Chris Hadfield: Becoming an astronaut

James - I'm keen to mine your experiences as a pilot and your time in the Air Force, which you yourself have been mining for the inspiration of your current book. I'm sure everyone, including me, is endlessly fascinated by your exploits in space. But you had your fair share of excitement well before you ever started training to fly in a rocket ship. Was it the best possible preparation? Were there hairy moments that meant that when you did become an astronaut you were able to remain calm under pressure?

Chris - The reason that so many of the early astronauts had previously been test pilots is there's a great number of parallel skill sets. If you're trying to do something nobody's ever done before and not be panicked and to have depths of competence so that you're ready to face the unknown, that's what test pilots do for a living. And it's only a small subset of fighter pilots who qualify to become test pilots. Test pilot school is a year, it's like a PhD in flying and it's deeply theoretical, all into the fundamental control theory maths of how all it works. And so I loved flying, but I always thought, 'wow, yeah, this is great. But someday I'd like to walk on the moon. So yeah. So I'm gonna go be a test pilot.' And I just found it endlessly fascinating. And I've ended up, now I've flown, I guess, I don't know, a hundred different types of aeroplanes from great big ones to little tiny ones, single seat aeroplanes, lots of different fighters, the great C141, C5, 747, those types of aeroplanes. And so a multi-layered competence in flying all those different aeroplanes. What you eventually learn is that all aeroplanes are the same. Just have to figure out how to start this one and how it's going to try and kill me, and stay away from those areas where this aeroplane has bad habits. All of that was preparing me not just to be a good competent test pilot, but what it was really doing was laying a really wide foundation of the type of skills that I might need later when I'm going to fly spaceships built by different organisations. And eventually to learn to speak Russian, to fly as the pilot of a Russian rocket ship and a Russian spaceship. And to put all those skills together all at once. So no matter what went wrong, I could still be trusted to do the right thing.

James - You talked about the culmination of that application process, and you remember the call saying you were going to be accepted onto the space programme.

Chris - Yeah, my wife, as soon as she saw the expression on my face, she was doing cartwheels across the kitchen floor. Because it had been such a long road for both of us. And she realised this was one of those watershed moments in life where we have been climbing and climbing and climbing, and somehow we now are just on the other side of a thing that will never change. And that, that was a great moment in life.

James - When we spoke to Helen Sharman, the first Briton in space, she recalls the way she even heard about it was driving home in the car and listening to a radio advert 'astronaut wanted, no experience required.' What was your experience of actually even this occurring to you as a possibility?

Chris - Obviously I looked at the nations that had astronauts, initially the cosmonauts and the Americans from the Soviet Union from the United States. And I used their skills as some of the skills I thought that I might need to gather, even though Canada didn't have astronauts. But then at the start of the shuttle program, Canada built the big arm on the space shuttle. the Canadarm1. And because we provided the arm to the space shuttle, NASA said, 'we'll fly three Canadians in space. They'll be like guest scientists on board.' We called them payload specialists. But that meant that in 1983, Canada, we didn't have a space agency yet, but there was a national recruitment for astronauts. I wasn't ready, I didn't even apply. But a bunch of people applied and they hired six people. So three primes and three backups. And one of them flew in space about nine months later. His name's Marc Garneau. He had a PhD. He was a Navy officer, but there he was, he's like Helen Sharman, he saw this advert popped up and, uh, to be an astronaut. He applied, he got selected, immediately thrown into training, and nine months later he found himself in space. But what that did was it opened the door for a Canadian astronaut programme. And when the International Space Station started becoming a reality, NASA wanted Canadians to be part of the international component. And so we had another selection, but in this case, we weren't guest scientists, passengers, but we were going to become fully fledged, fully qualified crew members, maybe with the opportunity to even command the space station someday. And so it was a little different selection process, but it was that Canadian technology that then gave us a membership to fly our first people with someone else's programme and a developing mutual trust so that then Canadians could have an increased role onboard the International Space station. And that's continued right through to today with the international crew that's up there right now.

James - <affirmative> Then the arduous application process, the watershed moment you describe, and I'm sure you're going to tell me, that's when the hard work just began.

Chris - The process was agonising because they said send in your resume. You had to be a Canadian citizen, you had to be able to pass a class one physical, and you had to have at least an undergraduate degree. But I'm thinking, 'well, that'll whittle it down to about 5,000 people, you know, so how am I going to stand out?' So I, and there was no internet back then. This was in late '91, early '92. So I tried to put together the most thrillingly deep resume I possibly could, leaving no stone unturned as to all of the things that I'd done so far in life because I didn't know what they were looking for. And then I bound it in a document on the most expensive stationary I could buy. I thought, 'man, I'm trying to stand out from thousands of other people. I don't want to inadvertently get shifted to the bottom of the pile.' And then I hired a shipping company and I was all nervously tracking. And then you wait and you hope they phone you. And finally got a phone call saying, 'Hey, we'd like to interview', and you realise there's going to be more than one interview level. And so iit turned out there were 5,330 people applying. And so out of those, they whittled it down to 500. And they called, 'Hey, you're at the 500 level. We want you to do an in-person interview with an industrial psychologist.' So I did that. And then you're waiting for another call. And then they were down to 120 people and they called, and then they were down to 50 people. And now they brought us all up to centralised locations where there were 50 of us to do a more in-depth interview. And then we were down to the final 20. And they hadn't even told us how many they were going to hire. So it was months and months of an upset stomach because I was powerless and this was hugely important in my life. And I was trying to put my best foot forward, but I didn't even know what my best foot was supposed to look like. And so I found it very unsettling and uncertain. But that last final week with 20 of us where we had very detailed physicals and we did a press conference, I had no idea, but it was just so they'd see how we'd react publicly and we'd had to write a big essay, and we had a big panel interview. And finally after all of that is when I got that phone call and they hired four of us. And then we showed up for the big hoopla announcement day. And that's where the game was afoot. And now it really began. But really that was just table stakes to start the hard work of all the things that you actually need to know to be trusted to fly a spaceship.

James - At this point, does it begin to creep into your head the possibility that you're going to space? Or do you have to temper that still so much because there's so many hurdles still to overcome. Being accepted onto the programme by no means guarantees you're going to space.

Chris - You recognise that there are people who get very close to being selected as an astronaut. They don't fly in space. There are people who get that phone call, but for whatever reason, life rears its ugly head. You have an injury or, or it turned out they don't like who you are. And so you never can count on the fact that you're going to fly in space. And in fact, you learn, because of the many years of preparation, you learn to just the ultimate gratification deferred. And you cannot count on space flight to justify what you're doing. If you do, it'd be a torturous existence. If the only part I liked about being an astronaut was flying in space, I would've hated my life because I only flew in space for six months, and I was an astronaut for 21 years. So the vast majority of my life was preparation and training and study and supporting other flights. So you have to make that the daily joyful part of who you are. And then maybe at the end of it, you'll actually get to fly in space. And even the day of my first space launch, which was in '95, at Space Shuttle Atlantis. We'd already had a full dress rehearsal day. And we'd gone out and got into the ship. And so the day we're going to space, it's like 'well, the weather might be bad or the abort sites might be bad.'

James - Still, you're still not letting yourself believe?

Chris - No. And so we got in and it was a beautiful day in Florida, but in case you lose some of your engines on the way to space, you actually have to abort and land either in North Africa or in the South or in Spain. We keep abort sites over in Spain or North Africa. And the weather in Spain and North Africa was bad that day. So we got into the ship, we were ready to go, and we had to scrub. And so it was one more day of very realistic training. But finally on the 12th of November, 1995, even though it was a much worse weather day in Florida, but good enough, the engine's lit. And even then, you don't let yourself believe because you're not in space yet. And it is only after the rockets have done their job, they've accelerated you from 0 to Mach 25. You're, uh, you know, a hundred miles above the Earth, you're going five miles a second, and the engine shut off, main engine cutoff, and you're weightless. That's when you allow yourself to believe that you're an astronaut.