Chris Hadfield: Commanding the International Space Station

James - Your first space flight, you must be with other astronauts who've got some experience. So, are you teasing out hints from them as to when they think it's a go? And then, you know?

Chris - Sure. I flew with four other people on my first space flight, they were all American and they had all flown at least once before. I was part of the flight crew up on the flight deck. There were four of us flying the space shuttle; commander in the front left seat, and I was seated next to Jerry Ross and this was his fifth space flight. He eventually flew seven times in space. Whenever I didn't know what to do, I just did whatever Jerry was doing: 'What's Jerry doing? He knows what he's supposed to be doing at this point' and that was very helpful. But when we were sitting on the launch pad, five minutes before launch, you're laying on your back in your chair and I'm like, 'Oh, it's getting pretty close to launch!' I looked over and Jerry's right knee started bobbing up and down nervously. I'm sure he didn't even notice that his knee was bobbing up and down. And I was thinking, 'Wow, if Jerry's nervous, this is a time maybe for Chris to get nervous also. Maybe this is actually going to happen today.' I think having a mix of rookies and experienced astronauts onboard a spaceship is a good idea.

James - So that was your first space flight. The second one you so viscerally described at the beginning, in 2001, where you did 2 spacewalks. Your final mission in 2012, that's the long duration one to the ISS where you are the commander, right? How does the preparation differ from the matter of days you spend up there for the first few missions to the matter of months for the final one?

Chris - My first two space flights were as part of the flight crew of American Space Shuttles and we were just like a visiting construction crew. We would fly in, we'd dock with, in the first case, the Mir Space station, and the second case, the fledgling International Space Station. We were the hard hat crew, showing up to build something for a week or so and then coming home again. That's a very specific, discrete, deep, complex series of tasks and so that's the pacing and the ethos of what you're doing. It's the difference between going to build something for the weekend and moving somewhere. It's a whole different mentality, and how you prepare for it and the depth and breadth of problems you might face. And we were moving internationally - I'm moving to a country where they speak a different language and it's all different technologies. I was moving there, this time, not in a space shuttle, but in a Soyuz. So first, I had to learn to speak Russian and then I had to learn orbital mechanics and control theory in Russian and then to fly a Soyuz spaceship, in all emergency cases, talking to the centre for flight control on the outskirts of Moscow so I can talk directly with everybody there no matter what emergency happens. It's a whole different type of preparation. And then I'm also going to be the commander of the world spaceship, so that level of responsibility for the lives onboard, I'm their commander - if something goes wrong, the real buck is going to stop with me. We're running 200 experiments on the space station, so you have to travel to Japan and train for months in Japan on their part of the space station and all of their experiments and meet with the scientists from all around the world. It's quite a demanding task because, once you get there, yes you can talk to Earth for them to help you, but whenever anything goes wrong, very often the very first symptom of something going wrong with a spaceship is you lose communication with Earth. If it's a power problem or an altitude control problem where the Space station starts tumbling or something, probably one of the first things you're going to lose is communication. So you have to be able to do everything autonomously. It's a bunch of work.

James - Speaking of communication with Earth, this is the point at which you shoot to internet fame, spreading descriptions of how you accomplish basic tasks in space, like brushing your teeth, for example. But also the Space Oddity David Bowie cover, which most people listening to this I expect will have seen. This is where your powers as a communicator start to be realised and, I suppose, you set in motion the career you've moved on to have afterwards?

Chris - I haven't changed. On my first spaceflight, I was on the cover of Time magazine, so it wasn't like it was unrecognised. But there was no internet then and there was no social media. Also, onboard the spaceship on my first space flight, how could you communicate? There was a Ham radio. It's very difficult to mass communicate with a Ham radio. And we didn't have digital photography, it was film. So I could take a great picture of a volcano erupting, but no one was going to see it for months. If I want to go somewhere and show it to someone, I can't just email it to them or put it on Twitter. I'm going to have to actually travel somewhere and project it on a high school wall. Part of the reason I could share the experience so much more effectively on my third spaceflight was that we had WiFi on the space station. We had slow and intermittent but fairly capable connection to the internet from the International Space Station, so now I could see something and take a beautiful picture of it and then just look at it and write a little comment and send it. It just took a matter of seconds and suddenly I could bring a billion people along with me. It harked back to when I was that little kid who was so inspired by the NASA programme and the people going to the moon and the way that NASA so brazenly shared everything that was happening. You're going to get real communications and if someone swears up on the spaceship on the Apollo ship, then so be it. And Buzz did swear! It was like, 'Oh well! We all know swear words. Too bad.' So I just thought, 'Wow. If that was so influential in my life because of their willingness to share the humanity of that experience, then I should do the same. We set records for the amount of science we got done. It wasn't just us, but the momentum that had built, the station was mature enough. So we were getting all the work done, and we had a big emergency where we had to do an emergency spacewalk to save the life of the space station. So we were doing all of the technical stuff, but I also tried to intersperse using the technology onboard to share it as best as I possibly could, including the guitar that is permanently on the space station that was put there by the NASA psychiatrists. I thought, 'Hey, I'm a guitar player. I'm going to write some music up here.' They give me time to sleep, I'm going to steal some of it to be artistically creative and just try and help as many people as possible get this as part of their thinking so that maybe it'll help them make different decisions with their lives.

James - They're brilliant videos if anyone hasn't yet seen them.