Chris Hadfield Quotes
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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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What I like to do when I get to a new place is buy local music early on and listen to it while we're driving around. I think it helps explain and illuminate the culture of where you are if local music is playing.
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Spacewalking trumps everything. Viscerally, it is a phenomenal place to be; to be able to glance right and see the world, glance left and see the universe, and realise for a moment that you're holding on to your known existence with one hand. That's the thing.
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The communities and countries best at using energy to optimize a microclimate for human life are also the ones whose people have the longest average lifespans. Canada, Sweden, and Iceland - places with inhospitable winter weather - are frontrunners in sustaining human health and life.
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To be on my very first spacewalk, to be outside, and to have contamination in my suit to the point that I couldn't see in either eye - that, I think, would cause some people to lose control.
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I was born in Sarnia, Ontario; a small town, it's where oil was pretty much discovered in North America.
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When you're on one of the Caribbean islands, sometimes it's hard to picture how they fit in with the rest, but when you see them all joined together like a necklace from space, you see the natural geographic connectedness of them all.
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When I did my spacewalks, it was during space station construction. So the shuttle was docked to the fledgling ISS at the time. So we would always stay tethered.
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It is spectacular. From about five minutes in, when we knew for sure that we were going to have the weather to go, the smile on my face just got bigger and bigger, and I was just beaming through the whole launch. I mean, it is just an amazing ride.
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It was remarkable to see from space how predictable people are. Our homes and towns are almost all in places with moderate temperatures, and they generally have the same shape - a thinly occupied outer blob of suburb surrounding a densely populated core, all based around a ready source of water.
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Airline food is cooked in an oven and then kept warm. Space station food is often cooked in an oven and then thermo-stabilised, irradiated or dehydrated and then stored for a year or two before you even get to it.
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I watched the first people walk on the moon, and to me, it was just an obvious thing - I want to somehow turn myself into that. But the real question is, how do you deal with the danger of it and the fear that comes from it? How do you deal with fear versus danger?
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Ever since I was nine years old and I watched Neil and Buzz walk on the moon, I have felt passionately that this is an interesting human adventure. This is one of the things we're doing that is really fundamentally important, as we leave our home planet, but also exciting.
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We have never lost a crew member on the space station, but of course, the Columbia accident. I was - I'd already been an astronaut for a decade when the crew of Columbia was killed. And I went through test pilot school. Rick Husband and I were out at Edwards at test pilot school together. He was the commander of Columbia.
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The Soyuz craft weighs tons, and you're lying on the floor of it on your back. But the Russians do tell you, remember, before you land, stop talking so you don't bite your tongue off.
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Our three big emergencies are fire, loss of pressurization or contaminated atmosphere. Any of those things in a spaceship are very deadly and time critical. Everybody's trained, but I'm the commander of the ship, and it's up to me to decide.
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Just taking risks for risk's sake, that doesn't do it for me. I'm willing to take risks that I think are worth it, and I've worked so hard to make sure that I survive.
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Almost everything worthwhile carries with it some sort of risk, whether it's starting a new business, whether it's leaving home, whether it's getting married, or whether it's flying in space.
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The beauty of the space station, and of human spaceflight, is that it is now at a level of maturity where you can invite people on-board, which is what I worked so hard to do on social media and all the videos I made.
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I'm a mechanical engineer, and I grew up on a farm, so I like practical hardware - somebody's elegant solution that proves itself over the long term.
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Our role is to develop techniques that allow us to provide emergency life-saving procedures to injured patients in an extreme, remote environment without the presence of a physician.
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There's always constantly interesting things to do, and who knows, maybe I will be a good sculptor. I haven't decided what I am going to do next, but I am not going to quit just because I did something interesting.
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When we first get to space, we feel sick. Your body is really confused. You're dizzy. Your lunch is floating around in your belly because you're floating. What you see doesn't match what you feel, and you want to throw up.
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Every single thing that you learn really just gives you more comfort. It's something I counsel kids all the time: if someone is willing to teach you something for free, take them up on it. Do it. Every single time. All it does is make you more likely to be able to succeed. And it's kind of a nice way to go through life.