they use it for so many different purposes as well as just straight insight entertainment. i'm really pleased that i recorded the daily life on a space show. >> what are you doing today not this very day but if you're retired and how big is your family and where do you live? >> my wife and i have been together 40 years this year. we have three kids all around 30ish. and but they've all moved away of course. one lives in china, one in chicago, one in toronto. and my wife and i lived in california, maryland houston, and russia for the last 26 years but we recently moved back to toronto. now we're in toronto and i split my time between a bunch of things. i teach at the university wrote

and played a lot of mudesic and i perform with symphonies now. the first book is being made into a tv show down in hollywood and there's a series of you tube science videos we're doing and some documenties in the works. lots of different things. >> what kind of questions do you always get from kids? >> there's a fundamental difference between what a young person asks and what an adult asks. at first i was sort of amused by it. then i thought. an adult will ask what is it like in space? which is sort of an aimless question. sort of like what's it like on earth? and i realized a kid will ask, so when you exhale in space and heat doesn't rise why doesn't your breath collect and

suffocate you? and an adult will say what's it like in space. and i think the difference is by the time you've reached some level of adulthood you have put limitation ons your life. you have decided these are the thing that is never going to happen so your level of engaged curiosity drops off. when you are nine and you're watching a video on weightlessness then they see themselves as part of that process and it's one of the many thing that is may still happen in their life. so they become very mentally engaged. to me that's delightful. because if they're engaged and they are challenging and thinking of new things and perhaps make decisions with their lives that will expand who they are. >> how big is the canadian space program? >> it's tiny. well depending on what you compare it to. but the canadian space program, the budget i think is less than

the communications budget of nasa. it's a little organization. it's just a few hundred people. but it has a lot of bang for the capped dan buck. we were the third nation in space after soviet union and then the u.s. we've had eight astro nauts flying in space ments we lead the world in robotics and do a tremendous in the area. >> another video. this one has to do with lickeds. >> they don't behave the way you would expect. >> did you know that average person on earth uses 350 liters of water a day? that's over 1400 cups of water. water consumption is critical on earth but even more so here on the international space

station where we have a closed environment. from washing ourselves to making our coffee to even when we sweat the water that gets expelled is collected into a purifyication system. and we reclaim about 93% of all the water. we even recycle our urine. >> but before you cringe at the thought of drinking your leftover wash water, keep in mind that the water that we end up with is purer than most of the water that you drink on a daily basis at home. that makes the international space station its own self-contained environment. that's a critical step towards living for long periods off of planet earth. >> now, can you -- i mean, how long does it take you to get used to drinking -- the urine? >> we all drink reprocessed urenrin every single day. dinosaurs were here.

all the water on earth passed through their kidney's at some point assuming dinosaurs had kidneys. but the question is do you have a good purifyication system? because by the time you drink it do you want to have the impurities removed? whenever you flush a toilet that doesn't magically disappear it goes into some sort of process to purify it. maybe it will evaporate and turn into pure rain water. the difference on a space ship is you know whose it was. and that's different. it's a little more personal and the process is much closer and closed. but to leave earth right now we're just orbitting the world. but to turn our tail to the world and leave we have to go from 93% water recycling system to pretty much 100% water recycling system. we don't have an infinite supply on water on a space ship if it's a long voyage.

it's one of the things we're doing on the space station is priving the technology and the devices and the inventions that have to work in weightlessness without breaking down basically forever if we are ever going to make the ability to not just orbit the world. >> how long has the international space station been up there? >> the first piece was launched in 1998 and we've had people living permanently in space, which is a pretty significant thing to say, actually. we as a species 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 stocked the space station. but we launch healthy people hire 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. up there, it is a pretty healthful 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. and in skylab we learned from it. 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 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. europeans have one big module. 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. maybe barnes or trailers bolted together. 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. and 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 crying or trying to cry in space. [video clip] col. hadfield: here is a common question -- can you cry in space? do tears work? well, let's tried out. i cannot cry on command but i can take this drinking water and put it in my eye and see what happens. here we go. so, just as if i started crying, my eyes are full of tears. but you can see, it just forms a ball on my eye stop -- 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 across your nose and gets into your other i 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 really limited resource and you recognize how precious it is. you try to never do anything where the water is going to end up in the trash we sent back to earth. we want to wring all the water out of everything so it can get back into our condensers and even operators and get recycled stop -- get back into our

evaporators and condensors 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. [chuckles] 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 try and get this astronaut-friendly resume or cv. then one of the space agencies puts out an ad, wanted astronauts. thousands and thousands and thousands of people will reply and then it is an agonizingly 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 at that level, they get disqualified medically just because we want a physically healthy body as we can get. in my case, when they stuck that want to add out, 5300 32 people applied -- 533 guest: peopl -- 5332 people applied. 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 to they picked 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 they interesting and well-spoken? are they coordinated? are they healthy and fit? is this a person that 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 bit if emerald, what is this person like? astronaut applicants are just guessing.

they are hoping they have the stuff that 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 -- a space 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 for the first half of the time i was there 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 to me.

so for the last half of the time, i was commander of the international space station. brian: it in all of your experience in space, when were 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 maybe coffee and to, -- 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

spending decades, visualizing failure and gaining skills so when you fly in space, nothing gives you an unexpected fear. everything, you have a heightened sense of awareness. 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 shiver of fear go of my back, though, 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 of where i was. 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 hid all

the time -- 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, neil, mike, and buzz 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 watch. [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 for 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 often asked questions. i will just let her explain it. suni williams: this is our orbital outhouse, it serves two functions, number two, right here. i will show you.

you can see it is small, so you have to have pretty good aim and be ready for things to get going in the right direction, and it smells a little bit, 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 correctly, 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 out of 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 four something will like suni just showed you how to use the toilet, and the toilet breaks on a regular basis, and the panel that had the little pig

your of the outhouse -- the panel that had the little picture of 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 -- every single inning on board 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 had forgotten that it was that long ago. 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, about 2.5 years beef or it was published. 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 advice from 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, "an astronaut's 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 did 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. 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 soyuz russian craft 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 it does not fly itself home. and so you have to be qualified as a soyuz crew member to live on 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, and both of them are building vehicles right now to take people to the station. so we are not just relying on soyuz, so they should be flying in 2017, succumbing pretty -- so it is coming 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 that are of therefore a year right now. the russian national not to and 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 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, commander 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 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 american planes have you been 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 see-141, 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 bombers. but i have flown a lot of other airplanes also. 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.

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. how do you hear me? this chris hadfield. william shatner: chris, i hear you loud and clear. do you find yourself in the space station 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 used to put in for us "star trek," with how the world looked from sulu and chekhov's 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. it is completely random. there is no difference. 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 your inner 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

what, 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 an hour and a half. 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 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 nuanced and viewed of all and textured and real. 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 pick that? 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 the social media for me. he insisted i do it. 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 -- up here.

and as i said that, 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. chris hadfield: happily. ♪ >> ♪ this is ground control to major tom

you've really made the grade and the papers want to know whose shirt you wear ♪ 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 look very different today for here am i just sitting in a tin can far above the world

planet earth is blue and there's nothing left to do ♪ ♪ ♪ [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] announcer: for free transcripts, or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at q&a.org. "q&a" programs are also available as c-span podcasts.

>> here are some of the other programs you might like. charles bolden on his life and career. the history of the u.s. army. and neuroscientist and author of a book. you can watch these at any time or search our video library at c-span.org. >> next, live, your calls and comments on washington journal. then live at 10:00 a.m., michael morell assesses the agency's

efforts over the last 10 years. and then the the u.s. house of representatives for morning speeches. >> here are some of the book festivals we will be covering this spring on tv. the publishing industry showcases their upcoming books. the first week in june lit best including our three-our in depth program. your phone calls. this spring on c-span twos book tv. >> this morning, usa today editor paul finger looks at the ongoing ethics probe of 10 lawmakers accused of except the improper travel. later, the roosevelt institute and the manhattan institute

representatives discuss income inequality in the united states, its root causes, and what should be done about it. as always, we will take your calls in june can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. washington journal is host: good morning. it is monday, may 18, 2015. with plans for a busy legislative week on top, before the annual memorial day recess, house will be in at noon today, and the senate will convene at 2:00 p.m. meanwhile, this morning, we will take up the topics of congressional ethics probes and the issue of economic inequality in this country. with rapidly unfolding events in iraq and syria over the weekend, we begin focusing on the u.s. military efforts against the so-called