yes, Standard Or- bit, Captain. And we’re detecting signs of life on the surface.” Star Trek fans went crazy. In one day Hadfield had more than 70,000 followers, and his place in popular culture was firmly set- tled. More actors from Star Trek got in on the act, with Leonard Nimoy (Mr. Spock), George Takei (Mr. Sulu) and Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher) all tweeting at Hadfield. So did real astronauts, Apollo’s Buzz Aldrin and Apollo and Gemini pilot . By Feb. 24, Hadfield had 435,491 followers and he’s on pace to surpass 600,000 by the time he takes control of the ISS.

19 Chris Hadfield

Chris Hadfield, just by being Chris Hadfield, has made space a water cooler topic in a way it hasn’t been for decades. Toronto Maple Leafs goaltender Ben Scrivens thanked the commander on Twitter for “the great pictures and insights into life in space” and asked if he’d like to trade jobs for a day. Justin Bieber tweeted that he wanted to play a concert in space, and NASA responded, saying they could help. William Shatner has an invitation to the Hadfield cottage later this summer, to smoke cigars and stare up at the sky. Richard Branson, space watcher and billionaire businessman, even blogged about Hadfield in February, calling his photographs the stuff of marvel and pointing out a gorgeous picture of a full moon rising over Earth. “Pardon us while we scoop our jaws off the floor,” Branson wrote. Hadfield has brought the universe to us simply by being a gen- erous and gregarious communicator and being savvy enough to use social tools to bridge the physical gap. Hadfield considers this work as important as the science he’s there to perform. “Each astronaut has personal goals as part of their career,” Had- field says. “One of mine has been education and public awareness of what we are doing in space exploration. This current five-month mission combined with the advent of social media has made this possible like never before. I think it is important that people see the world from this new perspective that technology has given us, and I do my utmost to make that happen. “What we’re doing on space station is fundamentally fascinat- ing, and the evidence shows through a measure like Twitter — the exploration we’re doing, the experiments we’re doing, the view of the world and how it encapsulates where we are in history.” It turns out the Earth is pretty compelling from on high. “I love the ones that make me think about our planet in the atmosphere, when you look at it from the external view you think there’s this tiny thin band of atmosphere keeping us alive,” Jere-

20 Chris Hadfield my Hansen said. “I love the photos of the Andes, the colour and the richness, I love his interest in the rest of the world, we’ve both flown a lot over North America in F18 fighter jets, but the way he has brought attention to other parts of the planet has been some- thing with his photos.” In his pictures, the lush Amazon basin looks like an impres- sionist painting. Sand in the Sahara resembles a chocolate cake. A cyclone forming over Madagascar looks computer generated by filmmaker Stephen Spielberg. London, Dubai, Hong Kong and New York — the world’s biggest cities look like sparkling spider webs.

Chris Hadfield described these Saharan sand dunes as “delicate cappuccino frosting decorations” (Photo: Chris Hadfield/NASA)

“There is beauty in space, and it is orderly,” the German-Amer- ican rocket scientist Wernher von Braun said in 1958. “There is no weather, and there is regularity. It is predictable. Just look at our little Explorer; you can set your clock by it — literally; it is more

21 Chris Hadfield accurate than your clock. Everything in space obeys the laws of physics. If you know these laws, and obey them, space will treat you kindly.” “Australia looks coolest, the colours and textures of the Out- back are severely artistic,” Hadfield says. “The most beautiful to me are the Bahamas, the vast glowing reefs of every shade of blue that exists.” His favourite photo is one of a noctilucent cloud. “To me it is both beautiful and scientific. I never thought I’d ever see those rare phenomena, let alone get a top-notch photo of them.” Hadfield considers himself a musician primarily, as the guitar- pick shaped mission patch suggests. He teamed up with Ed Rob- ertson, who performs with Canadian alternative rock group the Barenaked Ladies, to write a song called “ISS (Is Somebody Sing- ing)” before he left for space as part of the Coalition for Music Education program. “I really wanted to convey that, even though Chris is in a re- mote location, being obviously in space, he’s still very connected to his family, to his friends, to his colleagues here on Earth,” Robert- son told the CBC. “And though it’s a lonely existence he’s leading, he’s coming home. “He’s pushing these frontiers for knowledge and exploration. And yet, as we’ve seen, he’s the most connected astronaut in his- tory. He’s the rock-stonaut up there, tweeting his every move. I re- ally wanted to convey that sense of connection and belonging from his remote place in space.” They performed it — with Robertson and the Wexford glee club in the CBC studio, and Hadfield in the cupola on the ISS. To watch them play, Hadfield looks delirious, on top of the world. “That’s what’s special about Chris Hadfield. Has there ever been a more articulate astronaut?” Robertson said. “He is able to convey the wonder of his position in a way I don’t think anyone before

22 Chris Hadfield ever has. Chris is so accomplished, so proficient and so profes- sional and so capable, and yet he comes across as the dude from the feed mill who has a pickup truck so he’ll help you put your boat in the water. And yet he’s the first Canadian to walk in space, about to be commander of the ISS, and he has this folksy wisdom that is magical.” Ken Cameron flew with Hadfield on Atlantis in 1995. He is a veteran of three space flights and was a passionate lobbyist for musical instruments in space back when NASA wasn’t as keen on the idea, and played with Hadfield on that flight. “The social media stuff is catching,” Cameron says. “More and more people are seeing the potential benefits. You have to take time to do it. It depends on the individual. Chris is an unusual sit- uation. The number of Canadian astronauts is small compared to overall in NASA. All the Canadian astronauts I have met have felt that they are ambassadors not just to the United States but also in Chris’s case to Russia, and maybe they’re more aware of the nature of what their work does relative to the Canadian people. There’s a duty that comes with the position.” Marc Garneau said that NASA must capitalize on Hadfield’s communication skills, social media savvy and his soaring popu- larity. “He’s exceptional in terms of his skills, not everybody is as good as Chris is in terms of his communication skills, or his appeal, but it’s an important tool for NASA to use,” Garneau says. “The technology is there to let the contact occur. When you do, it puts NASA back in people’s mind, maintains the interest in space, when it was a little more mysterious thing, you could only go to mission control, you could hear the ground contacting the capsule in orbit but didn’t have the opportunities to interact with the astronauts.” During a recent question-and-answer session online, a reader on social media site Reddit asked Hadfield if he ever gets the urge

23 Chris Hadfield to point and shout look: “Look! I can see my house from here!” “At first yes, but after a few days, you start to see the whole world as one place. An awesome perspective to be given. Try to look out the window as often and as long as possible. Truly see our world.” In Chris Hadfield’s universe, every tweet sounds like a poem, every song a call to action and every photograph resembles a painting.

24 4 Launch Pad 5, May 5, 1961

“Let’s light this candle.” —, the first American and second man to travel into space

At Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge near , Fla., peak tourist season has yet to get going. Part museum, theme park and monument to the space exploration achievements of mankind, it’s a nostalgic place, stoic in its quiet patriotism. Orchestral pieces play over outdoor loud- speakers.

The Kennedy Space Center Rocket Garden (Shawna Richer/Toronto Star)

Inside the entry gates is the Rocket Garden, eight impressive missiles from the Mercury missions, the imposing Saturn 1 rock-

25 Chris Hadfield ets and Gemini and Apollo capsules — and even the actual orange gantry Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins used to board Apollo 11. “People used to live here but that all changed in the 1950s,” Kennedy tour guide Mark Smith says, pointing out retired launch pads and their history. “You had to be pretty rugged to deal with the snakes and the alligators, and then the V-2 rocket launches started here in the 50s.” Those were the unmanned Cold War rockets from the early days — the , Minuteman, Thor and Titan missiles that were built to be “astro-spies.” The old blockhouse on Launch Complex 26 near pads 5 and 6, where Explorer 1 and Alan Shepard and the chimp went up is still there and smells like 1961. All the original firing-room instruments panels are under glass. Condensation has been form- ing inside the 2 ½-foot-thick windows since the ventilation system was turned off in 1964. Because Kennedy Space Center is dependent on revenue from visitors, guided tours and gift shop sales — no government money funds the Center — parts of it seem strangely abandoned and ee- rie. Somewhere not far from LC 26, in a field away from the road the tour buses use and inaccessible to the public, the remains of the Space Shuttle Challenger are buried under a white dome. The shuttle broke apart 73 seconds after launch, killing all seven crew members. A ways north along the cape is LC 34 where astronauts Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffee died in a capsule fire during a prelaunch test for the Apollo 1 mission on Jan. 27, 1967. The pad remains scorched black from the blaze. Grissom’s widow, Betty, visits every year on the anniversary of the fire.

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26 Chris Hadfield

In 1958 the NASA Special Committee on Life Sciences established the following qualifications for the first Americans to fly into space: a degree or equivalent in physical science or engineering; graduation from a military test pilot school; 1,500 hours of flying time including a substantial amount in high-performance jets. The original government advertisement for astronaut can- didates that same year listed a starting salary range of $8,330 to $12,770. (That would be worth $66,111 to $101,394 today). “This attracted the best candidates although it was minimal compensa- tion considering that you were asked to strap yourself to the top of a live military ballistic missile.” NASA screened 473 military service officers, some of them women, and on April 9, 1959, announced the seven Mercury as- tronauts, who would later be thought of as the Original 7. The ex- treme testing is immortalized in The Right Stuff.

The seven Mercury astronauts known as the Original 7 (Photo: Shawna Richer/Toronto Star)

Alan Shepard, one of the original Mercury 7, became the first

27 Chris Hadfield

American and second human to travel into space on May 5, 1961 aboard Freedom 7 on a 15-minute suborbital flight. Ten years later he flew Apollo 14 and hit golf balls on the moon. would become the first American to orbit the Earth on Feb. 20, 1962. Glenn spent five hours in space, drifting first through a black sky and gazing at constellations he could not iden- tify, and later in the sunrise, dreamily reporting swirling, lumines- cent particles that looked like fireflies. They would later, during a May orbit by Scott Carpenter, be identified as bits of sunlit frost that clung to the capsule and flaked away. Those flights were the first that gave Americans a sense of what it was like to be in space. “It was a cherished experience,” Carpenter says. “I feel I got the chance to see the inner workings of the grand order of things. In the overall scheme of things, it proves that men can do about any- thing they want to if they work hard enough at it.” Joe Stewart, a master electrician from Seattle who once worked on cable assemblies for the Minuteman missile project, visited Kennedy Space Center with his wife Elena for the first time in Jan- uary 2013. At 67, he was emotional about the visit. “Because of my age I grew up with this program,” Stewart said. “I’ve seen all of it. And to be able to go back and see where my fa- vourite astronaut (Grissom) died and see where the Mercury went up, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. When JFK made that speech about going to the moon, I wanted to be an astronaut. “I can’t even begin to tell my grandchildren how many things we wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for the space program — cell- phones, iPads … It opened up opportunities to grow like crazy, especially on the electronics side of things. When we went to the moon and came back, the country flourished for many years af- ter. We had to develop the transistor to go to the moon. We made

28 Chris Hadfield things smaller. That’s where the computer came from. Bill Gates, these guys were inspired by the space program. Kennedy was the biggest visionary of them all.” Elena remembers the night Apollo 13 got into trouble trying to land on the moon. “It was the middle of the night. We were ab- solutely on the edge of our seat. We made cookies. My cousin and her husband and their kids came over. We were just glued to it, so worried for them.” “We sat through the whole mission holding our breath,” Jim says. “They spun around the moon to slingshot themselves back to earth because they didn’t have enough fuel. And they did it with- out computers nearly as sophisticated as we have today. And they did it on a dime. When they broke through and re-communicated with Earth, every one of us just screamed, ‘They made it!’ They got back. We didn’t lose them. “Now everything’s slowed down since the shuttles, but it (space exploration) will pick up again.”

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Chris Hadfield is optimistic about the future and his role in it. He is eager to travel to Mars and believes it will happen in our lifetime. “The space business is an extremely difficult one,” he says. “We’ve never had regular access to space. We’ve had a space flight, a landing, and then we review everything and make sure it’s safe and then we launch another one. The shuttle was extremely suc- cessful, launching 135 times. But it’s not like between flights we can just count on the next one. Every one was really the max level of effort that we could do. “And so it went from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo to Shuttle with many, many lulls in between. And the time it takes to build a new vehicle is quite long. You could say we kind of lost our way in between every single launch. But in truth that’s not how it works.

29 Chris Hadfield

What it takes is an enormous effort of will and technical know- how to build a space ship. And to be brave enough to launch one, because you risk lives every time you do. And we’re just right now in between vehicles. Much as we were after Mercury, after Gemini, after Apollo, we’re in the after-Shuttle era right now. But fortunate- ly because of international cooperation we’re not grounded.” The ISS is the ultimate diplomatic effort — each module built in a different country and sent up one at a time, beginning in 1998. It’s the largest spacecraft ever built, a live-in laboratory and a last- ing achievement, the kind the Mercury 7 envisioned. “We used to joke about canned men, putting people in a can and seeing how far you can send them and bring them back,” John Glenn says. “That’s not the purpose of this program … Space is a laboratory and we go into it to work and learn the new.”

30 5 Truth and Beauty

“Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.” —American poet Walt Whitman

“When you get close to a star, what does it really look like? I’d like to know so I can draw them better.” Nikky Rodriguez, a Grade 2 student at Chris Hadfield Public School in Milton, Ont., asked the astronaut this question, her voice quavering with nerves that came from realizing she was speaking with someone in space. Hadfield answers all these questions in vibrant prose, painting glorious word pictures with every sentence. He’s talking to kids via live video link but the adults in the room are woozy with wonder. “Stars come in all different sizes,” he says. “The sun is just a little yellow star. There are red ones. Ones that look brownish. There are huge white ones, ones that look blue. It depends on what chemi- cals are in them and how strong they are. But from the space sta- tion, they look perfect points of light. Like an absolutely perfect diamond of light. They don’t even twinkle. They’re just a brilliant, piercing point of light. There’s nothing in the way, between my eyes and the star, there’s nothing to stop the light. “They’re perfect.” And if you’ve ever wondered what a sunrise looks like from up close — Hadfield sees nearly 500 in a month. To him, each is a stunning splash of art. “When the sun comes up, it’s beautiful,” he says, describing the event he sees 16 times a day. “We come around the world and drive into the sunshine. The whole horizon suddenly glows beautiful or- ange and every colour in the rainbow and the sun bursts up and the space station, the solar arrays glow blood red, yellow and or- ange, then blue, as the light shines on them. Suddenly we’re in the

31 Chris Hadfield daylight. And that happens so fast.” Astronaut Jeremy Hansen, who has moderated many of the live hookups between Hadfield and folks on the ground, has been im- pressed, especially by the younger generation’s interest in space, particularly at Hadfield’s namesake school in his hometown of Milton. “I walked into the school and was greeted by a student wear- ing a full spacesuit with a helmet and he proceeded to tell me ev- erything that was going on using all the correct scientific terms,” Hansen says. “These kids are so interested and know exactly what is happening. No doubt, space is no longer new, and these kids don’t know a time when we weren’t in space, but yet they still find it incredibly exciting. “I get letters from children all the time telling me that the idea of being able to be an astronaut helps them try harder and do bet- ter in school. I feel like the idea that it is possible helps them live their dreams.”

A student in a homemade space suit Chris Hadfield an- swering questions (Photo: Richard Lautens/Toronto Star)

32 Chris Hadfield

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Some of Hadfield’s earliest and most moving tweets referred to the invisibility of political borders across most parts of the planet. Garneau remembers what that was like, seeing it for the first time. “It will never leave me,” he says. “You are changed by the experi- ence. You are very, very deeply affected by that unique perspective of seeing Earth surrounded by the blackness of space and realizing it’s home to all of humanity, not just where your country is.” The visible boundaries of Earth seen from space are rivers, coastlines and specific practices in land use. “Most people only understand geography when they look at a map and see countries and major cities outlined,” American astro- naut Ken Cameron says. “It’s very easy to lose track of what you’re looking at when you’re looking out the window of a spaceship. “Chris, he’s orbiting a spacecraft that has almost six billion crew members. And there’s a heck of a lot we don’t know at all. He has a unique vantage point and has the training and background to draw on a lot of different aspects of it. That’s what makes what he’s doing so compelling.” What do the astronauts see, and how do they feel, the first time they look out that window? “I was focused on finishing out the ascent, and I went to get my suit off and meanwhile they had opened the payload doors,” Cam- eron says. “It was just a stunning view. I was just happy to be there. I don’t remember where we were over the Earth, but that I was in space. It was kind of a relief at being there and kind of an odd feel- ing because I felt humbled by that as much as you’d expect to feel exalted by it. You feel small in many cases, not grand. “Just moving over Earth at six miles a minute waiting for the next sunrise, sunset, all the things that are happening. It’s not triv- i a l .” Science would seem at odds with spirituality, but for those who

33 Chris Hadfield experience space firsthand, there’s no denying the intersection of God and the universe. “It depends on the astronauts,” Cameron says. “Many scientists feel close to God when they’re doing science, or not, depending on their background. In many cases — in most actually — people don’t talk about it. There’s more a sense of camaraderie in accom- plishing the mission, a real sense of ‘Wow we made it!’ We actually got here!” Marcos Pontes, the first Brazilian in space, spent a week on the ISS in March 2006, conducting eight experiments on behalf of the Brazilian Space Agency. He’s not afraid to mix science with reli- gion. “Looking back to Earth from space is something that will change your life, the way you see life,” Pontes says. “I do believe in God. I am religious and it’s very important. After the flight you feel more connected with those things. Because you think about … when you look back at Earth you don’t feel like a big astronaut. You feel very, very, very, very small, pretty much like nothing. “That feeling makes you think about what is important in life. God, in a sense, is very present in this — something that is inside of us and everywhere at the same time. Sometime people in sci- ence don’t much like to talk about religion, but I don’t mind. We are all part of the universe.” Michael Collins, who walked in space as part of the Gemini program and flew to the moon with Armstrong and Aldrin, saw early on the advantages of sending men and women to space who were more than engineers and pilots. “I think a future flight should include a poet, a priest and a philosopher. We might get a much better idea of what we saw,” he said upon returning from the Apol- lo mission.

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34 Chris Hadfield

Hadfield and William Shatner spoke on Feb. 7 in a space-to- ground phone call before reporters and a group of three dozen space and social media groupies invited to the Canadian Space Agency. Hadfield told Shatner that he sees the universe as a scien- tist and a mechanical engineer, but also as a human being who is at one with the universe.

Chris Hadfield speaks from the International Space Station to Wil- liam Shatner at the Canadian Space Agency (Photo: Benoit Desjardins/CSA)

“Most people, the highest they ever get is to climb a tall hill or climb a mountain and look around or even get in an airplane and start to see what lies beyond the normal two dimensions, the sur- face of normal life,” Hadfield said. “To have the opportunity to get as far away as we are here, and not only that but to go around the world every 90 minutes, the view that they used to put for us on Star Trek — how the world looks out the windows — that’s how the world really looks — this rolling, beautiful Earth. “But all you have to do is flip yourself upside down and sud-

35 Chris Hadfield denly the rest of the universe is right there at your feet below you and that’s where the engineer in me is very much thinking about the ship and how we got here, and the problems and difficulties, but the human in me recognizes what we are in between. “We’ve gone from climbing a hill, getting in an airplane, to now being right on the cusp of permanently leaving our planet … and I feel hugely connected to that. “And now I’m doing my absolute best to help people under- stand where we are philosophically and historically … and where we lie in the universe.” Mission accomplished.

36 6 A Spaceman for the New Space Age

“We should do astronomy because it is beautiful and because it is fun. We should do it because people want to know. We want to know our place in the universe and how things happen.” —American astrophysicist John N. Bahcall

Marc Garneau believes Chris Hadfield is a new style of astronaut, one who will help give the space program a much-needed boost of public relations. “NASA doesn’t fly shuttles anymore, but we have the ISS and in order to maintain people’s interest and bring space to people they need to give (Hadfield and others) time to communicate with the ground,” Garneau says. “We are social creatures. There’s an enjoy- ment of having that communication link with the ground.” Garneau — who never had a mission as lengthy as Hadfield’s — recalls a talk he gave in Toronto after his 1984 mission. After describing the trip in some detail, a man rose and asked Garneau to “show us your soul.” “That’s a pretty dramatic remark to make,” he says. “But the man said he wanted to know what it felt like to be up there. For the past 28 years I have tried to take people on the trip, share thoughts and feelings and joys and fears. And Chris is doing that so well.” These days, Americans spend $10 billion a year on plastic sur- gery, twice as much as the federal space budget. But astronaut Ken Cameron believes the work that Hadfield is leading on the ISS will make a difference for generations to come, in the same way the early space programs did for the earlier generation. “We can’t really manage the Earth effectively until we man- age the way we develop it, take care of all its various populations, needs,” he says. “We all have different rules and yet we share the

37 Chris Hadfield same atmosphere and oceans. It’s very apparent to space flyers. Chris recognizes that. He’s very effective in communicating it and it’s going to be a valuable part of the space station for years to come. “We’ll continue to do medical research and materials research, but a lot of people downplay the importance of getting off the Earth in order to understand it.” Asked by a reader on Reddit what space exploration missions should be given priority, Hadfield answered diplomatically. “The ones that the taxpayers want,” he says. “My job is to per- form them as efficiently and creatively as I can, like what I’m doing today, and during these five months. “Privatization is the right and natural way to go, and we are on the cusp of it now. We have a SpaceX Dragon (commercial flight) coming to ISS in two weeks; we’ll grab it with Canadarm2. We need better engines for space flight to be safer and simpler, and thus cheaper. Like the difference to cross the Atlantic in a prop versus a jet airplane.” “As a species, we have always taken the very best of our technol- ogy and used it to take us to the furthest reaches of our knowledge — the horse, the wheel, the sailing ship, steamship, propeller, jet, rocket, space station. Yes, we will establish a permanent base on the Moon and beyond, but when depends on inventions not yet made. “My guess is that power generation is the primary obstacle, and fossil fuels and even solar power won’t be enough. Meanwhile, the Space Station is the crucible where space exploration technology is designed and tested. When we go further out, it will be heavily indebted to the pedigree of space hardware proven on ISS.” There is a line in the film Apollo 13, spoken by , the astronaut played by Tom Hanks. “Imagine if Christopher Colum- bus came back from the New World, and no one returned in his footsteps?” The past, present and future of space exploration is

38 Chris Hadfield rooted in this simple question. “Going to Mars is inevitable, just as sailing across the Atlantic or flying across the Atlantic or orbiting around the world or going to the moon,” Hadfield says. “It’s just a matter of when we figure out how. We take those visualized dreams and fantasies and turn them into reality, which is what we’re doing here, right now. “We’ve endured accidents, budget cycles, and many naysayers. But meanwhile we have accomplished countless acts of magnifi- cence, from walking on the moon to Hubble teaching us about the universe, to international co-operation, to Curiosity drilling on Mars, to permanently leaving Earth on ISS. “I’m working as hard as I can to help that all happen, and have been for 20 years. It’s hard to leave home, but we’re managing to do it as a species, regardless. Pretty amazing.”

Chris Hadfield in 1995(Photo: Joe Skipper/Reuters file photo)

39 Notes and Sources

All Chris Hadfield tweets, status updates, photographs and video information written by Chris Hadfield and courtesy of NASA as posted on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube between Dec. 21 and Feb. 25, 2013.

Introduction “The universe is wider …” Walden, Henry David Thoreau, 1854, Empire Books, 2012 The universe, nearly 14 billion …” Extra Dimensions in Space and Time, Itzhak Bars and John Terning, page 27, Springer, 2010 “Exploring space …” Discover: The Year in Science, page 80 “Gene Roddenberry …” Astrodigital.com, Jim Plaxco interview with Majel Barrett Roddenberry, Oct. 1, 1994

Chapter 1 “The contemplation of celestial things …” Marcus Tullius Cicero, circa 30 BC, Today in Science History Chris Hadfield biography from Canadian Space Agency’s Chris Hadfield: From Humble Roots to Lofty Heights “It was the most magnificent experience …” Reddit, Ask Me Anything, Feb. 17, 2013 “He has shared what space looks like …” Reddit, Ask Me Anything, Feb. 17, 2013 “Too many of us have lost the passion …” Ray Bradbury, The Thrill of , Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery News, by R.D. Lau- nius, April 8, 2003

Chapter 2 “We believe that when men reached beyond …” John F. Kennedy, Presi-

40 Chris Hadfield dent’s news conference, Feb. 21, 1962, The American Presidency Project International Space Station background from Canadian Space Agency “Space food has come …” NASA, Space Food Information “Urine, which the Mercury and Gemini …” CollectSpace.com podcast by Robert Pearlman, Feb. 20, 2009 “I’m still learning … Privacy here is about … For his insightful work … To be an astronaut … To simply fly … Sometimes, we hear pings … The biggest danger …” Reddit, Ask Me Anything, Feb. 17, 2013

Chapter 3 “We need to have people up there …” Buzz Aldrin, The Real Mars, by Michael Hanlon, Carroll & Graf, 2004 “Leonard Nimoy (Mr. Spock) …” CSA Mission Blog, asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/ missions/expedition34-35/blog.asp “Each astronaut has personal goals …” Reddit, Ask Me Anything, Feb. 17, 2013 “There is beauty in space …” Reach for the Stars, Time, Feb. 17, 1958 “I really wanted to convey that … remote place in space …” Ed Robert- son, CBC.ca, Feb. 6, 2013 “I wrote the first version …” Chris Hadfield, CBC.ca, Feb. 6, 2013 ISS (Is Somebody Singing), by Ed Robertson and Chris Hadfield, cbc.ca/ live/intergalactic-collaboration-chris-hadfield-ed-robertson-premiere- iss.html “At first yes, but after a few days …” Reddit, Ask Me Anything, Feb. 17, 2013

Chapter 4 “Let’s light this candle.” Alan Shepard, NASA, Kennedy Space Center “The original government advertisement … In 1958 the NASA … NASA screened ….” Kennedy Space Center “They would later, during a May orbit …” John Glenn’s Fireflies and the Astronauts’ Constellation, CollectSpace.com podcast by Robert Pearl-

41 Chris Hadfield man, Feb. 20, 2009 “It was a cherished experience …” Scott Carpenter, Interview for Oral History Project, March 30, 1998 “We used to joke about canned men …” John Glenn Jr., International Space Hall of Fame, New Mexico Museum of Space History

Chapter 5 “Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.” Walt Whitman, Miracles, Leaves of Grass, 1856 “Think a future flight should include a …” Michael Collins, International Space Hall of Fame, New Mexico Museum of Space History, Nov. 9, 1969

Chapter 6 “We should do astronomy because it is beautiful …” John N. Bahcall, Sky and Telescope magazine, January 1990 “Americans spend $10 billion a year on plastic surgery …” Esquire, Janu- ary 2013, page 58

42 Playlist

Music is such a big part of Chris Hadfield’s life that it would be remiss to not include a mix of his favourite songs and some that inspired the writ- ing of this story. Here are 20 tunes that sound as good in space as they do on Earth. Thanks to the Canadian Space Agency for sharing Hadfield’s favourites (noted with an asterisk).

Space Oddity — Eight Miles High — The Byrds Looking for Astronauts — The National Starlight — MUSE Spaceman — The Killers Take it from Day to Day — Stan Rogers * Hallelujah — Leonard Cohen * What Am I Doing Here? — Blue Rodeo * If You Could Read my Mind — Gordon Lightfoot * Four Strong Winds — Ian and Sylvia Tyson * No Sugar Tonight — The Guess Who * Fly By Night — Rush * Truscott — Trent Severn * If I Had a Million Dollars — Barenaked Ladies * Rockstar — Nickelback * Walking on the Moon — The Police Rocket Man — Eclipse — Pink Floyd Cosmic Love — Florence and the Machine Fly Me to The Moon — Frank Sinatra

To experience the songs, click here, or go to http://tiny.cc/lw49sw

43 Acknowledgemenrts

Thank you to Chris Hadfield, for making my Twitter and Face- book feeds the best they’ve ever been, ’s space coast and the Kennedy Space Center for rekindling my fascination with the heavens, and to my editor Alison Uncles for giving me a simply beautiful idea.

44 Shawna Richer is a feature writer at the Toronto Star and the former digital editor. She previously wrote “OMG Justin! My Time among the Beliebers” for Star Dispatches, an eRead about the phe- nomenon and fandom of pop star Justin Bieber. © 2013 Toronto Star Newspapers Limited

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Renaissance Rocket Man: How Chris Hadfield Brought Space Down to Earth

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