To infinity and beyond with Chris Hadfield
At age nine, Chris Austin Hadfield decided that he would be an astronaut one day.
SPACE FLIGHT. Chris Hadfield conducts a flight check at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in
Kazakhstan.
Picture: NASA/Victor Zelentsov.
Like most children his age, the little boy had no idea what that actually meant, other than taking a trip to space. But as Hadfield explains, not all astronauts go to space. Huh?
“Since you usually only hear about astronauts when they’re in space, or about to be, this is not an unreasonable assumption,” he said.
“I always feel I’m disappointing people when I tell them the truth: we are earthbound – training – most of our working lives.
“Fundamentally, astronauts are in the service profession. The job description is not to experience personal thrills in space, but to help make space exploration safer and more scientifically productive – not for ourselves, but for others. Most days, we train and take classes – lots of them – and exams. In the evenings and on weekends, we study.”
Suddenly, the whole idea seems much less appealing. Fortunately for Hadfield, he had the opportunity to go into space four times – the culmination of years of training that included a stint as an engineer and a Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot.
Jointly, these experiences gave him not only a bird’s eye view of the earth but a better perspective on life itself, which he relied on in his book, An Astronaut’s Guide To Life On Earth. The book is no mere autobiography or an exposition of space travel accounts – that would not satisfy Hadfield. Instead he offers a number of life lessons learnt in his 25 years of space exploration, both on earth and in space.
Astronauts are taught that the best way to reduce stress is to sweat the small stuff.
He said, “There are no problems so bad that you can’t make them worse. We don’t train just to develop specific job-related skills, like piloting a Soyuz, but we train to develop new instincts, new ways of thinking, new habits. In simulations, we don’t just practice things going right but things going wrong as well.
We’re trained to look on the dark side and to imagine the worst things that could possibly happen. Over time, I learned how to anticipate problems in order to prevent them, and how to respond effectively in critical situations.”
The now retired Hadfield enters every situation with a plan of how to react in a crisis, whether it is as a passenger on an aircraft, spending an afternoon in the pool with the kids or simply using the lift to access a multiple-story building. It is what he calls the power of negative thinking.
In a recent TED Talks, Hadfield has posed the question: “What is the scariest thing you have ever done?” or “What is the most dangerous thing you have ever done?”
No one in the audience could compete with his trip to outer space or the fact that, during a spacewalk, his eyes swelled up so much that he was temporarily blind. Hadfield suggests that what matters most is not the possibility of something going wrong, but rather the preparation taken to be able to deal with the situation.
