27 Oct 2021

Chris Hadfield: astronaut and author

From Nine To Noon, 10:07 am on 27 October 2021

Chris Hadfield is a retired astronaut, former fighter pilot, engineer and now author of high-stakes thriller The Apollo Murders.  

Colonel Hadfield was the first Canadian to walk in space, flew three space missions, and commanded the International Space Station.

He joins Kathryn Ryan to talk about his career, inspiration for writing the novel, and his famous video of covering David Bowie’s Space Oddity in space.

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Photo: Supplied

Hadfield became increasingly interested in space while reading comic books and science fiction as a child as well as watching Star Trek and the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

"[With] all those fictional things, I think established the dream in my head of flying in space, but the plan was kicked off by the first actual people going to space.

"When I saw the first people walk on the moon, I was just about to turn 10 years old, it was just a seminal event. I thought if those people can do that, then this is maybe something I could do, it's not just a dream and so I really started making plans around the time of my 10th birthday."

Eventually, Hadfield became a fighter pilot in the 1980s, embarking on missions to intercept Soviet bombers in North American airspace and later an astronaut.

The important lesson he learned along his journey was to be tenacious about optimism, he says.

"Don't give up on your optimism, don't somehow succumb to maybe the easier emotions of despair or blame or something but recognise that we're so lucky that the sun rises every morning and it's a new day, and yesterday never went perfectly.

"Recognise the thing that you have absolutely the most control over in the world, always, is yourself."

Since retirement, he has published The Apollo Murders, a thriller plunging readers into the paranoia of the Cold War through the lens of competing space programmes and fictionalising Apollo 18 - a real mission cancelled during the Nixon administration - going ahead as a spy mission. 

"The vast majority of the things that happened in The Apollo Murders are real, the soviet space station, the secret spy space station that was orbiting the world, that was real and what ended up happening to it actually happened, and then the Soviet rover that was exploring a part of the Moon that no human had ever been to, that was real, and what happened to it [in the book] really happened so I used those anchor stones to put my plot in and it gave me a great structure."

He sent a copy to his friend, director James Cameron, who he says told him reading the book makes one question what parts of it were real and which aren't.

"[Cameron] said make sure when you're talking to people, say it that way, because it's so intertwined with the reality of what was going on."

His emotions and thoughts during a spacewalk mission where he temporarily went blind helped him convey the thrilling events in his novel, he says.

"[Spacewalking] is just so incredibly separate, where the world is no longer home, the world is in the distance, it is a planet and you are somehow now not part of it anymore.

"There's a great liberating feeling to that and a remarkable self-awareness that comes from it but while I was outside going through that thought process, there was contamination in my suit that blinded both my eyes.

"It took a long time to fight through it and work the problem inside the suit and eventually regain my vision while I was outside. So that was difficult to get through."

Hadfield has spoken about that experience in a TED Talk, which has been viewed by millions.

"There's an enormous difference between danger and fear, and we tend to treat those two words like a synonym, and they are not.

"Fear is just an unprepared reaction to danger ... and an astronaut's entire life is trying to gain competence so when danger does raise its head, you have something more going for you than just adrenaline in your veins."

In 2013, he gained attention after recording the first music video performed in space - David Bowie's Space Oddity - which has more than 50 million views.

His son, who rewrote the lyrics, persuaded him to do it, and Hadfield put together the basic track and with some help from other musicians it was finished and sent to Bowie.

"He loved the audio track and gave us permission to do video, so it took about a couple of hours maybe to do the audio track, an hour maybe.

"I sure didn't storyboard [the video] beyond just in my head, and in the short time I had when I was supposed to be asleep, [I] just made that video and then sent it down to my son who co-opted a buddy to edit it together and release it."

"I think somehow that music video allowed people to just absorb what it actually feels like to be in space, in a way that outstrips anything else I've ever done."

Hadfield has also helped found the Open Lunar Foundation, which he says aims to enforce a sense of responsibility to space activities and an eye to the long-term of how our technology may soon allow us to settle on the Moon.

"If we don't try to get our sense of what the new culture is going to be and the regulations that back it up, if we don't get those established in time then we'll make the ridiculously short-sighted mistake of just importing our current snapshot of imperfect geo-political entities and laws of inertia, and somehow transplanting those to outer space which would be infinitely regrettable.

"I've worked pretty much relentlessly since I retired from being an astronaut to try and help shift people's thinking on it and assume a sense of responsibility for it and take some of the actions needed so we're not just always pursuing our evil side."