Chris Hadfield

Chris Hadfield: The Astronaut Who Learned to Explain

Halfway through his first spacewalk in April 2001, the anti-fog solution used to polish his visor got into Chris Hadfield's eyes. Outside the International Space Station, in a pressurised suit, he could not rub them. He went temporarily blind. His solution was to vent oxygen from the suit into space, flushing the contaminant out with the escaping air — and then to complete both of his scheduled spacewalks. It is a useful thing to know about a man now best known for singing a David Bowie song with a guitar.

The Farm Boy Who Watched Apollo 11

Chris Austin Hadfield was born on 29 August 1959 in Sarnia, Ontario, to Eleanor and Roger Hadfield, and grew up on a corn farm in southern Ontario. At nine he watched Neil Armstrong step onto the Moon on television and decided what he was going to do with his life — a story so standard among astronauts that it is easy to forget that in 1969 Canada had neither astronauts nor any route to becoming one.

In the Royal Canadian Air Cadets he won a glider pilot scholarship at fifteen and a powered pilot scholarship at sixteen. He graduated an Ontario Scholar from Milton District High School in 1977, and in 1981 married his high-school girlfriend, Helene Walter; they have three children.

Cadets, Cold Lake, and the Tu-95

He joined the Canadian Armed Forces in 1978, studied at Royal Roads Military College and the Royal Military College of Canada, and took a mechanical engineering degree with honours in 1982. He was top graduate of Basic Jet Training at CFB Moose Jaw in 1983, then flew CF-116 Freedom Fighters and CF-18 Hornets out of Cold Lake, where he became the first CF-18 pilot to intercept a Soviet Tu-95 Bear over the Canadian Arctic.

Test Pilot

He went to the US Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards, taking the Liethen-Tittle Award as top graduate in 1988, then served as an exchange officer with the US Navy. Between 1989 and 1992 he tested F/A-18s and A-7 Corsair IIs and flew the first flight test of the National Aerospace Plane's external-burning hydrogen propulsion engine. He was named US Navy Test Pilot of the Year in 1991, and took a master's in aviation systems from the University of Tennessee Space Institute in 1992. Across his career he has flown more than seventy types of aircraft.

In June 1992 he was chosen from 5,330 applicants as one of four new Canadian astronauts.

Mir, and the First Canadian Arm

On STS-74 in November 1995, aboard Atlantis, Hadfield served as mission specialist on only the second shuttle docking with the Russian station Mir. The crew fitted a five-tonne docking module to Mir and transferred over a tonne of supplies. Hadfield became the first Canadian to operate the Canadarm in orbit, and remains the only Canadian ever to board Mir.

On STS-100 in April 2001, aboard Endeavour, he performed two spacewalks totalling 14 hours and 50 minutes — the first Canadian ever to leave a spacecraft — helping to install Canadarm2 and the Italian-built Raffaello module. This was the flight on which he was briefly blinded.

Between missions he did the institutional work that actually runs a space programme: chief CAPCOM at NASA for twenty-five shuttle missions, CSA chief astronaut from 1996 to 2000, NASA's director of operations at Star City from 2001 to 2003, then chief of robotics and chief of ISS Operations. In 2010 he commanded NEEMO 14, fourteen days in an underwater laboratory.

Commander, and the Guitar

He launched on Soyuz TMA-07M on 19 December 2012, and in March 2013 became the first Canadian to command the International Space Station. Queen Elizabeth II sent a personal message. What made the mission famous, though, was the camera and the guitar.

Across five months he photographed the Earth relentlessly and posted the results, held a Reddit AMA in February 2013 that remains among the most-read ever, and passed 2.4 million Twitter followers; *Forbes* called him perhaps the most social-media-savvy astronaut ever to leave Earth. He recorded music aboard the station on a small Larrivée parlour guitar: "Jewel in the Night" at Christmas 2012, then "Is Somebody Singing" with Ed Robertson of Barenaked Ladies. On 12 May 2013, days before coming home, he released a video of "Space Oddity" performed in orbit, with the lyrics altered so the astronaut survives. It has since passed 56 million views, and prompted *The Economist* to ask, seriously, whether copyright law extends to Earth orbit.

He returned on 13 May 2013, retired from the Canadian Space Agency that July, and moved his family back to Canada after three decades in the United States — keeping, he said, a promise made to his wife nearly thirty years earlier.

Why Chris Is Called a Genius

The word has actually been applied: he was named a Genius 100 Visionary in 2016. It is worth being careful what that means here, because it does not mean what it means for a physicist.

The underlying quality is a fusion of two things that rarely coexist. The first is extreme procedural competence — top of his class at jet training, top graduate at test pilot school, US Navy Test Pilot of the Year, seventy-plus aircraft types, one of four selected from 5,330. The blinding on STS-100 is the tell: presented with a failure mode nobody had trained for, in a vacuum, he reasoned to a solution — vent the suit, flush the eyes — and carried on working. That is not courage so much as an unusually intact capacity for sequential thinking under conditions designed to destroy it.

The second is translation. Hadfield can take an environment almost no human has experienced and render it in ordinary language without either mystifying it or dumbing it down, and his engineering training means he stays accurate while doing it. Most astronauts cannot do this. The Canadian Aviation Hall of Fame cites his "dedication to perfection"; what the public actually responds to is the opposite quality — his willingness to show the mundane, the food, the haircuts, the sleeping bags.

The counter-case is straightforward and he would likely accept most of it. Hadfield discovered nothing. He designed no spacecraft, formulated no theory, and originated no technique that bears his name. Everything he is celebrated for is an earned skill rather than an innate gift: training produced an exceptional operator, practice an exceptional communicator. "Genius 100 Visionary" is a designation from a branding exercise, not a scholarly judgement. And his single most famous act is a cover version of another man's song. He was also, undeniably, in the right place at the right moment: social media matured precisely while he was in orbit, and other astronauts of comparable ability flew without becoming household names. The fairest reading is that Hadfield is a superbly trained professional who turned out to possess a second, unrelated talent — and that the combination, not either half, is what makes him unusual.

Legacy

He is the only Canadian to hold both the military and civilian Meritorious Service Crosses, and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2014. He taught at the University of Waterloo from 2014 and joined Virgin Galactic's space advisory board in 2021. *An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth* topped the New York Times list, *You Are Here* collected his orbital photographs, *The Darkest Dark* is for children, and since 2021 he has written Cold War thrillers beginning with *The Apollo Murders*. Sarnia's airport bears his name, as do two schools, an air cadet squadron, a street in Milton, asteroid 14143, and a bee. It is a peculiar and rather Canadian set of monuments for a farm kid who decided at nine, on no evidence at all, that his country would eventually need astronauts.

Achievements

• Notable work: Chris Hadfield: What I learned from going blind in space
• Notable work: performance of 'Space Oddity' during ISS Expedition 35
• Affiliated with Canadian Space Agency
• Educated at Royal Roads University, Royal Military College of Canada and University of Waterloo
• Worked as astronaut, executive producer and aircraft pilot