An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth
I really enjoyed Meeting and spending a delicious half hour or so with Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield this week. He’s touring the Country promoting his book ” An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth in time for the Christmas season. It traces the path he took to realize his childhood dream to become an Astronaut and includes some great anecdotes and descriptions of what its like to lift off and return to earth. You can watch and hear the full interview here but I’ve added a clip below that I recorded with him as a side bar to the main event because we ran out of time and his entourage had him on a very tight schedule.
What I really wanted to know, but was not sure he would answer is the extent to which, if at all, they trained as a crew or had an officially sanctioned protocol for the eventuality of coming in contact with any other form of alien space craft while they were orbiting the earth for 6 months at a time. In my view, it’s not as stupid a question as some may think. Neil Armstrong and Mike Collins brought a flag and plaque with them to the moon that identified who they were and why they were there etc. so I wondered if he and his crew had trained or adopted a protocol for in the event of an encounter. For the record, here is his answer
The timing couldn’t better for Chris and his publishers with the 6 month mission on board the ISS still so fresh in our minds. He brought the experience of space to the population of earth in a way no other has been able to do through the use of Twitter, which he tells me the Canadian Space Agency endorsed and encouraged. Millions of students around the world were exposed to him in their classrooms and I fully recommend his book as a follow up primer for the kind of life they aspire to lead.
His main message for young people is to figure out and to follow an incremental path that best positions towards the ultimate goal while making sure they do ” Sweat the small stuff” without making themselves crazy.