Astronaut Chris Hadfield’s career is a constellation of Canadian firsts.
His accomplishments have earned him the Order of Canada, NASA’s Exceptional Service Medal, a spot in Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame, and the support of an entire nation.
While at a neighbour’s cottage on July 20, 1969, a nine-year-old Chris Hadfield watched the Apollo 11’s lunar landing. As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the first steps on the moon, Hadfield determined that he “was going to follow in the footsteps so boldly imprinted” by his new heroes.
“Later, walking back to our cottage, I looked up at the Moon,” he said. “It was no longer a distant, unknowable orb but a place where people walked, talked, worked, and even slept.” (All unattributed quotes retrieved from Hadfield’s autobiography An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth)
“From that night forward, my dream provided direction to my life”, Hadfield explained, and he began to base his everyday decisions on what an astronaut might have done at his age. At 13, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Cadets, earning his glider’s license at 15, and began flying powered planes at 16.
While studying mechanical engineering at Kingston’s Royal Military College, Hadfield kept a photo of the Columbia Space Shuttle above his desk as a reminder of what he was working towards.
Following his time at college, Hadfield became a tactical fighter pilot for the Canadian Armed Forces, serving throughout the Cold War. Though he loved flying, his true passion was in understanding the inner workings of airplanes, which led him to becoming a test pilot.
At the time, there were no Canadian test pilot schools, meaning Hadfield had to go abroad for his training. After a bout of bureaucratic confusion in which he was selected to study in France but inexplicably lost his spot, he was accepted to the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School in California in 1988.
Hadfield told WIRED that this experience was the “most demanding year of [his] life,” but his hard work paid off when he graduated at the top of his class and later earned the title of the U.S. Navy Test Pilot of the Year in 1991. His work as a test pilot—specifically being awarded “Best Project” at the Society for Experimental Test Pilots—“opened the doors [for him] to get chosen as an astronaut.”
Hadfield “grew up in a time when “Canadian Astronauts simply didn’t exist,” but he never let the perceived impossibility of his goal affect his self-worth or dedication to achieving it. Hadfield’s dreams came marginally closer to fruition in January of 1992, when the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) put out a call for astronaut applicants.
Hadfield submitted two phone-book-sized, bound resumes—one in English, one in French—to be added to the CSA’s pile of 5329 other applicants. After four rounds of candidate elimination, Hadfield was selected to become an astronaut alongside Dave Williams, Mike McKay, and Julie Payette.
After three years of training and “learning so much that [he] could almost hear [his] neurons firing”, Hadfield became the fourth Canadian to travel to space. This mission, in June of 1995 aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis, involved docking with the Mir Space Station—the first modular space station—and marked the U.S.’s 100th human-carrying space launch.
During his eight-day orbit, Hadfield became the first Canadian to operate the Canadarm.
While on his second space flight aboard the Endeavour in 2001, Hadfield was the lead spacewalker in the installation of the Canadarm 2 that was used to build the I.S.S.—making him the first Canadian to walk in space.
“You are in a one person spaceship that is your space suit, and you’re going through space with the world. It’s an entirely different perspective,” Hadfield said about his spacewalking experience. “You’re not looking up at the universe, you and the Earth are going through the universe together.”
Five hours into this monumental spacewalk, he went blind. His water bag began leaking, the water drops mixed with the anti-fog (a mix of oil and soap) on his visor, and this mixture splashed into his left eye. His tears then combined with the liquid and invaded his right eye and had the same blinding effect. After notifying Ground Control, they told him to purge his oxygen valve in fear that the blindness was caused by the lithium hydroxide from his air purifier. Luckily, the fresh oxygen being introduced began the evaporation process, allowing Hadfield to slowly regain his sight and complete the spacewalk. This setback extended the spacewalk to eight hours from its scheduled six and a half, but led to NASA changing the anti-fog solution used on astronaut helmets.
During his 21 years as an astronaut, Hadfield only spent 6 months in space, and spent the majority of his career in what he calls “ground jobs.” After the Atlantis mission, he became a CAPCOM—capsule communicator—and relayed information from Mission Control to orbiting astronauts for 25 consecutive Shuttle flights. He became Chief CAPCOM, which he told WIRED was “the next best thing to space flight.”
His other roles included being NASA’s Director of Operations in Russia, the Chief of I.S.S. Operations in Houston, and NASA’s Director of Robotics. Hadfield credits his experience in ground jobs for “making him a much better astronaut” through developing a wider variety of skills that allowed him to contribute more in team settings.
After 11 years on Earth and a solved intestinal obstruction that nearly prevented him from returning, Hadfield made his final trip to space in a Soyuz, accompanied by Tom Marshburn and Roman Romanenko. When the three began experiencing weightlessness, Hadfield said he felt something he’d never felt before in space: “I was home.”
Hadfield describes Expedition 34/35 as the “pinnacle of his career,” and spent his last five months aboard the I.S.S. as the shuttle’s first Canadian commander.
Hadfield began seeing his presence in space as “a chance to stop telling people how inspiring the space program is and start showing them” through sharing videos and photos on social media. While in orbit, he made over 100 videos about how daily practices are adapted to accommodate weightlessness—many of which went viral.
“The immediacy of the reactions and interactions, the collective sense of wonder, made me feel as connected to the planet and to other people as I ever have, though I was floating 250 miles above the Earth in the company of just five other human beings,” Hadfield explained.
Despite his illustrious career and flurry of accomplishments, Hadfield told WIRED that he believes he’s “most famous for, strangely enough, playing music.” He has been playing the guitar since age 10, and was able to reach cosmic heights with his music thanks to the I.S.S’ on-shuttle acoustic guitar.
Not only is he a part of the all-astronaut band Max Q, but his song “I.S.S. (Is Someone Singing?)” in collaboration with the Barenaked Ladies and the Wexford Gleeks was sung in schools worldwide by nearly a million kids for Music Monday in 2014. In 2015, he released Space Sessions: Songs from a Tin Can—the first full-length album to be recorded in space.
Hadfield is also responsible for the first music video in space, an adapted cover of David Bowie’s 1969 hit “Space Oddity” that Bowie himself described as “the most poignant version of the song ever done.” It started off as a family project with his son, Evan Hadfield, who produced the video. Hadfield was hesitant to cover the classic, but changed his mind after Evan told him to “just do it, or you’d regret it forever.”
After commanding an emergency spacewalk with one day of preparation, compared to the usual months or years of planning, Hadfield’s music video was released on his final night aboard the I.S.S. in 2013, and had amassed over 7 million views on YouTube by the time he landed back on Earth just 12 hours later.
During a TED Talk, Hadfield celebrated “Space Oddity” for expressing the humanity of astronauts, describing it as “a reflection of the fact that we are not machines exploring the universe, we are people, and we’re taking that ability to adapt, and that ability to understand, and that ability to take our own self-perception to a new place.”
Hadfield’s career of firsts in Canadian space exploration is a result of a lifetime’s worth of hard work, determination, and genuine passion for outer space. He has created a remarkable legacy of making the impossible possible that is inspirational to the nation’s future astronauts and earthbound Canadians alike.
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