Transcripts For CSPAN Q A 20150518

[piano playing] Ground Control to major tom Ground Control to major tom lock your hatch and put your helmet on, Ground Control to major tom commencing countdown engines on detach from station and may gods love be with you brian how long did it take you to do this video . Col. Hadfield a couple hours. Saturday afternoon on a space station. I had done the audio a few months prior. My son had said, dad, you have to have video to go with the audio. I floated around inside the space station, just sang the song a couple of times. Thinking, what would make an interesting backdrop . My son edited it on the ground. It is amazing to see the result of that, how it has led people to see life on a space station and therefore , in a different way. Brian how many people have seen this . Col. Hadfield it has been seen over 25 million times. I do not know how to measure it beyond that. Brian what happened after this was out in the ether . Col. Hadfield the interesting measure of it is, my son released it on a sunday night. You are coming home on monday. I was helping ready the Russian Space station. I knew that was out there. Came back, big fiery reentry on the plains of kazakhstan. Our vehicle rolled to a stop. Russian technicians come up, open the hatch, drag the commander over, and they saw me. And he said, chris, i saw your video. It was great. That was my welcome back to earth not even 24 hours later that i had the idea. Just a small fatherson music project had reached all the way to the plains of kazakhstan. Brian what year did you do it . Col. Hadfield it was the last few days i was on the spaceship. 2013. Brian lets do some of the Little Things before the bigger things. Where were you born . Col. Hadfield i was born in a town called sarnia where lake huron joins lake erie. Just on the canadian side of the canadianu. S. Order in ontario. Brian what service did you go into . Col. Hadfield i joined the Canadian Armed forces, the Royal Canadian air force, and sorbet t served a tour with the u. S. Air force and 21 years at nasa. Brian how many times did you go in space . Col. Hadfield i flew in space returns. The first was three times. The first was on atlantis. The second was to build endeavor and do a couple spacewalks. The third was to live on the International Space station on a russian rocket, the soyuz. Brian what is the difference between a russian astronaut and a canadian astronaut or american astronaut . Col. Hadfield very little. To take all 7 billion of us and you set tight requirements and constrictions and filter people that apply and choose 18 he tiny representative sample of humanity. That filter, whether it is japanese chinese, european, it tends to spit out the same sort of person. The language is different. But once you get all of us in a room, we have a lot more to talk about than you might think. Brian how different is the Russian Space program from the american Space Program . Col. Hadfield the American Program and the Russian Program really set the standard for the world from the beginning with sputnik in 1957 and the early american unmanned and the race to the moon. It set the tone of it and what space agencies should look like. They have a lot of similarities. It requires a huge amount of infrastructure. The time it takes is longer than any political cycle. It has its own sort of environment. A great sense of technological bride. And pride of accomplishment for something new for humanity. There is a lot of similarities between the two. The russians have put a lot of effort into longterm human habitation of space. Nasa put a huge amount of effort into getting people to the moon and the shuttle program. They are closely linked on the international station. It is a nice balance of expertise. I was nasas director of ops in russia for several years. There are more similarities than differences. Brian how many videos have you made about space . Col. Hadfield someone told me about 100. I served as an astronaut for 21 years. I am not sure how that sounds to people, 21 years. Neil armstrong was an astronaut for eight years in the accelerated pace of the race to the moon. 21 is a long time to serve in the Astronaut Corps especially as a canadian. In that time, i spoke i could not count the number of schools and businesses. I thought, if i ever get to orbit for a while, live on a space station i am going to make a little video to answer questions that everyone has been asking me for two decades. I crammed a lot in. People at the Canadian Space agency turned them out into Youtube Videos. Hundreds of millions of people have watched the videos. It was a great way to share the experience. Brian you have a book, and astronauts guide to life on earth. The paperback is out in 2015. We are going to another video, selfexplanatory. [video clip] col. Hadfield we take our asparagus and hydrated. You can see what it is like to eat asparagus in space. This is where i am going to rehydrate the asparagus. Right here. You dont want to lift the spoon too much or the food will fly everywhere. Imagine trying to mix in other food with this if the package is already full. It is not possible. You cannot hold two or three of these at once. You kind of need to eat one and then the other. Brian what does asparagus taste like up there . Col. Hadfield i have not seen that since the day i made it. Most of our food went through a water dispenser. The food is dehydrated. It saves weight getting up to space. You would think rehydrated asparagus would be disappointing to eat. But actually, it holds its texture pretty well. It has a fibrous but chewable texture that asparagus has. Quite a strong flavor as well. Asparagus weathers space travel pretty well. Brian how did you do the actual recording . Col. Hadfield it is really busy on a spaceship. I think the fact that i made a bunch of videos maybe gives the impression that all i did is make videos. But you will notice that i was just by myself because five other crewmembers are busy running everything. I said, im going to eat some asparagus. Set up the camera and take 30 seconds to film it. I have been the subject of many documentaries in my life. I sort of watched how professionals do it. You need the shot that shows the scene, does the introduction, then an action, then a closeup. When you are finished, try to bring it all together. It is not a complicated. I would just make 15 little clips and overnight, when the communication with station was quiet, we could send all the video to the ground. A very talented lady at the Canadian Space agency turn all those into a twominute Youtube Video and fired it off to the world within a day. And you would not believe the letters and emails and School Teachers and kids and everybody that watch to those as part of environment classes. The use them for so many different purposes. I am really pleased that i recorded daily life on a station. Brian what are you doing today . How big is your family and where do you live . Col. Hadfield my wife and i have been together for years this year. We have three kids, all around 30ish. One lives in china, one lives in chicago, one lives in toronto. My wife and i have lived in california, maryland houston and russia, but we recently moved back to toronto. I split my time between a bunch of things. I teach at university. I work with schools electronically through skype. I have written a couple books. I give a lot of lectures. I am on the space Advisory Board for canada to help the government decide what to do. I play a lot of music and perform with symphonies. I am coming up with the vancouver symphony next. The first book is being made into a tv show in hollywood. There is a series of youtube science videos and documentaries in the works. Lots of different things. Brian what kinds of questions do you always get from kids . Col. Hadfield there is a fundamental difference between what a young person asks and what an adult asks. At first, i was bemused by it. But i thought about it. An adult will ask me, what is it like in space . Sort of an aimless question. It is sort of like saying, what is it like on earth . What i realized is a kid will ask, when you exhale in space if heat does not rise, why does your breath not just slowly collect and suffocate you . I think the difference is, by the time you have reached some level of adulthood, you have put limitations on your life. You have decided, these are the things that are never going to happen in my life. Your level of engaged curiosity drops way off. Whereas if you are nine years old and you are watching a video of someone explain weightlessness and what that actually means, they see themselves as part of that process. It is one of the many things that may still happen in my life their life. They become very engaged. If they are engaged mentally they are challenging themselves to think new things and perhaps make decisions with their lives that will expand who they are. Brian how big is the canadian Space Program . Col. Hadfield it is tiny. The canadian Space Program, the budget of the entire program, is less than the communication budget of nasa. Just a few hundred people. But it has a lot of bang for the canadian buck. We were the third nation in space after the soviet union and u. S. The have had eight astronauts in space. We have a lot of satellites orbiting the world. We lead the world in robotics and telecommunications. It is little but purposeful. Brian another video, this one has to do with liquids. Col. Hadfield they do not behave the way you would expect. [video clip] col. Hadfield the average person on earth uses 350 liters of water a day over 1400 cups of water. Water consumption is critical on earth and even more so on the International Space station where we have a closed environment. From washing ourselves to making coffee, the water that is expelled is collected in a purification system. We reclaim about 93 of all the water. We even recycle our urine. Ewww. Col. Hadfield before you cringe at the thought of drinking left over urine the water we end up with is pure than more of the water you drink at home. That makes the International Space station its own selfcontained environment. A critical step towards living long periods off planet earth. Brian how long does it take you to get used to drinking urine . Col. Hadfield we all drink reprocessed urine every day. Dinosaurs were here for millions of years, and all the water on earth passed through a dinosaurs kidneys at some point. The real question is, do you have a good vacation system . Purification system . When ever you flush a toilet, it does not magically disappear. It goes into a process to purify it. The difference on a spaceship is you know whos urine it was. It is different if it is a little more personal. The process is much more close. To leave earth, to turn our tail and leave, we have to go from 93 water recycling to 100 water recycling. We do not have an infinite supply on a long voyage. We will have to find a way to improve the that. One of the things we are doing on the space station is proving technology that has to work in weightlessness without breaking down basically forever if we are going to not just orbit the world. Brian how long has the space station been up there . Col. Hadfield the first piece was launched in 1998. We have People Living permanently in space, which is a significant thing to say. We as a species have people permanently living in space since november of 2000. Coming up on 15 years. When we look back and say, when was it we left earth, it was november of 2000. Brian how big is it . Col. Hadfield if you were in it, you would be amazed how huge it is. Part of the beauty is, you are weightless. Square footage does not mean anything. It is a threedimensional environment. In this studio, we could be in this corner or that corner. You can take advantage of volume better. As a scale, it is like a couple big airliners with a door in between. There is only six people on board. If you think of a couple big airliners and only six people you can go half a day without seeing another person. Brian when you sleep, how long do you sleep . Col. Hadfield that is up to the astronaut. Nasa pumps out a schedule of intricate, directive detail like you would not believe. There is an electronic screen with a red line that tells you what you are supposed to be doing every five minutes for sixmonth that you are up there. Imagine if your life was directed to that degree. It tells you when you are supposed to go to sleep and when you are supposed to wake up. If you want to get something personal done, make a music at io, for example you do that in the time you are supposed to be asleep. Nasa gives us seven hours a night, but i got about five. Brian do you take medicine in space . Col. Hadfield we have a full pharmacy on board and get trained as emergency medical technicians. Trained for basic dental work, surgery, just in case someone got badly hurt. So our medical team has stopped the space station with all the supplies you need, just in case someone got hurt. But we launch healthy people, higher healthy people. We make sure they are extremely healthy before we launch the. They are monitored carefully from the ground. Even though we have medicine on board, maybe you take some headache pills, but you cannot catch a cold. It is a pretty careful environment. Stay healthy the whole time. Brian we have some video of sonny williams. Col. Hadfield she did a bunch of videos of herself. Brian you can see her on the screenwriter. Right there. [video clip] you do not have the sensation of line down. Here is one sleep station right here. You can follow me if you want. I am inside. It is sort of like a little phone booth, but pretty comfy. I have a sleeping bag right here that weve been. We sleep in. You can sleep anywhere. I have a sleeping ceiling. I am on the floor, but it does not matter if i turn over and sleep upside down. I do not have any sensation in my head that tells me i am upside down. Brian how much privacy do you have when you sleep . Col. Hadfield it was one of the concerns when nasa and International Partners were designing the space station. What does a person need for privacy . Especially if it is a tightknit crew . One of the things we learned when we did it wrong, by expediency on apollo or the shuttle, where there is no privacy, is that a little privacy is a good thing. What suni was showing us, we had these tiny sleep pods, a little taller than i am, slightly wider than my shoulders. When you are in there, it has little saloon doors that swing close and have a little magnet holding them. There is a nice fan so you do not suffocate. It gives you a little place that is your own. It does not need to be much. But for the longterm Psychological Health of the crew, it is nice to have a little introspective location. Brian who owns the space lab . Col. Hadfield it is 15 different nations. Ownership is a complex issue internationally. The way we have determined who has access, who has authority, is basically proportionate to how much you put into it. Whether you build one of the modules or paid for a part of it. It is divided across 15 partners proportionate to the amount of gdp or whatever they put into building it. Brian who has put in the most . Col. Hadfield the u. S. And russia are the dominant partners. They either built or paid for the building of most of it. Two big Mission Controls in moscow and houston. There is a Mission Control montreal, germany, japan. The predominant i do not know what the right word would be the main control is with nasa and houston. The russians, because they built a whole segment, they are very active in the program. When we had a software or hardware program, the russians can take over and control things. When they have a serious problem, we can do the same favor for them. That has saved our bacon countless times. Brian how many pieces are there to the space station . Col. Hadfield more than you think. Each piece had to come up in a rocket or the back of the space shuttle. Each rocket limits the size of the peace. The russian pieces are built in moscow and shipped to kazakhstan. So the limit to their pieces is the height of the Railway Overpass and length of railcars. They have several modules. Nasa has several modules. Japanese have a couple modules. If you looked at it, it would feel like you are in a 12 bedroom house. Not 12 bedrooms. 12 room building. Brian do you stay in your own area . Col. Hadfield the station is an International Space station. You stay in the area where your work is, but your work could take you anywhere on any given day. Often, you will be working a suite of experiments and may spend 80 of your week in the japanese laboratory, but you could be anywhere else. Brian here is Chris Hadfield trying to cry in space. Col. Hadfield here is a common question can you cry in space . Lets try it out. Im going to take some water put it in my eye. We will see what happens. Just as if i started crying, my eyes are full of tears. You can see it just forms a ball. In fact, i can put more water in. So if you keep crying, you just end up with a bigger ball of water in your eye until eventually it crosses your nose and into your other i eye or spreads over your cheek. Brian what is your relationship with water in space when it does what it just did in the video . Col. Hadfield you have a Great Respect for water because it is a limited resource and you recognize how precious it is. You try to never do anything where the water is going to end up in the trash we sent back to earth. We want to wring all the water out of everything so it can get recycled. It is also a huge threat to us because on earth, water falls to the ground. If you had electrical wires in the walls of your house, they are not liable to be submerged. Give water can float anywhere, think of how you would have to change the Electrical Panel in your house or a simple light switch if you knew that at any given moment, the light switch could be underwater because a ball of water could float across the room. The art careful with stray water. You do not want to have an inadvertent short of electricity because of stray water. We are very respectful of where water goes. Brian when you thought you wanted to be an astronaut to the time they designated you one what did you have to go through . I do not mean as a kid. As an adult, what were you up against . You say in the book that astronauts are competitive. Col. Hadfield it is an extremely rare job. I heavily pursued job by a lot of people. If you stopped people on the street, they would tell you, i would love to be an astronaut. But how do you do it . The people who decide to do it get advanced degrees, keep their body in shape, learn to scuba dive, speak other languages. They get this astronautfriendly resume or cv. Then one of the space agencies puts out an ad, wanted, astronauts. Thousands of people apply. Then it is an agonizing process where you are hoping they are going to respond and say, send us more information. They look at your psychiatric tests, ask for more information, references. Maybe you will get to come to an interview. That lasts a week. It is aptitude testing, robotic aptitude, mental acuity. You have to sit in front of a huge number of aerospace experts and experienced astronauts and run an hourlong panel interview. And the medical is the biggest discriminator. Most people get disqualified medically just because weand so in my case, when they stuck that one to add out thousands of people applied, and they chose four of us, and one of us went to start trading immediately with nasa, so that was the most unnerving five months of my life, because i had done my best. I laid everything out, but now i had no more control over whether someone who thought what i had done was going to have the right stuff. Brian what did they tell you was the reason or the reasons that they pick you out of 5000 . I mean, what did you do that the others did not . Host Chris Hadfield i have never found out. One thing you can say is do they have an advanced technical degree . Proven ability to learn . Do they have good decisionmaking ability, and are the interesting or well spoken . Are they coordinated . Are they healthy and it . Is this a person you would want to spend six months away from earth with . Is this an interesting person . Is this a person who has a sense of reserve . There is a lot of technological academic, and accomplishment measures, but a lot of it is a little fema role a little ephemeral not just guessing what tom wolfe called the right stuff, but you never really know. But we do a good job, and only very, very rarely does a base agency hire someone and then later on discover that they just did not suit them or that maybe after one flight, they did not enjoy it, and they left. Brian what was your job in the space station . What was your responsibility . Chris hadfield i flew in space three times, so my jobs were different every time, but on my third flight, for the long one, i was a crew member, responsible for hundreds and hundreds of things, but i was just one of the regular crew. I was Flight Engineer number i do not remember, four, but then after that, halfway through, kevin ford, who was the commander at that time, his ship of three was leaving, so he handed over command the, so for my last half of the time, i was commander of the International Space station. Brian you know, it with your experience in space, when are you the most nervous or concerned or frightened . Chris hadfield nobody once a frightened astronaut. It sounds trite, but frightened often means you are liable to make a bad decision, because year and animal reaction is what you are counting on, so we tried to never let ourselves be in a position where we dont know what we are doing. It sounds may be cocky, too, but it is not, and that the lines the light of an astronaut. It is that entire lifetime of visualizing failure, visualizing things that are likely to fail. We actually say, what is the next thing that is going to kill us all of the time. What is the next thing that is going to kill us . So as a result, you are visualizing failure and gaining skills so when you fly in space, nothing gives you an unexpected fear. And you have an urgency to thought. You have a real close attention to detail, but it is not a feeling of fear. It is much more a feeling of of a. M. I how can i make myself as keenly aware as possible so i can deal with all of those things i have looked at . The only thing where i felt a chill up my back was on the dark side of the earth, eastern australia, in the darkness, and watching a shooting star come in between me and the earth, and at first, i had the standard reaction of wishing upon a star, but then i had the sobering realization that that was just a huge dominant rock from the universe going, who knows, 20 miles a second that missed us and made it down to the atmosphere, and if it had hit us it was a begin of one that you could see it if it had hit us, we would have been dead in an instant, and that randomness, the lack of ability to monitor no matter how hard i had prepared suddenly what felt like a big armored ship to me, suddenly i felt i was writing inside the wizard of oz, you know glendas delicate, little bubble in the universe, and it kind of reminded me of the fragility. Brian 21 years with Neil Armstrong and eight years. There is a great deal of difference between you two. I want to ask you about your ability to communicate. Hell armstrong basically head. He did not spend a lot of time in public. You have spent a lot of time in public. When did you know you had a public persona . Chris hadfield the three of them walked on the moon, and mike wrote a terrific book about it, and that really made me think. Mike was sort of the unknown member of the trio, and yet he wrote the definitive book on what the experience was like and nasa, to their credit, they could have been forgiven for not broadcasting it live, because the opportunity to mess up was enormous. Somebody could have crashed, summit he could have sworn a blue streak, but nasa said this is too important to keep to ourselves, so we are going to broadcast it live to the world and i think that combination convinced me that if i ever got to do Something Like that myself i will not keep it to myself. I am constantly reminded of the fact that i am there on behalf of everyone else. People are spending a lot of money for us to start to explore the rest of the universe in person, and i am literally the vanguard of that, so i am not just going to keep the magnificence or the complexity or the Lessons Learned to myself. I am going to share them, and i think it is an important part of the job. I think people make more informed decisions. Young people look at this as something that might be open to them or at least it influences their thinking, and not everyone is interested in space flight but the people who design your cars the people who design medical research in quitman they are interested. They are inspired. They are somewhat motivated to do what they do because of the fascinating lure of exploration and spaceflight, so to me, it is selfperpetuating, and i think an important part of the job. Brian here is another public appearance of yours on the conan obrien show. Lets take a listen. Chris hadfield there is not a washing she or water, so we wear them until they wear out, and then we threw them in the trash and when it gets full of trash we close the hatch, and it undocks and backs away and falls down into the atmosphere so your dirty laundry actually gets incinerated in the atmosphere. Conan wait a minute. You are kidding. Dirty underwear out the window, and it is raining down on us . [laughter] Chris Hadfield you know when you are in the corner of a room, and there is a sharp sunbeam, and you can see those lovely modes of dust falling delicately down through the sunbeams . Conan yes. Chris hadfield that is my underwear. Brian so how long did you wear the underwear or the clothing that you had on you . Chris hadfield it is intriguing. It is an interesting thing to think about. Because we have gravity, our clothing is pushed onto us. We are sitting on our pants and underwear and grinding them into our body. It is just how it is under gravity, so naturally the oils and Everything Else, the things that are not clean in your body get ground into your clothing, so especially your underclothes gets soiled pretty quickly. That is why we change them on a regular basis. When you are weightless, they are basically just hanging to you all of the time. They seldom even touch your skin, so imagine if you took your underwear, and you sort of a hung them next to you after a day, and how dirty would they be questioned and to be personal, on the space station, i wore white underwear and it was fascinating to me that i could wear the white underwear, and after two days, there were still pristine and white, and we did not have a washing machine, so i would wear the clothing until they were becoming, you know, a little bit rank, and then we would throw them away because everything that comes up to the station has a cost, so you want to wring everything you can out of it, and it was surprising. Brian a thing to quantify. How many pairs of underwear did you take into space, and you were up there for how many days . Chris hadfield we decided several years ago not to do it like that, because if we did every astronaut would have different underwear, and then there would be different sizes so there is a place that is in the throat of the station between one of the american modules and one of the russian modules, and it is lined with small fabric backs, and in their there are small, medium, and large underwear, and there are white socks and black socks, and you treat it as a immuno larder, and we do inventory, and they make sure there is enough of all sizes it is more efficient. Brian how often does a spaceship come to the station . Chris hadfield there are ships that come from japan russia, the united states, and then they dock at all of the different ports of the station, and there is an unmanned resupply ship coming up every few weeks from one of those locations and it is quite busy, because we have to move them around like a shell game sometimes to free up a port, and there is four in the russian segment, some in the american segments, so you can have a week where you are doing nothing but moving spaceships around, so you get fresh fruits almost every time one of those comes up. It is the last thing they put in the ship before it leaves earth. It might be a little container of apples and oranges, something that may spoil coop spoil and then it docks, and you open it up, and then it smells like oranges, which is a rare and lovely smell. Brian back to sunny wins, s sunita william. Ms. William this serves to w functions, number two, right here. I will show you. You can he it is any mall, so you have to have pretty good aim and be ready for things to get low get going in the right direction, and it felt a little it, so i am closing it up. This is, of course, for number two, and this guy is number one. The never one step can sort of go all over the place if you do not incorrect and as i mentioned, both of them have a little bit of suction, so that should keep going in the right direction, but as i said sometimes get a little out of control if you are out of control yourself, so we have a lot of protected stuff and we do have privacy. There is a little door. Brian does that remind you of anything . Chris hadfield it is the loudest thing on the ship. As sonny said, going into the Sewage Treatment system, the liquids, and the solids going down, and we recycle the liquids for the solids, we do not recycle. Brian how often do kids ask you about that . Chris hadfield it is not just kids. That is the most asked question, and if they do not ask it is just because they do not want to. Brian and how long are you train to do what we see her doing and you do . Chris hadfield you get hired, and you train, and you continue to train up to the launch, and the hardest is the memory tasks. How do remember everything everybody taught you, because a lot of it is life or death. Had you keep something some safety technician, what he told you six years ago when you were doing survival how do you keep that in the front of your brain so we train constantly. Something like the toilet, and sonny just showed you how to use the toilet, and the toilet breaks on a regular races, and the outhouse, if you pop the four corners, then you are in the full guts of the filtration, and there is an acidic treatment that goes into it to help neutralize the liquids that come out, and then there is the centrifuge and everything in there, and you not only have to know just how to use the toilet, you have to know how to take the whole thing apart, troubleshoot it and then rebuild it and i think during my five month up there, i rebuilt it three times and other guys did, as well. It is the complexity, not only of learning to use things but of however thing works and how to rebuild every single thing on board a whole spacious. Brian how did you do this whole book an astronauts guide to life on earth . Did you take notes when you were in space . Chris hadfield ive added email from 15 years ago, my first conversation about writing that book with a canadian journalist named Bob Mcdonnell and at the time, i told him, this is how i want this book to go. I did not keep specific notes, but i started working on it. I need to remember including this, and i started working on the books in earnest, and i just did it in fits and starts, and then i had a lot of events during my third spaceflight that made it into the book, so it was a big effort, and, of course, it was not just me. It was 18 of people, working with an agent and editors and family and a lot of effort externally, but the book is now in 20 languages and there are ministers that use it as the basis of their servant. It is used by businesses, and my whole purpose of writing that book, and astronauts guide to life on earth, was to try to be useful. What out of this experience is useful at a personal level. It is entertaining would the funny stories, but so what . What is useful out of it, and i think that is why it is successful around the world. Brian how much of it and you write . Chris hadfield i wrote most of it, but i worked with a professional writer. Thus like Everything Else in life, i do not want to make all of the mistakes myself. I want to get advice. Brian how many copies of this book have sold . Chris hadfield i do not know. It was a New York Times bestseller and even this week, on the bestseller list in canada. And it is all over the world. Brian and now it is in paperback, so less expensive. Chris hadfield added elementary schools, they are using it at grade eight, and in paperback it is cheap enough at that level, so i am delighted. Ryan you are finished in space but if everybody wants to go back to this space station they have to fly a story is russian craft fly a soyuz station. Chris hadfield the best the shuttle could do was visit and when the shuttle was not there the shuttle could only fly for about five weeks, and if the shuttle was not there, or if there was a leak or a fire, if it got hit by a media right, we would have to get into this soyuz and fly it home. It is our lifeboat. It does not fly your cell phone. You have to be qualified as a soyuz crew member to live on the eighth nation. The shuttle was a huge delivery the ogle, and it built the station, an amazing vehicle, the most capable flying machine, but we have always use the soyuz to take people. But that is about to change, as there are two companies, one from boeing and one froms a six, to take people up and back, so we are not just relying on soyuz, so they should be flying in 2017, succumbing pretty quick. Ryan who is up there now . Chris hadfield there are six people there. There has always been one american and one russian since the first crew went up there in 2000. Maybe the most significant of their right now, i do not know how you measure significance, but there is an american and a russian of there for a year including scott kelly, and that is the longest any american has flown in space continuously. There is also a russian up there for 850 days. This is his fifth term on the station. There is an italian woman who is brilliant, speaks five languages, and is a test pilot a military pilot and it is a wonderful, little microcosm of earth that is up there exploring the rest of the universe. Brian how good is your russian . Chris hadfield my russian is good enough to fly a spacious. I studied for 20 years, and i was a director for 20 years, and i was a pilot. It is like Flight Engineer. The commander of a soyuz sits in the middle, and the copilot, a mentor pilot is what we call it on the shuttle, sits on the left, and i was the pilot basically of the soyuz which means if somebody got an appendicitis, i would have to fly it completely by myself, so i had to qualify to be a Russian Spaceship commander, and none of the training is in english. None of the professors speak any english, so i speak soyuz really, really well, and then my russian is good enough to handle everything i need to do. Brian how much education do you have . Chris hadfield i went to school in canada entered did a masters degree at the university of tennessee, the u. S. Air force test pilot school, but really, i have been studying my whole life. I have a masters in Aerospace Systems science. Brian what are you qualified to fly . Chris hadfield it is a big list. Most of them are american. Lots. Everything from little oneperson gliders through to 747, the spatial, even though i do not fly it myself. The one i flew the most was an f18, ironically intercepting soviet planes. Brian how you are able to talk to Something Like William Shatner and how you communicated with earth. Lets watch the video. [video clip] mr. Shatner, this is Mission Control, houston. William shatner i am calling. This is shatner. Do you hear me . [whistle] this is the Space Research shuttle, and, yes, i hear you loud and clear. This Chris Hadfield is. Mr. Shatner observing as a scientist, a part of it, removed from it, or are you able to to see the ewing unifying parts of it so you become one with the universe . Chris hadfield you never site on the stage, but the view they put in for us star trek, with how the world looked from your windows, that is how the world looks. It is an enormous, wonderful rolling earth below us, but all you have to do is flip yourself upside down, and suddenly the rest of the universe is right there at your feet below you and that is where the engineer and me brian you are turning. Chris hadfield there is no up or down. It completely defies the laws of gravity that we are so used to on earth, but on a spaceship you rapidly get used to the idea that there is no defined up and down, and your inner air becomes completely driven by what it sees, not by what it senses, so it does not care. There is no up or down. You cant just float anywhere. It is kind of magic. Brian how fast are you going on the space station, and how many times do you loop the earth . Chris hadfield five miles a second. You have to decide relative to what, but it is 17 and 5000 miles an hour, which is such a big number, you need to measure it different right, so one way to say it is you go from l. A. To new york in nine minutes. That is how fast you are going which means you go around the whole world in one of five hours, so 24 hours, that means you go around the world 16 times a day, and the beauty of that is our orbit is not with the equator. It is like a pool of, 52 degrees up from the equator, so north and south and north and south, and the world turns. Every time you cross the equator, it is a new part, so you see the entire world every day. You see all 7. 5 billion people every day and with a clarity and a threedimensional perspective that is entirely different from what you would expect. It looks nothing like a globe or google maps where everything is a different color. It is new wants and beautiful and mesmerizing to look at. Brian we are going to close the program with a little more of the song you recorded for space oddity. What is that song . Why did you do that one . Chris hadfield my brother and i had a Christmas Song and there started to be an internet clamor of having a cover of david bowie , and i had never done that before. He insisted i make it. Friends put the instrumentals underneath, and lovely instrumental track, and my son said, dad, it has to be video. You are in space. And i was, i am busy up, and i put the whole thing together, but really, it was not a planned. It was a fatherson project, and it was done sort of in response to requests from all around the world. Brian and he edited it hereunder . Chris hadfield he and a friend took all of that wrought video. The Canadian Space Agency Processed it, just to make sure there was nobody floating around in the background in their underwear, and then they put together the video, and there was no master plan to it. It just got done on time so we released it the day before i came home. Brian our guest is the author of an astronauts guide to life on earth, colonel Chris Hadfield lets close by watching more of space oddity. Happily. This is Ground Control to major tom this is major time to Ground Control. And i am floating in a most peculiar way and the clouds look very different today for i am sitting in a tin can far above the world planet earth is blue and there is nothing left to do [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] announcer four free transcripts, or to give us your comments about this Program Visit us at q a. Org. Q a programs are also available as cspan podcast. Announcer here are some of the other q a programs if you enjoyed this. Charles bolden on his career. Major general marsha anderson, the highestranking female africanamerican in the history of the military. And the author of the book the teenage brain. You can watch these anytime or search our entire Video Library on cspan. Org. Announcer on the next washington journal, paul singer, on accepting money from an oil company in azerbaijan