Top astronaut Chris Hadfield says he ‘smiled so hard his face cramped’ the first time he blasted off into space.
The former International Space Station commander – who once performed David Bowie’s Space Oddity on the vessel – has opened up about the “punishing and wild and powerful” experience of a launch.
He spent nine years as a military Top Gun pilot before joining NASA, where he became the first Canadia to perform a spacewalk in 2001.
Back on Earth he was also the voice of mission control to astronauts in orbit for 25 Space Shuttle missions.
Since his retirement as an astronaut in 2013 he has remained an adviser, helping prepare the recent Artemis II mission to orbit the Moon, which was watched by one billion people.
He says the vessel’s notorious problem with the loo – which had to be fixed mid-orbit by the crew – showed how uncomfortable space travel can be.
Chris has flown in even smaller craft with more primitive facilities and lower tech lavs. But he says the rollercoaster ride through the atmosphere and joy of looking down on Earth more than made up for it.
“You’re actually existing in an environment of tremendous wonder,” he explains. “The physical experience is punishing and wild and powerful.
“The number is like 60million horsepower, an unbelievably huge amount of power being unleashed right behind you to physically force you up through the atmosphere. The vibrations of it. The accelerations of it.
“But, it’s funny, after about two minutes I realise I have a moment of self-awareness and my face is hurting. That’s a weird thing. But then I realised I was smiling so broadly that my cheeks were cramping up. It was the unconscious joy of what was happening.
“You have to put that aside because you’re flying a spaceship and there are a million things that can go wrong and you’re trained for all of them.
“And the only way that you’re going to stay alive is if you can recognise them quickly enough that you can react to them before they kill you.
“So it’s intense but at the same time it’s spectacular. And it only takes eight and a half minutes. That’s how long it takes to get to space. And then the engines shut off and you’re suddenly irreversibly weightless. It is magnificent.
“I was 10 when I decided to turn myself into an astronaut – and then decades of self-change, decades of learning, of studying and turning myself into something that could be trusted to pilot a spaceship and then to be actually able to do it.
“And then when you get to space. That combination of working with an incredibly competent and good group of people and going around the world every 90 minutes, seeing entire continents pour by underneath you in an unprecedented way.
“And being weightless, which is like having an instantaneous dream about super power. All of that is difficult to absorb on your first orbit.
“But I’ve had 2,650 orbits of the world since then aboard three different spaceships and so I truly had a chance to internalise it and get a sense of the peace and the grace and the magnificence of the Earth itself.
“How could I ever forget it? It is a huge part of who I am and what I’ve done.”
Chris says ‘two big things’ about space travel changed him forever.
“One was a deep reinforcement of the commonality of the human experience,” he says.
“Seeing everybody in all of their common forms of how we choose to settle and live on this world.
“And seeing all of them in 90 minutes over and over and over again tends to minimise the hotspots that we so breathlessly report to each other all the time and actually reinforced the normality and the shared joys and hopes of everybody on the Earth.
“The other was an eternal sense of optimism.
“Because for the first time you get an actual sense of the age of the Earth. It’s 4.5 billion years old. That’s such a big number no-one can imagine how big that number is. Life has been uninterrupted on Earth for four billion years. We couldn’t kill all the life on Earth if we made it our No1 objective.
“Earth is ancient and tough as nails and all we’re really trying to do is get a good sustainable shared quality of life for as many people as possible.”
- Tickets are now on sale for Chris Hadfield’s 2027 speaking tour of the UK and Ireland. Head to www.fane.co.uk/chris-hadfield for more information.