Peter Barnes (journalist)

Transcription

[applause] Valerie Pringle: Thank you Ms. Tina. You can tell she's a dear friend from that kind introduction. Anyway this is indeed a thrill. There is no bigger hero in this country right now than the colonel, than Chris Hadfield and so here's this man, this superstar super nova and you are the lucky ones. As Tina said the website crashed so you are among the few who get to see him and his spare muscular frame as it was so nicely described in the Globe and Mail. [laughter] VP: Just the other day in the flesh. But obviously Chris captured our imaginations and our hearts from the International Space Station. What he did there was quite unprecedented and extraordinary and so now as you know and I'm sure you all have your copies, he's written his memoir. It's called "An Astronauts Guide to Life on Earth," that has some very practical and yet profound lessons which he imparts from his own life on setting goals on solving problems, taking advantage of opportunities. He was among the millions of people who gazed at the TV and up at the moon and back at the TV and up at the moon, when Neil Armstrong was there. But he made it happen for himself and I guess that story and many many others are what you want to hear from him. So that is what we will do. So I would love to welcome Colonel Chris Hadfield up to the stage. [applause] VP: Well you have to admit it is spare muscular and pretty impressive. [laughter] And enough of that, alright. Enough of that. I know people thinking of your story go, "Okay. Nine-year old Ontario farm boy wants to be an astronaut, inspired by what he's seeing". There isn't such a thing as a Canadian astronaut but there you are and here's your career. It's like a straight line, it's like a rocket ship. The way you describe yourself in your book is more square astronaut, round hole which makes it slightly more awkward than just the huge trajectory. How do you describe that? How did you become an astronaut in your mind? Chris Hadfield: I don't know of anybody's life who has been as linear as it may appear and mine sure wasn't linear at all. It was not only improbable of course, but at the time you mentioned probably it was impossible. There was no Canadian astronaut program, but things change and even at nine years old I recognized that even important things change. And if you needed evidence of it, to be nine years old... For the video camera, can I stand up or will it be a problem? I'm gonna stand up, okay. [laughter] [applause] CH: I had just been sitting all day. And even at nine years old to have such a stunning example. [laughter] Did somebody make a lewd comment in the back? [laughter] My fly is done up. I think we're okay. [laughter] Anyway... S?: Sorry. CH: So if you... As a nine-year-old child if you needed any clearer example that opportunity existed, there couldn't have been something more inspiring than the fact that when I walked outside from that cottage after having looked at what I'd seen on the television and looked up through the oak trees and saw the moon and thought that there's two guys sleeping on the moon right now. Not only did they land there and walk there, but they've gone back inside and they're sleeping. And this morning it was impossible to walk on the moon. To be there it just imbued everything with such a sense of portent and possibility that it was infectious and intoxicating for me. CH: And so I just thought well that's the coolest thing ever, how do I do that? What do I need to do? And I had no idea but it seemed obvious that they fly in space, so I need to learn to fly and they've been to university, so I need to go study something in university and I grew up in a farm so mechanical engineering sounded logical to me. And then just keep on studying and learning and trying to put together a bunch of skills so that if somebody in Canada at one point said, "Hey, we're looking for astronauts who can hold their hand up the highest," that hopefully I'd be that guy. That's really how I got there. VP: Were you driven? Were you compulsive? I know you say even as a kid it was sort of like everyday in every way I can be better. I have choices I can make and I can either... CH: No I wasn't compulsive. I was... VP: Your parents looking at you going, who are you? CH: No, we had five kids. My parents barely noticed me. [laughter] CH: They just... You know we'd have three people at the table or nine people at the table with a family of five kids, so you just never really knew. No, I didn't really know for sure. There was such a long shot. Maybe the key out of it is that it gave me something that is one of the best gifts you can give to a young person. That is a long-term dream, a long-term goal that helps them guide you in your decision making even unconsciously. If you know sort of that you want to get to that back corner of the room, then every little move you make is probably going to be trending that direction, even when you're not thinking about it. Because it just gives you a long term... By whatever, by 11 o'clock I've got to be in that corner. So you're just going to start drifting that way as conversation goes on. And I gave up on it several times. I took a year off school and went and bummed around Europe, tried to think about what I was doing. Exactly, exactly the same time as Guy Laliberte, actually. The two of us were over there at the same time. We're born within two days of each other. He founded Cirque du Soleil. And... VP: But at that point was he what, a circus performer or he was a bum too? CH: No, he was, he actually earned his money as a street performer in Europe. That's where he learned the trade. And I was hitchhiking around, playing guitar and trying to figure out what I wanted to do, for sure. And it was not a linear path. And in 1986, when Challenger exploded and killed the seven people on board, we were just in the process... We're pregnant with our third child, making no money, junior officer, living in northern Quebec, flying F18s, busy as could be, my wife just being driven to distraction being pregnant again, after having two little tiny kids, it was just "crazy time." And to have the Challenger blow up then, it looked like the whole thing was over. There's just no way. How am I ever gonna fly in space now? But amazingly enough, I did get selected as an astronaut in '92 and then was an astronaut for the last 21 years. So it was not linear. Life is not supposed to be linear. The whole idea of living is to follow your distractions. But it's really nice if you need to know that you have to be in that corner over there by about 11 PM because that helps. VP: One point about that is, what if you hadn't made it? Would you have felt "looser, disappointment, didn't achieve my one big dream." CH: Well, my dream was to walk on the moon, so... VP: Oh, looser. CH: I'm a looser! [laughter] VP: Well then! CH: I have not yet walked on the moon and I don't think I'm ever going to. And that's a trite answer, but there's some substance to it, in that I learnt a long time ago that it is the gratification deferred that kind of defines your whole life. And if you ever allow yourself to fall prey to allowing an event that you don't have much control over to define your sense of self worth, then you're setting yourself up for disaster. If, for example you said "I have to win the lottery or I'm a failure," You've defined yourself basically as a failure. You've completely cast away your own self determinism and you are setting yourself up to feel like a failure your whole life. Because that's something you don't actually have any control over. And for me, basically it was a lottery. I want to walk on the moon. What are the odds? Terrible! Worse than winning the lottery. CH: And so I recognized early on that, that's an end game but it's the life in between that actually is my life. And I better enjoy all of these little tickets that I'm buying all the way along. I better have a great time doing the stuff that I'm doing. And I would have loved to have been an engineer, or a pilot, or a test pilot or each of the steps because I really enjoyed all of them along the way. VP: There's a line I love from Darwin that says, "It's not the strongest of the species that survives nor the most intelligent, but the ones most adaptable to change." Was that you? [laughter] Not that you're not strong and smart, [laughter] I add. CH: Well I'm not... Obviously I'm not the smartest person in the world. That's one person. I'm not the dumbest, hopefully. That's one other person. Everybody else, we're all in the middle somewhere. VP: But you've got to change. CH: Same thing goes with strength. But yes, adaptation, and something to recognize I think that is important that I've learned as I've gotten older is deliberate change within yourself. Maybe even against what you think you ought to be. But recognizing that "I need to change" because of the circumstances that I'm in, and I need to make my expectations match this change. If I chafe against the reality that is my life or it's never gonna change then all I will end up with are chafe marks and I'm not gonna actually get through that. So recognize that, keep that dream in mind, but at the same time, if you want to spend your life with somebody else, you're gonna have to change yourself to be successful. If you want to live in a certain place or whatever, you have to make those changes to make that your fulfilled life, I think. And I think I agree with Darwin. [chuckle] VP: Good thing. One of the... Just before we get to the astronaut stuff, one of the things you ended up doing, and it was great good luck, was going to Top Gun school, which everybody sort of thinks about Tom Cruise. But is that what it's like there? You were the top US Navy pilot... CH: Yeah. VP: Of the year. CH: Yep. [laughter] And the US Air Force test pilot of the year. VP: Woo hoo! [laughter] CH: I loved the challenge of controlling risk. I don't like taking risks for no reason, actually. I would never bungee jump, I don't sky dive. I don't... VP: You're afraid of heights? CH: I'm afraid of heights. [laughter] I don't like... I don't see any point actually in taking a risk where I can't control the outcome because I don't find it satisfying. What's the point? If what you are risking is the same thing that a 75 kilograms sack of sugar could do [laughter] then why I'm I doing it, I could tie an elastic around a bag of sugar and throw it off a bridge and go, "Hey! Look at that, that took a lot of skill." It doesn't interest me. But if there were controls on that thing, if there was a way to make it do it better or if there was a way to make it get closer to some purpose, then I find a fascination with it. CH: And being a fighter pilot was an extremely esoteric and complex skill. And I intercepted Soviet bombers in Canadian air space, off the Coast in Newfoundland, eight different times, who were practising cruise missile launches on North America. That's what I did for living, and then after that I went on to be a test pilot, where to be able to... They were crashing F-18s in the fleet, and we convinced the US Navy that we could figure out why and fix it. And so, they gave us an airplane and I got to go up and start taking this, putting this aeroplane out of control, more wildly and wildly. CH: The worst time it fell about two miles before we got it back under control again, which is about three kilometres. And that was fascinating to be able to... [laughter] Why is that... I didn't even know that was funny? To be able to take this 15-ton vehicle and put it completely out of control, and then figure out a way to get it back under control. And then simplify that and change the flight control laws and use the best of my ability in the team I was with, to come up with the solution that then saved people's lives and saved airplanes and the fleet for decades to come, and generally improve the whole state. To me that is a direct wonderful application of everything that I love best, and that type of risk I think is worth taking. And that's also part of the reason that I went in the profession that I did after that. VP: So, was there really an ad in the paper that said astronauts wanted. Really I missed that want ad. But it was something that you happened to see or someone drew your attention? CH: Yeah. Late January of 1992, before the Internet, the Canadian space agency actually took out an ad in newspapers and magazines across the country. That said, "Wanted Astronauts". And right there next to accountants, whatever comes after that, athletes or whatever works in there. And it said you had to be a Canadian citizen, be able to pass a physical and have a university degree. And that's all it said. So, I said, "Hey, I'll apply." And which is a huge understatement, I had been trying to gather the skills and prepare myself 'cause I hoped someday that opportunity would come. And when I say there is luck involved, there is just so much to stand up to see, make eye contact in the back. It was so much luck involved for timing, if I had been 15 years older or 15 years younger at the timing, that wouldn't have worked out at all. But in my case I was at the zenith of my test piloting career, I just had a lot of success, and that ad appeared and so I applied with the 5329 other people. VP: But you said the challenge in your mind was how to stand out but not be a jerk? CH: So, picture that it's you that is trying to make yourself standout of a crowd. Didn't know how big the crowd was, but I knew a lot of people would send in their application. So, how do you put your best foot as far forward as possible without tripping over it? How do you not make yourself look like some sort of prima donna self-absorbed person, but at the same time try and not get lost in the shuffle of everybody else. And so, I just tried to dissected it. "Okay. The first step is to send in a resume, I'm gonna send in a resume that I will never regret". One that is on expensive paper and typed up beautifully and bound, and written in English and in French and every little thing I've ever done in my whole life it's gonna be in here somewhere. So, at least I can't say, "Well, they didn't choose because I didn't get a good resume together." And I just treated each stage that way. When they said, "The next stage is gonna be a psychiatric exam." It's like, "Well, how do you pass the psychiatric exam?" CH: So, I called a psychiatrist friend and said, "How do you pass a psychiatric exam? [laughter] No, really. It's like, "They are gonna give me some test. What are you looking for?" And so I talked to him. He said, "Nah, really... They are just gonna sort out people with real serious psychiatric problems and you'll probably be alright." But that's how I treated the whole thing, like a competition that I had been... Like competing in for my whole life and this was the time to make sure that nothing that I thought help qualify me would get messed. VP: And you've just retired now from the Canadian Space Agency. So, you've got all this benefit of knowledge, etcetera, but what is the right stuff. What were they looking for? And does it make a difference if you're a Canadian astronaut or American astronaut or a Russian astronaut? CH: Yeah. I've been involved in selection boards since both for the American and for the Canadian space agency, I think primarily we are looking for three things to be an astronaut. Number one is an advanced technical education, and it's not because we need to hire people with an advanced technical education. We need to hire people with a proven ability to learn complicated things at a high rate. So, how do you do that? And if you can show, someone already has a PhD in biomechanics then this person has the ability to learn complicated things at a high level. So that's one. And so, pretty much, every astronaut at least has a Master's degree in a technical field. The second is physical fitness. You got to fit in your space suit. And so... [laughter] VP: No problem for you. CH: Well. So you just keep your body in shape. And a lot of that's luck. If you're born with a heart murmur then just so be it. I'm not gonna be in the NBA, I'm not gonna be whatever, there's lots of things that I'm not born to do and I could have driven myself crazy by not doing those things, but I just decided, "Hey, I'm not born to those things. I'll do other things." And so in my particular case, I was lucky that my body was healthy enough to pass the physical standards. And then just keep your body in shape. So that's two. And then the third is a proven ability to make good decisions when the consequences matter. So how do you hire someone, because you don't just wanna hire super fit students, you want to hire people who make good decisions in the real world. CH: And so we tend to then choose people like emergency room physicians and test pilots 'cause the test pilots who make bad decisions are dead. [laughter] So it's easy. And, we choose, then that filters it down to about a few hundred people. And then they're looking for other skills: Languages, music, scuba diving, flying or whatever else that might help preselect you or to help filter you up. VP: You may laugh at this. This is from a speech I've given a number of times about people I interviewed who were like heroes to me, what I learned from them or whatever. But here is... I did, I wrote this and I believe this, probably why I got chosen to come and do this tonight. "Astronauts are a group of the most impressive human beings you'll ever meet. You can't imagine the skills, achievements and qualifications of Marc Garneau, Roberta Bondar, Chris Hadfield, Steve MacLean, Julie Payette." And the one person whose CV I happen to have, I guess, before I'd interview, was Julie. And I remember her saying that she speaks five languages, plays the piano, sang with the Chamber Choir of the Montreal Symphony, runs, scuba dives, has her commercial and jet pilot license, BA in electrical engineering, MA in computer engineering, certified deep sea suit diving suit operator, Chief Astronaut Canadian Space Agency, speaks all these languages. Astronauts are gods, Americans too. And I said I remember talking to John Glenn before he went up in space when he was 77... And the one thing I remember he said to me was, "Well, I wish I had stretched more." [laughter] I went and told my husband immediately and I've been stretching ever since. Were you there for that launch, weren't you? CH: I was, yeah. I was there for STS-77. It was funny at the time, we were all going... 'Cause he was sort of put on the astronaut office to fly when flights were fairly rare. And I thought Ed Lu in the office said the best thing he says, "I kinda hope we don't fly John Glenn just because of the politics involved. But if we do, boy, I sure hope I get to fly with him." And in retrospect, it was a really good decision. I have huge respect for John Glenn. He's one of the great human beings I think. He has a whole life of public service, a great individual. Has been together with this wife since they were infants, in fact, 'cause they grew up as neighbours, just a really respectable man. And he... On his second flight when he was 77, he just did an outstanding job as well as his first. VP: You talk about the life of an astronaut. People go, "Whoa, you're selected, that's it." It's like the greatest thing ever. And then essentially, what you do, it is fascinating, but it's training, training, doing jobs all over again, practising things and sort of a lot of rejection. "Sorry, you're not on that flight. Sorry, not on that flight." "Colonel, please, please, pick me, pick me. I wanna go up, let me go up, put me in, coach." And you're going, "Nope, sorry, not on that flight." You go over and man the microphone at CAPCOM. Is that your life? CH: Yes, in fact, and it's a life you need to decide to love. And you can... It's easy to love actually because your learning such a wide variety of things. You're surrounded by people that are smarter and more capable than you all the time. So you're challenging yourself constantly to try and get better at what you're doing. You're gaining skills along the way. Somewhere along the way, you've learnt to speak Russian and you now understand orbital mechanics and you can operate an IMAX camera and you can pilot a one-person submarine. And all those things are slowly happening... VP: Come in handy. CH: Yeah, comes in handy. All those things are accumulating. As you end, eventually, there's still possibly the chance that you're going to fly in space, but that's not the defining moment. You're also supporting every single launch that goes up. And I worked in mission control as the microphone, the voice of mission control for 25 shuttle flights. And I contributed directly to every single one of those flights and helped shape the decision-making and trained for those flights with the crews. So, one-fifth of the entire shuttle program, I had a really key job to make those things successful, the early stages of building the international station, the latter stages and mirror all of that. And there is just a great sense of accomplishment and pride even though your real job is to fly in space and you haven't even done it yet, there's still just a great satisfaction in being part of the office. You do, though, have to change your thinking. You have to redefine what is success for yourself. You can't say "Oh, another crew got selected that I'm not on," and go home and slam the doors and be frustrated. CH: You have to somehow through all that, recognize that the big organization that you're in is a good one and the part that you're doing is vital and make it satisfying for yourself. And right now the two Canadian astronauts David Saint-Jacques and Jeremy Hansen are doing just that and doing a magnificent job of it. VP: That's why you need all those psychological tests [chuckle] to be able to handle that, really. CH: Yeah. VP: In addition to other things. Now, I want to talk about the... Your three flights. So the first one you said it felt like your cheeks were cramping 'cause you just... "Man, I'm leaving the planet." CH: Yeah. VP: "Finally I get to go!" CH: It's a wonderful human experience to ride a rocket ship for the first time. And it's both physically, viscerally overpowering, as well as mentally and psychologically phenomenal. It's a wonderful day in the life, and it's something that is exquisitely practised over and over. I don't know what a parallel would be, but let's say someone asked you to take out an appendix, and you're not a doctor I hope, but ask you to take out an appendix, and at first you're like, "Take out an appendix, me? I don't even know, no idea what... I'm not sure where the append... Which side it's on." And... But then, if they had wonderful simulators and super people training you and you got to watch all the films and practise on simulators and become to the point where you are, even though you've never done it for real, you have tremendous skill at taking out appendixes. CH: And then in comes the patient and you actually grab that knife in your hand and for the very first time cut into the abdomen, but it's not scary because you have done this a thousand times already before. And when you do it, of course there's some trepidation with the first cut, but with that first cut, you realize, "I know what I'm doing. That's exactly like I expected it to be." You get down to the subcutaneous layers and go through the musculature and get down and find the inflamed appendix and take it out and sew things up. Then with every little stitch that you do on the way through, you feel a growing sense of, "I was made for this, I'm good at this, I've never done this before, but it's exhilarating, it's serving a purpose, it's saving this person's life and I have the skill to do this thing. CH: Riding a rocket ship is that, times a thousand. You've never done it before, it's extremely complicated, the risk is not to the person lying there but to yourself, but every little step you take, every decision you make is one that builds on itself. And that's why as I already said, after a while, during launch about 70 or 90 seconds in, my face hurts. I'm going, "Why does my face hurt?" I'm busy, I'm concentrating, I'm looking at the engines, I'm getting shaken, squished in my chair, but somewhere in the back of my brain somebody's yelling, "Your face hurts." I'm, "Why does my face hurt?" I realize it's 'cause I've got this great big smile on my face, and my cheeks are cramping up from the smile on my face like a Cheshire cat and I thought, "That's probably a good sign where I've been smiling so much at just what's going on right now that my cheeks are cramping up because it's just such an experience that is so complex, so demanding, and yet I'm doing it, and I'm doing it because I know how and therefore it's so rewarding." It's a great thing to have been a part of. VP: And you loved it. Did it feel like it was over in a blink and were you worried you'd never get another chance again? CH: My first flight was to go help build the Russian space station, Mir. It was an eight or nine-day flight. I got to be the first Canadian to use the Canadarm. We got to dock with the Russian space station Mir, I got to go be inside of Mir. And it's... I could still walk you through the whole flight. It was a hyper-extended time in my head because it was so carefully thought of and so complex and so special. And all the little vignettes of the amazing things that happened in the time up there, so... It seemed to go on forever. And I can still remember it more clearly than I can, say, I don't know, 1985. I can try and remember something from some year, I only get a couple of ideas, whereas that eight days I remember a lot of things. So, it did go by in a hurry, but an extremely exaggerated one, so not in a flash. CH: And I remember a friend of mine came back from her first flight and she said, not with a prideful thing, but just with a great satisfaction that, "No one can ever take that away now. I have had this magnificent human experience that I've been dreaming about since I was a little girl," she said, "and that's in me forever. And if I never fly in space again, I mean, so what? I have had this wonderful experience." And I think I felt exactly the same way. It wasn't a fearful that I might not do it again, it was more just a great joy that I'd been allowed to go do something so professionally and personally significant. VP: The second flight you got a spacewalk. CH: Yes. As seen on the new five-dollar bill, [laughter] which is weird, actually, to be alive with your picture on the five-dollar bill. [laughter] VP: Really, that is! CH: Yeah. VP: That's amazing! [applause] CH: But it's not just me, it's Dave Williams and Steve MacLean, three Canadian space walkers and there's a space walker on the five. But actually to me the five is great. It is such a great recognition of Canadian capability. It shows the robot arms right from the Canadarm and the shuttle, Canadarm2 and the space station. It is so technologically and culturally significant for Canada that we put it on our money. To me that's a great respect for what we do as a nation, for the technological prowess that we have. I think it's a wonderful thing to see. But the actual experience, I was Canada's first space walker in 2001 and that, everything pales in comparison to going outside on a space walk. VP: Okay, tell the story in the short form version. Tell the story of that walk 'cause it's a great story. "Square Astronaut, Round Hole", blind drill. CH: When you pull yourself out into the universe, it's really physical. You're inside this tiny little airlock and it's just big enough for two people bumping into each other wearing our big bulky Michelin Man suits. And you turn the big crank on the hatch, you pull it up and it locks up into place through a 90-degree pivot. And then you push open the thermal cover that's attached by Velcro, it sort of pops open. And it doesn't pop open logically because there's no air to stop it. It's weird how things behave in weightlessness and with no air resistance, but finally this thing pops open and you pull yourself out. And the guys who design spaceships recognize that if you're building a vessel that's pressurized, you want your hatches to be round because that's the most efficient shape to seal. But the guys who design spacesuits said, "Well, we need to give him a backpack." And everybody has seen a backpack, they're square. So they built this lovely big square backpack and they didn't talk to each other. [laughter] CH: And so it's kind of a funny cliche in the book of "Square Astronaut, Round hole" but that's the truth. You have to, while wearing this little one-person spaceship that is your space suit. It keeps you alive, it's completely separate from the space station. Everything you need to stay alive is in this suit, for about 10 hours: Oxygen, carbon dioxide removal, water, cooling, electrics... Everything. And it's square, and it just fits through this round hole. And you're blind because you're wearing a big helmet so you can just see a little part of it. So you have to kind of... [laughter] Imagine, for all the women in the crowd, if your baby had been square. [laughter] Sorry. Anyway... VP: I had one that was almost like that. They had to break his shoulders and collar bones. CH: I was a breach birth, I almost killed my mom. My apologies. Anyway... [laughter] So you have to very carefully un-thread yourself and work your way out and not get yourself all tangled up. But finally, you pull yourself out into the universe and it is... If you can imagine, if you had to go the bath and you went to the back of the room and you're kind of walking down the hallway there and you turn the corner, you open these, you step into the bathroom and you're standing on the edge of Mount Everest when you close the door. CH: You're like, "How did I get from the hallway here to the edge of Mount Everest in one step? How can that even have happened?" And it's like that. Where you were inside this little cocoon and now you're in the universe alone, in between, and people say, "With the world below you, now the world is somewhere else and the universe is below you and around you. You're in the universe with the world." It's a whole different feeling and perceptive to looking up at the night sky, even on a clear night. Because you're immersed it in and you get your huge sense of aloneness, of one tiny entity in the immensity of it. And the universe isn't just a darkness, it's a palpable textured full emptiness, a full blackness like a velvet, you can almost touch it because it's just got so much stuff in it that is right at the edge of your perception and that's on your left and the world's over here, and you're in the middle holding on with one hand. It's an amazing place to be. A real perspective builder. VP: Just to ask sort of a dumb question. Is it at all like that movie "Gravity"? [laughter] CH: Is it like "Gravity"? I read Sandra Bullock's description of "Gravity" today. She said the movie was intended to be like a ride at the fair, like a fun amusement ride. She said the movie was intended to be an amusement ride. And it really is, it's a really good amusement ride. And the visuals in it are the best of any movie ever made. If you wanna see what I'm talking about, of what the immensity and the three-dimensional freedom, and the world not being below you and the station being a thing in between the station and the universe. Yeah, those visuals are better than ever. But it's still, of course, like any imagery pales in comparison to the experience itself. And what I was talking about was when I was outside on my first space walk, I was blinded by contamination in the suit. And first, my left eye suddenly went blind, which was not what I was expecting to happen. And I couldn't clear it, couldn't do anything with it, I didn't know why it was contaminated. Couldn't rub it, of course, because I got a helmet on. Although, my hand went up, went "doink" off the... [laughter] I was thinking, boy I'm glad I'm on a space walk, nobody saw me do that. I was... [laughter] CH: Anyway, my eye just teared up and without gravity tears don't fall so you get just a bigger and bigger tear on your eye of contaminated stuff unfortunately, until it gets so big that, and you're working away there on one eye and not telling anybody till suddenly it crosses the bridge of your nose like a little dam bursting and goes into your other eye. And then you're blind in both your eyes which happened to me about 10 minutes later or five minutes later, and then... VP: And you got to say, "Houston we have a problem"? CH: Yeah. Then you gotta call Houston and say, "Sorry Houston, I have a problem I can't un-blind," which is just what Houston wants to hear. [laughter] And so, they thought worst case scenario and they had me open the purge on my spacesuit to try to get, whatever the contamination was out of the suite. Then, I'm not only blind, but now I'm purging the oxygen out of my suit. Alone, on my first space walk, blind, listening to "ssss" [laughter] on my oxygen hissing out into the universe, blinking like crazy, not seeing a thing, trying to get my eyes to work, until after about a half hour. I could just start to see shapes again, I had teared enough that it had diluted the contaminant, that I could see again, a little bit. CH: Then, I called Houston and said, "Hey, I think I can see again, sort of," and they said, "Okay. Shut off the purge valve, close the purge valve, and let me get back to work." It turned out to be just the defog that was on our visor, was a mix of oils, and soaps, and stuff. It had been picked up by some loose water, it was sort of like squirting oil and dish soap into your eye, [laughter] which, don't try it, if you, you know... [laughter] But ever since then we've used Johnson No More Tears on our visors, which you think would have been a good choice in the first place. [laughter] VP: Okay. I've got my eye on my clock, 'cause we have to talk about your last mission. Which was spectacular. You say transformed you, you transformed it, it was just perfect. You were the perfect commander, it did sort of lift you to another level. I think you felt so comfortable and your use of social media and all... Whatever happened was just alchemy, and really, probably, the greatest thing you could have ever done. CH: That's really kind of you to say. I felt so lucky at this stage of my life to be asked to do that job 'cause I've sort of been getting ready for it since I was nine. And when I went to air cadet camp at 14 years old, and they taught... VP: He had a moustache then, by the way. CH: Yeah. [laughter] CH: When I went to air cadet camp at 14 years old and they taught me about leadership. And leadership is the art of influencing human behaviour to accomplish a mission in the manner desired by the leader, which was driven into my head when I was 14 years old. Or, the time that I was working on my dad's farm and fixing machinery by myself back at the back of the farm when something broke and had to solve it myself. Or, the flying skills I learned, or all the things I learned on my previous flights, and learned to speak Russian, and learned to fly a Russian spaceship. To then be asked and trusted in my early 50s to go command a world spaceship, to me, was a tremendous privilege and a really lucky break. And I resolved to make the absolute most of it. I thought, I'll sleep when I get back, I'm gonna try and be productive up there. I'm not gonna watch movies and things while I'm on the space station, I'm gonna do things. And we worked really hard, we set records for the amount of science done, number of hours of science, number of experiments completed. We set records for utilization of using the space station to invent how to build spaceships, of testing all the equipment on board. And the crew and I just had a great time up there doing all sorts of different things. VP: But it was the communication really, don't you think that transformed it? CH: The Canadian Space Agency started working on this with me years ago, did wonderful work. They hired a videographer, we made almost 100 videos in the 140 or whatever days that I was up there. Almost a 100 videos, some of which, those videos have been seen tens of millions of times. Some of them really mundane, a can of peanuts floating around. Some of them, just wringing out a cloth. Some of them, talking about the science of and the medical changes, a whole suite of educational and fun and entertaining videos. Then, everything else, the photography, and the music, and just the whole life experience that is new to us. We have left Earth, we aren't just sending out little probes, but some of us have left Earth. We've set up a habitat, we've set up an outpost off the planet, 13 years ago. And we're just starting to figure out what it means to us, not only technologically, but culturally and what perspective it brings back to us. And I just wanted to attack that full force and to include as many people as possible, using every single tool that was available to share the richness of this new human experience. VP: You couldn't have dreamed really that it would be as successful as it was, and especially the music and how that... People couldn't get enough. CH: Here's a nice little story, if we have just a moment. A lady at the Canadian Space Agency, named Carole Duval, her daughter was in a program called Music Monday. And it's run by a charity across Canada called Coalition for Music Education. And Carole at the Canadian Space Agency said, "Hey, this might be a nice project to do. Well Chris is a musician. I've heard him play on the beach down in Florida, one of Julie's launches, maybe this would be a nice project." She suggested it. The Canadian Space Agency picked up the ball, talked to this charity, they started working together. They asked me what artist I'd like to work with to write a song. They gave me a list of guys, I had known Ed Robertson, from the Barenaked Ladies from years before. I said, "Hey, maybe Ed would like to write a song with me." The two of us wrote a song together. We really liked the song, and then we recorded a version of it from orbit, with a band in town called The Wexford Gleeks, from the Wexford School, which is just beautiful. [applause] CH: And Ed, that day he was so funny. He was driving to the CBC studio to record that song, and he was like, "I've got a million things to do. How did I get roped into this project? Gah! We wrote this song months ago. What am I doing?" He got to the studio with the back-lit of stars and all of those students, those bright faced, talented, artistic students there, and went "I'm an idiot! This is the best thing ever." And sang that song, which just came out magnificently, and then it was learned by students right across Canada and on the sixth of May, I was up on the space station and tied in live to schools right across the country, and I played a song that Ed and I wrote about exploration and self betterment and looking at Canada from space and about the opportunities that exist live with 700,000 Canadian students who all sang that song at the same moment. [applause] 42:55 CH: And to me, that's what music is all about. None of us are the best musician in the world. None of us are the worst musician in the world. We're all just musicians of varying abilities and to be able to use music as a common language, to share in the joy of something magnificent is to me the definition of art, and to be able to be in that process and to be able to do it from the space station was just, I think, maybe the highlight of the whole five months for me up there, and I hear echoes all the time. Little six-year-old kids come up to me and blare that song at me at the top of their lungs, and people keep sending me videos of an entire grade three class sitting out in their garden with me on like the Wizard of Oz and a big head screen [laughter] with them all singing that song along. Some of them kicking the grass and punching each other, [laughter] but everybody singing that song with me out there, it's just... It was such a wonderful project to be part of, and amongst all of the science and the work and the straight arrow that is your life, it's really nice to appreciate the art. VP: Well, and Space Oddity, that was a fun thing you did with your son. That was Evan really, wasn't it? CH: Yeah, Space Oddity. I've never sang that song before in my life. It's like who covers Bowie? Nobody covers Bowie! [laughter] And Space Oddity? It's a song about a depressed astronaut dying in space. [laughter] But I'm not gonna sing that song, but Evan... I made it... I played it. My son said, "You gotta do it. Everybody wants you. You're not doing it for you. You're doing it for everybody else. Do it. Trust me." And I said, "Well, if you rewrite the words so that the astronaut doesn't die then I'll... " So, he did. CH: He wrote some really good up to date lyrics. I recorded a version of it, and I loved how my voice sounded, and I think it's a real reflection of the genius of Bowie is that just by the very act... I just sang karaoke and recorded myself in a garage band on an iPad with him singing in my ear with Bowie in one ear. But when I just played back just my a cappella voice, it was resonant of place. It was imbued with a feeling of being up there, which I hadn't expected to hear in my own voice. Somehow his words were prescient enough to give the song a feeling that I wasn't expecting, and then Emm Gryner who's a great musician friend of mine, she put the piano piece underneath, and a friend of hers named Joe Corcoran and then had this really killer audio version of it, and Evan said... He weighed in, my son, Evan, said "Hey, Dad. It's gotta be video. You're in space. It has to be video." So, I'm like "Ah! I'm busy, but okay." [laughter] So, one Saturday afternoon, I floated around singing myself... Singing. VP: Ground control. CH: Yeah, yeah. Singing Oddity to myself over and over and just thinking "I don't know. See how this works." And sent all that video to the Canadian Space Agency. They cleared it all, edited it all. Sent it to Evan. He and a buddy named Andrew Tidby did the editing over a six or seven-day period and on the day before we came home, they released it to the world. VP: How many hits? CH: Well, just on the one website where Evan released it, it's almost 20 million hits, and if you count all the other sites, it's in the... Double that, and if you count rebroadcast 'cause it's played all over the place all the time. It's hundreds of millions of times that little father-son project has been played. So, it's fun. It's nice. But it also shows that this human creation, this human exploration surpasses just being a laboratory. It's not just a place that we're doing experiments. It is a new, interesting extension of humanity itself and of culture and of opportunity, and it's reflected back in the things that we can do there that we couldn't do anywhere else. So, I'm really pleased how it turned out. VP: Wanted to ask as I look at Tina three things to sort of just cover of little bit. CH: You stopped looking at Tina when you said three. VP: Yeah. [laughter] One, partly you just talked about with you son, Evan, you're... I'd say interesting, honest, pretty even a little harsh on yourself in your book, talking about family and how amazing... You give your wife obviously huge credit, dedicate it to her, for sort of calling you sometimes on... "It's not all about you, honey, and it's a team thing." And about your kids going, "Well, who are you? You're not home." Or even the one time you sort of ended up besting one of your sons before you thought, "What a jerk am I?" CH: Yeah, the balance I think for everybody here is trying to raise kids or even just exist in a relationship, you never get the balance right, and that one day you get the balance right, the next day every thing's changed again. And the relationships always go in stages, and some stages last six months and some stages last about a minute and a half it seems like, but it constantly goes in stages. And when you choose a job that takes you away a lot or that even if doesn't physically take you away, that mentally takes you away a lot then... And I'm not, no better at this than anybody, but I found myself when I was driving to work, I'd think about work. I think about the jobs. "Okay, what do I need to get done today? What do I focus on? How do I get ready for this SIM? What am I gonna be doing?" CH: It occurred to be part way through that I ought to do the same thing on the way home. And say, "Okay, I'm driving home. Okay. What do I wanna get done tonight? How do I wanna make things happen? How do I wanna change myself? What objectives, what would be a really good night for everybody in the family on the way home, if we could do that?" And so just kind of treat it all to pay attention to it and try not to mess it up. But also, and it's something else I put in the book which is aimed to be a zero, that didn't occur to me till quite a bit later in life. But I would come back early in our relationship from being away for two weeks and come striding back into the house as the pater familias and pretty confident that I... VP: Top gun. CH: Yeah, right, Top gun. And that I knew what was good and pretty confident that I was a plus one. I'm a positive influence on this family. And within seconds everybody in my family knew for sure that I was a minus one [laughter] because they had been existing for weeks without me, and they weren't existing without me. They of course had developed an entire way of working with each other and functionally and doing things well that excluded me. And if I come bursting back in thinking that somehow I'm the important part of all this, then I don't have a hope. I'm just a big jerk that just stumbled in and is breaking furniture and China. CH: And so I just thought a long time ago, "Let me just try and aim for zero when I come back into the family. And if I can possibly just be a zero for a while and have a look around, actually notice what the new changes are, where the relationship is, what the influences are. And then once I've given myself real time to figure out what's going on, then maybe I'll try and tentatively do some things that a plus one might do. And then maybe I'll actually be one, and at least then hopefully I'll break even and I won't be a minus one." And sometimes I was a big glaring, bright, blinking minus one, and everybody is, but the best you can do I think is recognize it and try. VP: Just wanted with the last few minutes or so, [chuckle] Tina, talk about re-entry. Part of it is this book which is really a good fun read. Hope you get a chance to read and hope you get it signed. Really interesting. Obviously you didn't write it just since you got back, it doesn't seem possible, but so many of the lessons and things that you've pulled together. But how do you figure out dealing with fame? Finding things that give you purpose and value and moving forward to your... A young guy with a lean muscular frame, where do you go? [laughter] What do you do? CH: It was spare. VP: Spare. CH: Spare. [laughter] VP: You actually... You will have to think about that and it will evolve, but... CH: Part of it is that people think that I just hit a real peak in my life, that like people say, "Oh, how are you ever gonna beat that? You commanded a spaceship, how you ever gonna beat that?" And it never occurred to me to beat that. That I don't view that as something that I wanna beat. I wasn't trying to beat anything, I was just trying to do that job really well and really be content with the results of it. And on New Year's day 2000, when there was supposed to be the Y2K thing, I was building kitchen cupboards down in Texas 'cause we'd had a flood and our place had been wrecked. So, I was building kitchen cupboards. They were IKEA cupboards not too complicated, but I was putting them up. CH: And I spent the entire day watching the whole world celebrate the new millennium and... But I was taking great satisfaction in putting up the racks and then one by one hanging cupboards. And it was a really, really satisfying day for me. I had a task to do, it took some complexity, had to solve some problems, it was gonna accomplish something that I was proud of that was good for the family. And by the end of the day, hopefully we'd have a kitchen that worked. And so, it was for me a really, really good day. And by the end of that day, the entire world had celebrated the turn of the millennium. We hadn't all died of Y2K virus and we had a complete set of kitchen cupboards. And to me that was a great day. That was a peak in my life. That was a really successful and fun day of my life. And I managed to find stuff to do after that. [laughter] CH: I didn't go, "Huh, god, I'll never had another turn of the millennium again." [laughter] And "Unless we have another hurricane these cupboards are here to stay. You know, what am I gonna do." It's an attitude thing, right? How do you define your own success? Let me just say one thing, and that is about bucket list. So many people talk about, "Oh, that's on my bucket list. Oh, yeah gotta check that off my bucket list." I don't like the idea. To me by definition, if you are carrying around a virtual bucket that is empty, or partially empty you're just disappointing yourself all the time. You look in your bucket and you go, "Is that all I got on my bucket? Is that all I've done with my life? Is these... " I went to Cancun, I met... I don't know Robert Downey, Jr., and I... Whatever. I saw the Empire State building. That's it, that's my whole life. How disappointing." CH: And everybody does that to them self it seems. They've got this bucket list that they're worried about, that somehow becomes their measure of accomplishment, or self worth. What a terrible thing to do to yourself, and that's completely optional. Why not instead dump out your bucket at night, every night, wake up in the morning and go. "Okay, hey I woke up on time, 'chink' first thing on my bucket. Alright." [laughter] And, than you shave and you do a really nice job going, and I got that new lather shaving cream that has a nice smell to it. "Yay, A little more in my bucket," and you have Cheerios for breakfast, just like "whoo. I had Cheerios, I love Cheerios." CH: And by lunchtime your bucket is almost full, because the sun came out and you were nice to or someone was nice to you on the drive to work. And by the end of the day, your bucket is full, because you noticed all the great stuff that happened to you. And there's bad stuff happens everyday, but there is great stuff happens every single day. And you can completely fill up your bucket every single day and that is a much nicer way to go through life. And then you aren't going, "well remember that thing happened in 1978 that was kinda the zenith of my whole life. My high school prom and it's all been downhill ever since." [laughter] CH: That's totally up to you how you view it and I view the space flight as the same thing. That was a really good day. My bucket was really full the day I came back from space, but so what. It was just a wonderful thing that happened in the midst of all the things that are happening in life. And I'm really looking froward to tomorrow because there's all kinds of new stuff going on, and I'm looking for new challenges. [applause]