Top 30 Chris Hadfield Quotes

Our three big emergencies are fire, loss of pressurization or contaminated atmosphere. Any of those things in a spaceship are very deadly and time critical. Everybody’s trained, but I’m the commander of the ship, and it’s up to me to decide.

I’ve been lucky enough to fly to space twice.

There’s always constantly interesting things to do, and who knows, maybe I will be a good sculptor. I haven’t decided what I am going to do next, but I am not going to quit just because I did something interesting.

Now, as an astronaut, I have to bring a Sharpie with me everywhere – so I have a pen to sign autographs.

To be on my very first spacewalk, to be outside, and to have contamination in my suit to the point that I couldn’t see in either eye – that, I think, would cause some people to lose control.

And then finally, I’m the commander, so I am fundamentally responsible for the lives of the other people on board and the health and longevity of the space station. I need to bring six people back happy, healthy and feeling like they’ve had the best six months of their life.

When I did my spacewalks, it was during space station construction. So the shuttle was docked to the fledgling ISS at the time. So we would always stay tethered.

I watched the first people walk on the moon, and to me, it was just an obvious thing – I want to somehow turn myself into that. But the real question is, how do you deal with the danger of it and the fear that comes from it? How do you deal with fear versus danger?

The communities and countries best at using energy to optimize a microclimate for human life are also the ones whose people have the longest average lifespans. Canada, Sweden, and Iceland – places with inhospitable winter weather – are frontrunners in sustaining human health and life.

Almost everything worthwhile carries with it some sort of risk, whether it’s starting a new business, whether it’s leaving home, whether it’s getting married, or whether it’s flying in space.

I’ve been so lucky to have done two spacewalks. If you looked at your wristwatch, I was outside about 15 hours, which is about 10 times around the world. And, you know, there’s a whole time dilation, distortion thing.

My father was an airline pilot, so we travelled more spontaneously than a lot of families. On a Thursday, we could decide to go somewhere like Barbados the next day for a long weekend.

When we first get to space, we feel sick. Your body is really confused. You’re dizzy. Your lunch is floating around in your belly because you’re floating. What you see doesn’t match what you feel, and you want to throw up.

In the Soyuz, the little Russian capsule, you can actually hear the banging of the big shield, the big heat shield on the bottom, as it slowly erodes away from the heat and pieces of it fly off like sparks across your window, and it’s an interesting thing to ride through, you know.

The Soyuz craft weighs tons, and you’re lying on the floor of it on your back. But the Russians do tell you, remember, before you land, stop talking so you don’t bite your tongue off.

Airline food is cooked in an oven and then kept warm. Space station food is often cooked in an oven and then thermo-stabilised, irradiated or dehydrated and then stored for a year or two before you even get to it.

When you look out the window of a spaceship, you see entire countries, vast swaths of continents. One turn of the head covers what once took thousands of years to traverse at ground level.

I’ve had a chance to see something that is way outside everybody else’s frame of reference and gives a perspective that is very different from everyone else’s.

It was remarkable to see from space how predictable people are. Our homes and towns are almost all in places with moderate temperatures, and they generally have the same shape – a thinly occupied outer blob of suburb surrounding a densely populated core, all based around a ready source of water.

I was born in Sarnia, Ontario; a small town, it’s where oil was pretty much discovered in North America.

If you don’t like airline food, you’ll probably have the same impression of space station food. I would not fly to space for the food.

I’ve had a chance to fly a lot of different airplanes, but it was nothing like the shuttle ride.

Although simulators are great for building step-by-step knowledge of a procedure, the worst thing that can happen in a sim is that you get a bad grade on your performance.

Spacewalking trumps everything. Viscerally, it is a phenomenal place to be; to be able to glance right and see the world, glance left and see the universe, and realise for a moment that you’re holding on to your known existence with one hand. That’s the thing.

To be one of the world’s top space robotic arm operators is a necessary skill for an astronaut, but it doesn’t have much carry-over.

There are no wishy-washy astronauts. You don’t get up there by being uncaring and blase. And whatever gave you the sense of tenacity and purpose to get that far in life is absolutely reaffirmed and deepened by the experience itself.

And now for Return to Flight, I’m chief of robotics working in the astronaut office in Houston, as a Canadian.

I’ve raised three kids: my wife and I have three kids. I’ve observed through direct contact the adults they are now is partially the product of where they came from and what we did. With them growing up, but partially how they were wired at birth.

Think about what happens on Earth when you throw up. You throw up and you have a bag of something horrible and then you throw it away, but if I have this bag, what am I going to do with it? This bag is going to stay with me in space for months, so we want a really good barf bag.

You should have a fear of some things. That doesn’t mean it incapacitates you from your ability to figure out a way to deal with it.