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If one ever needs proof of Newton’s First Law—that a body in motion tends to remain in motion—all that’s needed is a look at the career of Chris Hadfield. With a mind-boggling list of achievements over the past 30 years, the first Canadian astronaut to command the International Space Station is a nothing less than a human perpetual-motion machine.

Indeed, when the Georgia Straight catches up with Hadfield, he’s in a car, speeding to Burnaby for yet one more event in the ongoing promotion of his new memoir, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth.

Despite a gruelling schedule, and the multitude of hats he’s worn over the course of his career—space traveller, fighter pilot, test pilot, flight instructor, engineer—it’s clear that Hadfield is not only relishing it all, but keeping his sense of wonder about a lifetime of adventure.

He’s also keenly aware of the spectacular effect that his videos and tweets from the space station have had on the general public.

“It’s really touching for me to see how people feel about it,” Hadfield says, moved by the overflow crowds at book signings at Black Bond Books in Surrey and Kidsbooks inVancouver. “When they see the realization of the dreams of opportunity, and they see that this sort of thing actually exists within the normal fabric of what Canadians do, it’s emotional for folks, and I’m delighted. I’m in a lucky position to be able to see it personally.”

Speaking with Hadfield, one realizes he often mentions being lucky. But while he’s a devout proponent of nose-to-the-grindstone hard work—it’s a major theme in his book—his gratitude to the fates is both obvious and heartfelt.

Describing his space walks, the first for a Canadian, he’s still wonderstruck, more than a decade later.

“I got to spend 15 hours outside, spread over two space walks, 10 times around the world. It’s a very euphoric experience, it’s a magnificent perspective-building, visually powerful experience. I count myself hugely lucky to have had so much time outside.”

While Hadfield has approached much of his career with the discipline of a career military officer (he was after all, a colonel in the RCAF until his recent retirement), he is, at heart, a curious and thoughtful man. After two short-term shuttle missions and a five-month stay on the space station, he still reflects philosophically about the view of Earth from space.

“We don’t normally travel far from our cave. We tend to see the world from that tiny knothole, and you forget that there’s this tiny little narrow habitable band that exists. To go around the world that way, to see it actually in perspective, to be able to see the incredible thinness of the atmosphere and the volcanoes bursting up from the heat below, you get a real respect for the preciousness of our life, and the fragility of it. Unless you’re incredibly obtuse, you have a great undeniable respect for it and a sense of proprietorship, or stewardship, towards it. And a great sense of privilege just being in it.”

A man of many talents, Hadfield knows how to crack a joke, peppering his conversation (and his videos) with a good dose of humour. He’s also an accomplished musician, having performed a space-to-Earth duet with Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies, as well as a solo rendition of David Bowie’s Space Oddity that was filmed aboard the space station and has racked up more than 19 million hits on YouTube.

Coincidentally, the guitar that Hadfield played in both videos, a Larrivée Parlor, was made inVancouver, although it wasn’t part of any master plan for the Canadian domination of space.

“It was happenstance,” Hadfield explains. “I’ve had a Larrivée for a long time, since the ’90s, but when the NASA psychiatrists were looking to buy a guitar, because they realized the importance of music for sanity, and to provide us with a guitar on the space station, they just went to the local guitar shop inHouston.”

The shopkeeper, knowing they needed a small-bodied acoustic guitar able to fit in a space-shuttle storage locker, suggested the Larrivée Parlor model.

“It was a wonderful gift,” Hadfield says enthusiastically. “Lots of astronauts have played it up there, but of course for the first Canadian commander, for me as a musician and a Canadian, to be able to have a Canadian guitar onboard after I had already known John Larrivée and visited his factory here, was a delight.”

Although his easygoing demeanor makes everything he does look effortless, going to space was anything but. Hadfield points out both in person and in his book that a lot of hard work went into getting him up there—not just his seemingly endless personal training, but the will and efforts of many aerospace workers, space agencies, the Canadian people, as well as multiple nations.

And then there’s the physical toll. Five months on the space station, it turns out, is very tough on the body.

“It’s somewhat akin to recovering from an illness or a bad car wreck, or both,” Hadfield explains. “It’s not simple, but it’s well-understood and expected, and very well-managed by the Canadian Space Agency, and working with a physical trainer who was actually from B.C. here, and folks from Simon Fraser University who were involved in both maintaining my health in orbit and in rehab back on Earth.”

While Hadfield says that he now feels pretty much as normal as he’s ever felt, there is still the matter of microgravity-related bone loss. Although it will eventually reverse itself, it’s something that all long-endurance astronauts come home to.

“We don’t really understand,” he says, “how the body directs bone to be both dissolved or absorbed and to be rebuilt again. It’s a pretty good case study for what the body’s internal control mechanisms are, and how it does it. So it makes me both a lab technician”—he laughs—“and a lab rat at the same time.”

One subject that brings up Hadfield’s serious side is the misconception, after the end of the shuttle program in 2011, that the exploration of space has stalled.

“There’s a great populist wave of uninformed pessimism. It’s sort of popular now to be pessimistic about it, but it’s just that some people are poor students of history. Look back after the Apollo fire, or at the end of the Apollo program, and the long hiatus before the shuttle got flying, so that Skylab, that magnificent creation, actually fell into the atmosphere and burned up. And after the Challenger accident, how low a nadir could the whole program endure, and then again afterColumbia. It’s funny how people think it was all great and then it isn’t.

“It comes and goes in budget cycles and political cycles,” Hadfield continues, acknowledging the funding realities. “It’s never been easy—sometimes it’s extremely hard—but at the same time we’ve been living on the space station continuously for 13 years this month. It’s happening—we left Earth 13 years ago.”

Aside from the myriad experiments and activities onboard the space station, Hadfield is clearly excited about a number of other developments.

“We just launched a probe to Mars,” he says enthusiastically. “The Indians launched a probe to Mars a week ago. We have a rover that discovered vast oceans of water on Mars. We’ve discovered there are planets around just about every single sun that’s in the universe, so there’s an unlimited opportunity for life elsewhere. We’re orbiting Mercury, we have a probe going out to look at Pluto for the first time. There’s lots of things going on.

“The real question is,” he adds, “when can the prime customer be weaned away from just the level of governments, where spaceflight can become inexpensive enough that individual businesses of individual citizens can buy access to space? We’re at that transition now. You still have to be wealthy, but there have been several people who have done it with the Russians, and if Richard Branson and his company are successful—which it looks like they will be—a lot more people, people who can afford a true luxury car, can afford space flight if they choose it.”

Whether or not Hadfield himself will take part in any private space flight remains to be seen, now that he’s officially retired from the Canadian Space Agency. Although he’s accepted a three-year professorship at theUniversityofWaterloo, the rest of his future is wide open.

One thing he won’t be doing is following in the footsteps of fellow astronauts John Glenn, Harrison Schmitt, and Marc Garneau, who all went on to political careers.

“It doesn’t interest me,” Hadfield says. “I’m not seeking elected office, nor has anyone asked me. It’s just not what I want to do. There are lots of ways to be a useful Canadian citizen and to try to effect worthwhile change besides elected office.”

When asked if he’s looking forward to taking a well-deserved rest, he lets out a big laugh and says, simply but clearly, no.

Even in retirement, it seems, Chris Hadfield’s rocket-fuelled momentum will keep him ever in motion.



