Chris Hadfield Quotes
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Ultimately, leadership is not about glorious crowning acts. It's about keeping your team focused on a goal and motivated to do their best to achieve it, especially when the stakes are high and the consequences really matter. It is about laying the groundwork for others' success, and then standing back and letting them shine.
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Think about what happens on Earth when you throw up. You throw up and you have a bag of something horrible and then you throw it away, but if I have this bag, what am I going to do with it? This bag is going to stay with me in space for months, so we want a really good barf bag.
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Some of the greatest reality television we ever had was the moon landings. When you think about it, that was human emotion and people, unscripted, working with each other - and millions and millions of people around the world, glued to their television sets to share real-time in a brand new, fascinating human experience.
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I'm really looking forward to it, if you can imagine floating weightless, watching the world pour by through the big bay window of the space station playing a guitar; just a tremendous place to think about where we are in history.
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I don't want to be treated like I came from another planet or something or was somehow born with some weird birthright or super power. I don't view myself that way. I am a normal guy, picking up the crap from the dog and scraping the BBQ and having a beer and fixing the shed out back.
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As an astronaut, especially during launch, half of the risk of a six-month flight is in the first nine minutes.
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You could look at something a hundred times from space, but the next time you come around the world, suddenly it's very different and gorgeous-looking, just because of the change of weather or the angle of the sun.
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'Boldface' is a pilot term, a magic word to describe the procedures that could, in a crisis, save your life. We say that 'boldface is written in blood' because often it's created in response to an accident investigation. It highlights the series of steps that should have been taken to avoid a fatal crash, but weren't.
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And then finally, I'm the commander, so I am fundamentally responsible for the lives of the other people on board and the health and longevity of the space station. I need to bring six people back happy, healthy and feeling like they've had the best six months of their life.
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You can get claustrophobia and agoraphobia - a fear of wide, open spaces - simultaneously on a spacewalk.
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I think there are lots of ways to exercise ambition and accomplish things using leadership without going into elected politics. So, categorically, I have no intention of going into elected politics. None.
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Now, as an astronaut, I have to bring a Sharpie with me everywhere - so I have a pen to sign autographs.
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For the last several years and culminating in six months in orbit next year, I've been training for my third space flight. This one is almost in a category completely different than the previous two, specifically to live in on the space station for six months, to command a space ship and to fly a new rocket ship.
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For whatever reason, I decided: 'I'm 18, I'm a man, I'm going to grow a moustache' - and it was pathetic for years - it was awful.
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The world, when you look at it, it just can't be random. I mean, it's so different than the vast emptiness that is everything else, and even all the other planets we've seen, at least in our solar system, none of them even remotely resemble the precious life-giving nature of our own planet.
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I've been lucky enough to fly to space twice.
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There are no wishy-washy astronauts. You don't get up there by being uncaring and blase. And whatever gave you the sense of tenacity and purpose to get that far in life is absolutely reaffirmed and deepened by the experience itself.
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If you don't like airline food, you'll probably have the same impression of space station food. I would not fly to space for the food.
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And now for Return to Flight, I'm chief of robotics working in the astronaut office in Houston, as a Canadian.
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Space is not a good place to mix foods because as soon as you take something out of the package, it becomes a flying object.
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When you look out the window of a spaceship, you see entire countries, vast swaths of continents. One turn of the head covers what once took thousands of years to traverse at ground level.
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Russians aren't perfect. Their politics are messed up, and they keep going through self-defeating economic cycles. But I have a lot of respect for Russia, and a lot of love for Russians.
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A lot of people live in fear because they haven't figured out how you're going to react when faced with a certain set of circumstances. I've come to terms with this by looking deeply into whatever makes me fearful - what are the key elements that get the hairs up on the back of my neck - and then figuring out what I can do about it.
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I've had a chance to see something that is way outside everybody else's frame of reference and gives a perspective that is very different from everyone else's.