ss, with color photos of every senate and house member and bio and twitter handles. also, a foldout map of congressional hill, a look at committees, the president's cabinet, and governors. order your copy today. it is $13.95 through the c-span store at c-span.org. ♪ >> this week on "q&a," our guest is former canadian astronaut chris hadfield, author of “an astronaut's guide to life on earth.” he talks about his missions in space, his time as commander of the international space station, and his use of video to inform the public about what life in space is like and experiments going on there. we start our program with a video that launched him in the public eye. [video clip]

♪ [david bowie's “space oddity” playing] >> ♪ ground control to major tom, ground control to major tom, lock your soyuz hatch and put your helmet on, ground control to major tom, commencing countdown engines on, detach

from station and may god's love be with you ♪ brian: chris hadfield, 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. so i grabbed the camera and i floated around inside the space station, just sang the song a couple of times. my son edited on the ground. thinking, what would make an interesting backdrop? 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 on youtube? 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. we were coming home to land on earth on monday. i had no idea, i was getting ready. 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. outstanding, guy! and, that was my welcome back to earth not even 24 hours later that i had the idea. just a small father-son music project had reached all the way to the plains of kazakhstan.

in under one day. it was pretty amazing. brian: what year did you do it? col. hadfield: it was the last few days i was on the spaceship. so it was a couple years ago 2013. , brian: let's 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 canadian-u.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 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 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. and then living on board the space station for five months. brian: what is the difference between a russian astronaut and a canadian astronaut or american astronaut? col. hadfield: very little. you take all 7 billion of us and you set some really tight requirements and constrictions and then you filter a whole bunch of people that do apply and you choose a teeny tiny representative sample of humanity. and that's filter whether it is , japanese, chinese, european, canadian american it tends to

, spit out the same sort of person. the language is different. if you are russian, it is a cosmonaut. if you are french, it is a --, 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 whole tone of it and white space agencies should look like. and, they have a lot of similarities. it is a complex thing that 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 pride. and pride of accomplishment for

something new for humanity. there is a lot of similarities sothere is a lot of similarities, between the two. the russians have put a lot of effort into long-term 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. so, it is kind of a nice balance of expertise. so having worked for both, i was nasa's 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 and the u.n., and everywhere i spoke. and 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. and so i crammed a lot in. ,and the 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, “an astronauts guide to life on earth.” the paperback is out in 2015. we are going to another video, it will be self-explanatory. and then i will get you to fill in the blanks. [video clip] col. hadfield: we take our asparagus and hydrate it. you can see what it is like to eat asparagus in space. ♪

this is where i am going to rehydrate the asparagus. right here on the ceiling. ♪ you don't 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. so the food is dehydrated. because it saves weight getting up to space. you would think rehydrated asparagus would be disappointing to eat. especially when you are just squirting hot water into it. but actually, some fruits and vegetables do not, but 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. it tastes about like it looks. 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. and, i just thought i'm 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. so, i had sort of watchtower professionals do it. you need the shot that shows the scene, does the introduction then an action, then a close-up. when you are finished, try to bring it all together. it is not complicated. i would just make 15 little 10 or 15 second clip 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 turned all those into a two-minute youtube video and fired it off to the world within a day. and you would not believe the letters and e-mails and school teachers and kids and everybody that watch to those as part of environment classes.

the use them for so many different purposes. as well as just straight insight, entertainment. i am really pleased that i recorded daily life on a space ship. 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 40 years this year. we have three kids, all around 30ish. they have all moved away, of course. one lives in china, one lives in chicago, one lives in toronto. my wife and i have lived in california, maryland, houston, and russia for the last 26 years, but we recently moved back to toronto. so now we are in toronto and 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. so there's book tour's.

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? which is sort of an aimless question. it is sort of like saying, what is it like on earth? well, it is kind of a big question, actually. 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?

whereas an adult will say, so, what is it like in space? 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. so those become external to you. your level of curiosity drops way out will stop whereas, if 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 their life. they become very engaged. and to me that his delight full because -- and, to me that is delightful because 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.

like, it is a little organization. just a few hundred people. but, it it has a lot to paying for the canadian. -- 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. we 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. [laughter] [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 -- is purer than more of the water you drink at home. that makes the international space station its own self-contained 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 it and they were big.

and all the water on earth passed through a dinosaur's kidneys at some point. assuming all of the dinosaurs had kidneys, and i assume they did. the real question is, do you have a good purification system? whenever you flush a toilet on ortho or wherever, obviously it does not magically disappear. it goes into a process to purify it. maybe it will turn into rainwater. the difference on a spaceship is you know who's urine it was. it is different if it is a little more personal. the process is much closer and closed. but 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 of water on a spaceship if it is a long voyage.

we will have to find a way to even improve 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 ever going to make the ability 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. so, coming up on 15 years. when we look to act 100 years from now and we say, when was it we left earth, it was november of 2000. that was our first permanent step away from home. 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. so even know it, you know square , footage does not mean anything. it is a three-dimensional environment. in this studio, we could be in this corner or that corner. you can take advantage of volume a lot better. may be as a scale, it is like a couple big airliners with a door in between. there is only six people on board. so if you think of a couple big , airliners and only six people, and you can use the whole internet volume you can go half , a day without seeing another person. it is relatively large. 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 actually this electronic screen with a red line that tells you what you are supposed to be doing every five minutes for six-month that you -- for the whole six months 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 -- music video, 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. once in a while i would need a little cat nap to catch up. 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, basic surgery, just in case, burn work, just in case someone got badly hurt. and so, our medical team has stopped the space station with -- stock the space station -- stocked the space station.

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 suni williams. col. hadfield: she is an incredible person. brian: you can see her on the screen right there. [video clip] suni: you do not have the sensation of lying 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 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. so it really does not matter. 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 that has trained together for a long time. 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.

but when you are in there, it has little saloon doors that swing closed and have a little magnet holding them. there is a nice fan so you do not suffocate during the night. it has a little light you can turn on and off. it just gives you a little place that is your own. it does not need to be much. but for the long-term psychological health of the crew, it is nice to have a little introspective location. brian: who owns the space lab? col. hadfield: the space station 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. but the predominant, overall -- 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 act of 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 over the last 20 years. 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 and each space shuttle limits the size of that particular keys. -- particular piece. 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. canada has the big robot arm on top. 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 in the station on any given day. often, you will be working a

suite of experiments and may spend 80% of your week in the japanese laboratory because that is where your experiments are but you could be anywhere else. brian: here is chris hadfield trying to cry in space. [video clip] col. hadfield: here is a common question -- can you cry in space? do tears were? -- do tears work? i'm going to take some water put it in my eye. i am going to take some water it and put it in my eye just as if i started crying, my eyes are full of tears will stop but you can see, it just forms a ball on my eye. 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 gets into your other eye or evaporates or maybe spreads over your cheek or you grab a towel and dry it up. 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 on board. number one because it is a limited resource and you recognize help us as 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 back into our evaporate or and 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. but if water can gloat as a ball

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. water conducts electricity, so we are extremely careful with straight water because the space station is solar powered, big electric current. enough current to kill us. 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. i mean 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. it is in extremely heavily sought or pursued job i 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 university degrees get advanced experience, keep your body in shape learn to scuba dive, speak other languages. they get this astronaut-friendly resume or cv. then one of the space agencies puts out an ad, wanted astronauts. it used to be just in the newspapers, now it is on the internet will stop wanted: astronauts. thousands and thousands of people apply, then it is an agonizing iterative 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. an interview 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 hour-long panel interview. and the medical is the biggest discriminator. most people get disqualified medically just because we want a physically healthy body as we can get. in my case, when they stuck that one thad out 332,000 -- and 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? 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 decision-making 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 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 wants a frightened astronaut. it sounds trite, but frightened often means you are liable to make a bad decision, because fear and animal reaction is what you are counting on, so we tried to never let ourselves be in a position where we don't know what we are doing. it sounds may be cocky, too, but it is not, and that defines the

life 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 am 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 dumb 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 big enough 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 riding inside "the wizard of oz," you know, glenda's delicate, little bubble in the universe, and it kind of reminded me of the fragility.

brian: you have 21 years as an astronaut, and neil armstrong had eight years. there is a great deal of difference between you two. i want to ask you about your ability to communicate. neil armstrong basically -- 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. they might have crashed. someone might 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 going to do my best to share it. i am literally and 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 equipment, 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 self-perpetuating, and i think an important part of the job. brian: here is another public appearance of yours on the conan o'brien show. let's take a listen.

[video clip] chris hadfield: there is not a washing machine or water, so we wear our clothing until it wears out. and then we throw 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. you guys on the space station are throwing your dirty underwear out the window, and it is raining down on us? [laughter] [applause] 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 motes of dust falling delicately down through the sunbeams? conan: yes. chris hadfield: that is my

underwear. [laughter] 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. when you and i are sitting here right now, 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. it is just normal that is why we , change them on a regular basis. when you are weightless, they are basically just hanging next to you all of the time. they seldom even touch your skin, so imagine if you took your underwear, and you sort of 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 their own block of 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 bags, and in their there are small, medium, and large underwear, and there are white socks and black socks, and you treat it as a communal 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 europe and 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, 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 suni williams. she is going to deal with one of the more i then, ask questions. i will just let her explain it. suni williams: this serves two functions, number two, right here. i will show you.

you can see it is any mall, so you have to have pretty good aim and be ready for things to 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 aim correct lady, 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. when you turn on the toilet, there is a great big whining noise because of course, as suni 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. if they do not ask, it is just because they felt a sense of decorum do not ask. but it is the most-asked question. 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. how do you keep something something some safety tech mission 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 something will like suni just

showed you how to use the toilet, and the toilet breaks on a regular basis, 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 how everything works and how to rebuild every single thing on or the whole spaceship. 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: i recently found an old e-mail 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. in my spare time, making notes in other places. saying hey 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. you know it it was a team of people working with in agent and a team of writers 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 service.

or sermon. 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 to make sure, just like everything else in my life, i do not feel like i want to make all of the mistakes myself. i want to get advice from other people will stop 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: yes, so actually now 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 -- fly a soyuz station. to get up there. chris hadfield: yes, because since expedition one, 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 lie itself home. in so -- it it does not fly itself home. and so you have to be qualified

as a soyuz crew member to live on the eighth nation. -- the space station. the shuttle was a huge delivery vehicle, and it was built upon 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 from spacex, 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 up there right now i do not know how you measure significance but there is in american and a russian who have been up there or a year. -- 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. -- to fly a russian spaceship. 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 the russian spaceship 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 essentially. 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 through the military academy 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. but formally i have a masters in , aerospace systems science. brian: what are you qualified to fly? chris hadfield: i have flown about 100, it is a big list. most of them are american. lots. everything from little one-person gliders through to

747, the space shuttle, even though i do not fly it myself. the one i flew the most was an f-18, ironically intercepting soviet planes. but i have flown a lot of other airplanes also will stop brian: here you are, i want to talk about how you were able to talk to someone like william shatner and how you communicated with earth. let's watch the video. [video clip] ♪ chris hadfield: mr. shatner, this is mission control, houston.

please call station for a voice check. i am calling mr. shatner, do you hear me? william shatner: i am calling. this is shatner. do you hear me? [whistle] chris hadfield: this is the space research shuttle, and, yes, i hear you loud and clear. this chris hadfield. william shatner: chris, i hear you loud and clear. observing as a scientist, a part of it, removed from it, or are you able to to see the unifying parts of it so you become one with the universe? chris hadfield: you never saw it 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 - [end video clip] brian: when you turn upside down like that, what does it feel like? chris hadfield: there is no up or down. i do it deliberately when i am on camera because it looks so different. 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 -- year -- ear becomes completely driven by what it sees, not by what it senses, so it does not care. there is no up or down. you can 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

want, but it is essentially 17,500 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. our world is 10 like a whole a who. -- our world is tipped like a hula hoop, 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 three-dimensional 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. and north is always up. it is new wants -- nuanced 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. but my son was insistent, who was taking care of a lot of these social media for me. i did a version of it and 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 like, i am busy a

peer and as i said that saturday i went ahead and made a video and put the whole thing together. it was a father-son project, and it was done sort of in response to requests from all around the world. brian: and he edited it back on earth? chris hadfield: he and a friend took all that 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 astronaut's guide to life on earth, colonel chris hadfield let's close by watching more of space oddity. happily. ♪ ♪

>> ♪ this is ground control to major tom you've really made it the grade and the papers want to know whose shirt you where but it is time to guide the capsule if you dare this is major tom to ground control i have left forevermore and i am floating in a most peculiar way and the clouds looked very different today for here am i sitting in a 10 can far above the world

planet earth is blue and there's nothing left to do ♪ >> for free transcript or to give us comments, visit us at q&a.org.

programs are available as podcasts as well. >> here are some of the other q&a programs you may like if you enjoyed this interview. nasa administrator charles bolden on his life and career. major general marsha anderson, highest-ranking african-american in the history of the u.s. army. dr. francis jensen, neuroscientist and author of the book "the teenage brain." you can find all of these at c-span.org. >> monday night on "the communicators," members of congress on collection of phone records and net neutrality.