The thing that is really useful, I think out of all of this, is we dig into it so deeply and we look at, "OK, so this might kill us, this is something that would normally panic us, let's get ready, let's think about it." And we go into every excruciating detail of why that might affect what we're doing and what we can do to resolve it and have a plan, and be comfortable with it. Half of the risk of a six-month flight is in the first nine minutes, so as a crew, how do you stay focused? How do you not get paralyzed by the fear of it? The way we do it is to break down: What are the risks? And a nice way to keep reminding yourself is: What's the next thing that's going to kill me? And it might be five seconds away, it might be an inadvertent engine shutdown, or it might be staging of the solid rockets coming off. On coping with moments of fear and panic in space But you can get claustrophobia and agoraphobia - a fear of wide open spaces - simultaneously on a spacewalk. For me, being zipped inside a small, dark place for an indeterminate amount of time was just a great opportunity and nice time to think and maybe have a little nap and relax, so it doesn't bother me. I think if you had tendencies toward claustrophobia then that would probably panic you and they would use that as a discriminator to decide whether they were going to hire you or not. So during selection in fact, they zip you inside a ball, and they don't tell you how long they're going to leave you in there. Really, it's good if you've managed to find a way to deal with all of your fears, especially the irrational ones. ![]() They don't want claustrophobic astronauts, so NASA is careful through selection to try to see if you have a natural tendency to be afraid of small spaces or not. To me it was taking time to notice something that is almost always there but that if you didn't purposefully seek it out you would miss - and that is our planet and how it reacts with the energy from the sun and how our magnetic field works and how the upper atmosphere works - what it really is, is just beauty. There are greens and reds and yellows and oranges and they poured up under my feet, just the ribbons and curtains of it - it was surreal to look at, driving through the Southern Lights. The colors, of course, with your naked eye are so much more vivid than just a camera. Just like the Northern Lights they erupt out of the world and it's almost as if someone has put on this huge fantastic laser light show for thousands of miles. So I shut off my lights, and I let my eyes completely adjust to the darkness, but as we came south under Australia instead of seeing just the lights of the cities of Australia we flew into the Southern Lights. I thought, "I want to look at Australia in the dark," because everyone lives along the coast, starting with Perth and across and it's like a necklace of cities. I was riding on the end of the robot arm. I was coming across the Indian Ocean in the dark. On doing a spacewalk amid Southern Lights ![]() ![]() Your purchase helps support NPR programming. 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."Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth Author Chris Hadfield "You don't get up there by being uncaring and blase. "There are no wishy-washy astronauts," Hadfield tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. In a new book, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, he shares some of the lessons he learned in space. On Earth, he's been the chief of international space station operations in Houston and chief CAPCOM commander - the person at mission control who communicates directly with astronauts in orbit. Hadfield has flown three space missions, conducted two space walks and spent a total of six months in space. But when he wasn't busy being an Internet phenomenon, the Canadian astronaut was witnessing awe-inspiring beauty, facing life-threatening dangers and, at times, holding onto a spaceship orbiting Earth at 17,500 miles an hour. While floating weightless in the International Space Station last spring, Commander Chris Hadfield recorded his own version of David Bowie's " Space Oddity" - a video that's now been viewed more than 18 million times on YouTube. NASA/Courtesy of Little, Brown and Company Give or take a few thousand days of training." ![]() In his new book, he writes that getting to space took only "8 minutes and 42 seconds. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has spent a total of six months in space.
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