An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

by Chris Hadfield

  When I’d repressurized the airlock and Pavel and I were pulling our crewmates’ gloves and helmets off, the feeling was wonderful. We’d beaten the long odds, done our job right, and maybe even fixed the problem and sort of saved the Station. What’s more: we were still on track to undock in less than 48 hours.

  The crew had come together to pull off an EVA in unprecedented time. The shared feeling of pride was palpable. I was proud of Tom and Chris’s hard-won competence, of Pavel’s skill even though he was doing something for the first time, of Sasha’s willingness to shoulder an extra load so Pavel could help out, of Roman’s dogged industry, continuing to pack our Soyuz so we could leave on time.

  And I was also proud of living up to NASA’s belief that I was capable of commanding the world’s spaceship. On my first day at JSC, I hadn’t been an obvious candidate. I was a pilot. I didn’t have much leadership experience to speak of at all. Worse: I was a Canadian pilot without much leadership experience. Square astronaut, round hole. But somehow, I’d managed to push myself through it, and here was the truly amazing part: along the way, I’d become a good fit. It had only taken 21 years.

  Little did I know that this early training in 1964 was actually getting me ready for flying in the tight quarters of the Soyuz spaceship. (Credit: Chris Hadfield)

  My first flight suit—a proud young Royal Canadian Air Cadet off to glider pilot training, summer 1975. (Credit: Chris Hadfield)

  Being awarded a scholarship to learn to fly gliders, spring 1975. My first step toward being a pilot. (Credit: Chris Hadfield)

  Helene and I happily marrying in Waterloo, Ontario, on December 23, 1981. I was still a military college cadet, so wore my formal scarlets. (Credit: Chris Hadfield)

  Test Pilot School, Edwards Air Force Base, California, as one of my toughest—and most fun—years of training came to an end in December 1988. A big day for the family, station wagon loaded to depart for Patuxent River, Maryland. (Credit: Chris Hadfield)

  The whole family—Helene, me, Evan, Kyle and Kristin—together for Christmas 2005, at our home near the Johnson Space Center. (Credit: Chris Hadfield)

  Flying a U.S. Navy F/A-18 with a hydrogen-burning research engine on the wingtip, being chased by a NASA Dryden 2-seater, at Pax River, 1991. (Credit: Chris Hadfield)

  Dragging supplies through the snow with American astronauts at Winter Survival with the Canadian Army in Valcartier, Quebec, February 2004. (Credit: Chris Hadfield)

  Mission Control in Houston, Texas, CAPCOMING for Space Shuttle mission STS-77 in 1996. My kids hand-painted my tie for Father’s Day. (Credit: NASA)

  Checking my gloves, ready to spacewalk: a day’s training underwater in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab in Houston, Texas, 2011. (Credit: NASA)

  Out in the untrespassed sanctity of space, between the Earth and forever. Canada’s first spacewalk (and mine!), April 2001. (Credit: NASA)

  Signing the traditional pre-launch book in Yuri Gagarin’s office with Roman and Tom and our backup crew in Star City, Russia, November 2012. (Credit: NASA)

  Inside the International Space Station Cupola, able to look down onto the whole world. A marvelous place to play guitar. (Credit: NASA)

  The crew of Expedition 34, cool in sunglasses aboard the International Space Station. Someone had said, “Okay, a serious picture!” (Credit: NASA)

  Dressed for spaceflight! Back in my Sokhol pressure suit, ready to return to Earth in our Soyuz capsule after five months on the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA)

  Tom, Roman and me in our Soyuz spaceship, designed and trusted to be small and rugged enough to safely deliver us down through the fiery atmosphere, home to Earth. (Credit: NASA)

  The International Space Station. (Credit: NASA)

  The Soyuz undocking from the International Space Station, with Tom, Roman and me inside, May 13, 2013. (Credit: NASA)

  The view from the International Space Station is phenomenal—a visual onslaught of ever-changing light, texture and discovery. The Cupola’s windows effortlessly offer up the familiar shapes of Earth in ever-unfamiliar and breathtaking ways. To simply look through the camera lens and press the shutter button is to see our world with both newfound understanding and respect. (Credit: NASA/Chris Hadfield)

  12

  SOFT LANDINGS

  AS WE WERE GETTING READY TO LEAVE Mir at the end of my first space flight in 1995, the mood was convivial. We were rushing around taking last-minute crew photos, signing sheaves of envelopes (a cosmonaut tradition: Russians are, for whatever reason, avid collectors of envelopes that have been in space) and double-checking that we hadn’t left any Shuttle gear behind. As a parting gift, we gave the Mir crew all our remaining condiments, like packages of salsa and mustard, which help make space food taste a little less bland.

  I didn’t feel let down now that our mission was almost over. I felt that I’d had an experience that no one could ever take away from me—fleeting, yes, but it would be part of me forever, so I was entirely ready to leave. We had done something unprecedented and near-impossible, building a dock for future Shuttle visits, and we’d done it well. As we prepared to undock, there was a palpable sense of triumph inside our spaceship.

  I pushed the button to start driving open the hooks that connected Atlantis to Mir, and after a couple of minutes, those built-in springs pushed us apart—an effortless kiss-off. As we started to drift away, the ship-to-ship radio crackled to life and the melancholic strains of “Those Were the Days,” sung in Russian, filled the Shuttle. We’d all sung the song together the night before in Mir, with Thomas Reiter and me on guitar. At the moment of undocking, the campiness of the song fit our mood perfectly. Spirits were high, as though we’d won a gold medal in the Cosmic Geek Olympics.

  We did a fly-around, one perfect looping circle to complete a full photographic survey of the station’s exterior. We were (and still are) trying to understand orbital debris—how often it hits spaceships and how big the rocks and dust grains are. Very little orbital debris is man-made; almost all of it is the stuff of the universe, such as meteors and comet tails. Detailed reviews of blown-up versions of these photos, so all the holes and pockmarks could be counted, would provide key data. After 360 degrees of behemoth choreography, with Atlantis slowly revolving around Mir like a whale skirting a giant squid, we fired our orbital maneuvering engines, pulled away safely and headed for home. We stayed on the radio, though, chatting and playing a little Tchaikovsky for our friends back on the station, until we lost contact.

  The Shuttle was a far more complicated vehicle than the Soyuz, which is highly automated, and landing it was an exceptionally high-demand piloting task. It was very difficult to fly, this hypersonic glider, so NASA chose top-notch test pilots and then trained them for many years to be able to do it right. Simply getting the Shuttle ready to survive re-entry required multiple systems checks and reconfigurations; one trick—we had to point the belly at the sun for hours to warm up the rubber tires for landing. Landing, in other words, required the same degree of focus and preparation as launching.

  The lesson for me was that the very last thing you do on a mission is just as important as the first thing you did—perhaps even more important, actually, because now you’re tired. It’s like the last mile of a marathon: the effort has to be more deliberate and you’ve got to push yourself, hard, to keep going right to the very end. It’s tempting to tell yourself, “I’ve only got 20 steps left,” but if you start anticipating the finish line, chances are that you’ll let up and then you could make mistakes—ones that could be fatal in my line of work.

  It’s dangerous to think of descent as an anticlimax. Instead of looking back longingly over your shoulder at what you’re leaving behind, you need to be asking, “What’s the next thing that could kill me?”

  I was downstairs on the middeck for that first Shuttle landing, just a hopeful, knowledgeable passenger with no windows, no instruments, no control. My main responsibility was to make sure that everyone on the flight deck was su
ited up and strapped in. I’d done that perfectly, and was on the middeck alone when Jim Halsell, the pilot, put on his helmet. His communication cord had been floating between the neck ring of the helmet and the neck ring of the suit itself; when the rings locked together they trapped the cord, leaving him unable to talk to our commander or to Mission Control. That’s a big problem at any point in flight but particularly when you’re trying to re-enter the atmosphere.

  I’m not even in my own pumpkin-colored pressure suit yet when Jim hollers, “Come help me.” He can’t get his helmet open to release the comm cord. On the flight deck, they’re doing all sorts of checks and turning on the flight controls, and he’s having to yell just to be heard through his big, thick helmet. So I float over to try to pull it off. No luck, the thing is completely jammed. I need to put more muscle into it, but Jim is belted into a seat that’s mere inches below the most critical switches for controlling the vehicle. If I yank too hard and his helmet comes off suddenly, there’s a good chance I’m going to smash into that panel and cause a real problem. I pull more vigorously, still wary of the potential for disaster. The helmet doesn’t budge.

  Picture this, if you can: we’re coming down into the upper atmosphere, I’m a rookie still dressed only in my underwear, my stomach’s starting to feel queasy and I’m working a problem no one anticipated, while everyone else is fully occupied trying to ensure we arrive alive. Lightbulb: I whip downstairs, find a big, long slot-head screwdriver—the kind you’d use to break open a door—fly back up and try to use it for leverage to unjam the helmet. Meanwhile, Jim is still focused on helping fly this incredibly complicated vehicle, trying to ignore the fact that now my body is wrapped around his helmet to cushion the thing from flying away, and I’m trying to pry it off with the screwdriver, looking, I’m sure, like Bugs Bunny in that episode where he’s hugging the head of The Crusher, the monstrous boxing he-man.

  Finally, the helmet pops off and I bounce off the ceiling, right myself, untrap Jim’s comm cord and refasten his helmet, just in time to drag myself back downstairs and pull on my big orange pressure suit—only, there’s a little bit of gravity now, so I keep getting bounced to the floor and I’m starting to feel sick. The suit wasn’t really designed for you to put it on by yourself, but it’s possible if you work at it, and when I’m finally in, I plunk down in my seat. We’re way down in the atmosphere by this point, already Mach 12, I’m sweaty from the exertion and now I realize I’ve messed up my own comm cord somehow: I can hear what everyone else is saying, but they can’t hear me. That’s no big loss, as my main focus at this point is trying not to throw up.

  I feel like I’ve only been in my seat for five minutes when we begin our slow, curving turn to line up with the runway in Florida. Since there are no windows I can’t see anything, but I sure can hear the rush of air that sounds like a freight train and can feel the very steep final dive to the ground, followed by an elegant touchdown. Our final approach speed is 300 knots, 195 at landing, and then we slow down carefully, thanks to a drag chute and wheel brakes. Only when the motion ceases altogether does the commander issue the radio call: “Wheels stop, Houston.”

  But the mission was still not really over. We had to refocus and push ourselves physically and emotionally for a last, hour-long burst of effort. There was a 150-step procedure to shut down the Shuttle, and each step was crucially important in order to ensure the vehicle would be ready to fly again in a few months. Only after the ground crew purged the unused toxic, caustic fuels that kept the hydraulic and life support systems running, and covered the fuel nozzles on the front and back of the Shuttle, were we free to exit, unsteadily at best. Some astronauts need to be carried, many vomit, and all of us feel awkward re-adapting to gravity, but an hour later, freshly changed into blue flight suits, we were back to inspect the belly of our spaceship for any damage, greet the ground crew and hold a small press conference.

  It was only after all that that I allowed myself to relax. I was a little dazed, but also exhilarated. I’d done my part, and as a crew, we’d fulfilled our mission.

  When we launch from Baikonur, the traditional send-off from the Russian ground crew is, “Miakoi posadki!” which means, “Soft landings!” It’s a sincere wish but also a joke, because they know very well that there won’t be anything soft about our landing when we return to Kazakhstan. Returning to Earth in the Shuttle was a fairly gentle experience, but Soyuz landings are famously rough: high g-forces, heavy vibration, rapid spinning and tumbling, all funneling down to a brutally jarring thud on the unforgiving Kazakh plains.

  It’s a wild ride, and everyone who’s ever taken it seems to have a story about it. My favorite is the one cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko tells about his return in 2008 with American astronaut Peggy Whitson and South Korean space flight participant Yi So-Yeon. When the Soyuz comes back to Earth, explosive bolts fire so the orbital and service modules are flung away to burn up in the atmosphere; only the re-entry capsule has an ablative shield to protect it from the heat. As Yuri and Peggy’s Soyuz started to come back into the atmosphere they heard the explosive bolts fire but, though they didn’t know it at the time, one of the modules didn’t actually separate from their capsule. It was still attached by one bolt and getting hotter by the second, because as the air got thicker, pressure and friction increased. The re-entry capsule, which wasn’t designed to return to Earth with a heavy, burning ball attached to it, became uncontrollable.

  As the Soyuz ripped through the sky in pure ballistic mode, the g-force climbed to nine—but it felt much worse than that to the crew because the capsule was tumbling so violently. Instead of just being crushed down in their seats, they were being banged around and squashed every which way. The crew couldn’t see what was causing the problem, but they knew something was terribly wrong and that the vehicle couldn’t survive that type of punishment much longer.

  Fortunately, the aerodynamic forces got so intense that the bolt snapped off, releasing the burning module. But it had hung on so long, at such high heat, that the top of the re-entry capsule was completely scorched. Yuri, who is unusually unflappable, even by cosmonaut standards, felt liquid dripping onto his legs and figured, “Oh, it’s molten metal; the Soyuz must be melting.” His response was to say nothing, move his legs a bit and continue fighting to control the vehicle (later he figured out that the drips were water from behind an oxygen panel where condensation normally turns to ice during landing). They were seconds away from death, literally.

  Then, thanks to its inherently good design, the vehicle stabilized, its parachute actually opened and the crew’s capsule subsequently smacked down, very hard but safely, on the ground. But they’d landed well short of the intended target, so nobody was there to meet them. No one on the ground even knew exactly where they were; the fireball of re-entry had disrupted communications for many minutes.

  Usually, after a crew has been in space for months, they’re too physically debilitated even to open the hatch, so a ground crew is standing by to extricate them. But somehow, after a few minutes, Yuri managed to open the hatch a crack—a superhuman feat given how weak and shaken up he was. Right away he smelled smoke. That was to be expected given the temperature of the vehicle, but when he cracked the hatch a little farther, what he saw was fire, everywhere. The Soyuz had landed in a grassy field and ignited it. By the time Yuri was able to get the hatch closed again, his hands were burning. All three of them wanted nothing more than to get out—they were nauseous and just feeling horrible, sitting in a cramped, now smoke-filled capsule—but the world was on fire. They were in no condition to try to jump out and make a run for it. So they waited. Nobody came.

  After a while Yuri decided to risk it and opened the hatch again. Good news: the fire had burned past the vehicle. Somehow he crawled out, and lo and behold, standing there were some locals, a few Kazakh men who’d been drawn by the smoke. They looked at him curiously, and then the only one who spoke any Russian asked, “Where did you come from?” Yuri was trying to e
xplain when the guy interrupted. “Well, what about your boat? Where did the boat come from?” He just couldn’t believe that this flat-bottomed craft had really come from space.

  In the meantime, Peggy and So-Yeon, whose back had been hurt pretty badly during landing, were working their way out of the capsule, and the guys helped them. At this point Yuri really wanted to get his radio equipment to try to call the rescue helicopters, but he didn’t have the strength to go back into the Soyuz and retrieve it. No problem. The smallest guy volunteered, helpfully climbing into the “boat” that had just fallen from the sky and grabbing anything he could lay his hands on. Yuri could see him cramming stuff into his pockets, but he was physically powerless to intervene.

  Yuri confronted him verbally, though, and while that was going on, the first helicopter came into sight and promptly radioed back to Mission Control that the capsule had been located but no parachute was visible. It had burned up in the fire, of course, but to everyone who heard that message, it could mean only one thing: the crew was dead. Mass devastation. Quickly followed by mass celebration after the copter landed and radioed back the good news: the crew had survived a ballistic landing, an inferno and some boat-loving bandits.