Derrol Nail:

He performed in space, entertaining millions back on Earth.

Chris Hadfield:

Ground control to major Tom.

Derrol Nail:

Now, talented astronaut Chris Hadfield returns to the Rocket Ranch.

Chris Hadfield:

It’s one of my favorite places on Earth.

Derrol Nail:

But he wants us to go back to the moon.

Chris Hadfield:

We are at the moment in history right now where our technology is good enough that we can start to settle the moon.

Derrol Nail:

And we’re going to Mars. But Chris cares about why we want to go.

Chris Hadfield:

If it’s just as a stunt, if it’s just to show that we can, then it’s a race, and when the tape breaks across the first person’s chest to do it, the race is over. Why would you ever go again?

Derrol Nail:

Chris Hadfield is talking and performing.

Chris Hadfield:

And I will love you now and always to the stars above.

Derrol Nail:

Next, on the Rocket Ranch.

Launch Countdown Sequence:

EGS program chief engineer verifying no constraints to launch. Three, two, one, and lift off. Welcome to space.

Derrol Nail:

Astronaut Chris Hadfield flew to space three times, and was the first Canadian to walk in space. His cover of David Bowie’s Space Oddity that he recorded on the International Space Station has over 47 million views, and as you’re about to hear, he’s given a lot of thought to the future of space exploration, and what it can mean for all of us. We begin with his impressive resume.

Chris Hadfield, a retired Canadian astronaut, engineer. You were a fighter pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force. You’re also the first Canadian to make a spacewalk, and you flew on two space shuttle missions, and you were the commander of the International Space Station. Chris Hadfield. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today.

Chris Hadfield:

My pleasure. I was also a test pilot with the US Air Force and the US Navy.

Derrol Nail:

Oh, very good. And that helps a lot.

Chris Hadfield:

It does. Yeah. Every space flight is immensely dangerous, and still testing all of the equipment, and my first space shuttle flight, the risk was very high. Even by the time I flew the third time, of course, risks were still high. So yeah, it’s good to have people with an operational background. So as you say, engineer and fighter pilot, but also test piloting.

Derrol Nail:

You just arrived here at the Kennedy Space Center. What’s it like for you, as you came back here to the rocket ranch, the place where, I didn’t want to use a pun, but really the space portion of your career took off?

Chris Hadfield:

Yeah. This is one of the real special places on Earth. It’s a spaceport. A seaport, or there didn’t used to be airports, airports are kind of a new invention. It’s only really a hundred years old. But spaceport is even newer than that. This is one of the places where we leave Earth and come back again. And that’s new. So to me there’s a great aura about it as well. And plus, I left Earth twice here, and I worked here for a lot of years. So it’s one of my favorite places on Earth. So I’m really pleased to be here with you today.

Derrol Nail:

We’re glad to have you. Chris, what are your thoughts about the commercialization of space, particularly near Earth orbit?

Chris Hadfield:

Well, space has always been commercial. There’s sort of a weird misnomer that… People forget the shuttle was built by a commercial company, Rockwell, and the lunar Lander that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out of was built by Grumman. It’s not like NASA is an aerospace builder, to a large degree. So that hasn’t changed as much as we think. We were fascinated by it, but Northrup and Grumman and Boeing and Hughes, those were all people, just like now, with Bezos and Musk, they’re just brilliant, hardworking engineers with an incredible work ethic and a really bizarre vision that allows us to do stuff we could never do before. So I think it’s a pretty exciting time. It’s a continuation of a lot of exciting times in the past, but too, I’ve had a break in between our ability to launch people from the United States, just like we did after Mercury and Gemini, and after Apollo, we’ve had a long break after the shuttle. And I’m really looking forward to these new vehicles, the one built by Boeing and the one built by space X.

They’re really advanced compared to the shuttle. The shuttle was such a primitive beast to fly. And the evolution has pushed them into a shape that is quite different. I think we’re finally learning what spaceships should actually look like. If you look back a hundred years ago at flight, airplanes looked like all kinds of weird things. Three wings, two wings, a tail in front, tail in the back. We were just trying to figure out, how should airplanes look? Now it’s pretty well decided, what’s the most efficient design. And that’s where we’re getting now with spaceships as well, especially ones that leave and return to Earth.

Derrol Nail:

This will allow, of course, NASA to focus more on deep space exploration. Do you think that there is a… There’s a lot of debate about this, a commercial market out on the moon? Do you foresee that, as an astronaut that has spent a lot of time in space, and thinking about these things?

Chris Hadfield:

So I’m the chair of the board of a space company, a foundation called Open Lunar, and Open Lunar’s whole reason to exist is the fact that we are at the moment in history right now where our technology is good enough that we can start to settle the moon. And it sounds crazy, right? It sounds like, that’s nuts, and why would anybody go to the moon? We forget the very first person to stand at the South pole was in 1911, and yet now thousands of people live and work and go to the Antarctic every year, and nearly a hundred live at the South pole year round, where they just about died 110 years ago. It’s because our technology got better. Transportation, how we generate power, that type of thing.

Spaceflight was impossible when I was a kid, no one had ever flown in space when I was born. Now we’ve had people living on the space station for almost 20 years, and we’ve discovered water on the moon, and we know that the North and South pole both have eternal solar power. So if you’ve got power and water, then how’s it any different than being anywhere else? It’s just a matter of whether your habitat is good enough. So I think it’s a pretty exciting time.

And as we start to settle the moon, just like anywhere, there will be lots of things that make a profit and lots of things that don’t. And part of it’s going to be born by governments, putting the federal road system across, or the rail system, or all the power, a lot of the infrastructure that needs to be built. That’s the role of large entities. But there’s always, just like building a space shuttle or building a Boeing vehicle, or a SpaceX vehicle, there’s private entities involved.

I also run a technology incubator under the Creative Destruction Lab, that I run the whole space stream for that. And we have hundreds of space businesses come to us every year. We whittle them down… Or space ideas. We whittle them down to potential businesses, and then help them through the whole process, and try and turn them into an exponentially capable space company. And so, yeah, it’s a fascinating time in both space exploration, but also including not just Earth orbit, but the moon, in an Earth, moon economic system. It’s a pretty interesting moment.

Derrol Nail:

And NASA sees this lunar mission as a way to get to Mars. Of course, Mars excites us, because it’s another planet, and it takes so long to get there, but it fires the imagination for a lot of folks. NASA has said, “We’re going.” What do you think about a mission to Mars, and how feasible it is? All the technology that we need?

Chris Hadfield:

Sure, well of course we’ve had dozens and dozens of missions to Mars already, just all robotic. And a lot of them failed, because it is a long ways away, and there are so many myriad problems to solve that someone actually has to figure out and deal with the unknown. And eventually, of course, we’ll have people on Mars. Just, you don’t have to go very far back in history to just change your line of impossible. It was impossible to sail the Atlantic for a long time, for hundreds of thousands of years. And then we figured out how. Now you cross the Atlantic and all you’re worried about is whether you’ve seen these movies before or not, we’ve made it so easy. So is the technology good enough now that we can start thinking about not just sending robots and risking robots to Mars, but sending people?

I don’t think our technology is quite there yet. Our engines are very primitive. It’s almost like trying to row to Australia, right now. You could maybe do it. There are people that row the Atlantic, but it’s hard and dangerous, and not particularly elegant, and not the long-term solution. So I think the way we’re going about it makes a lot of sense. Sort out the technology, build a space station, have people live there for a generation, learn how we support something that’s close to Earth. Then do the same thing on the moon. Three days away, we’re going to have to push a lot of technologies to allow people to thrive orbiting the moon, and on the surface of the moon. But once we figured that out, then see if that’s the moment where now, hey, you know what? We can put all this stuff together and have a safe and worthwhile plan to go to Mars. But you also have to answer the question, why?

Derrol Nail:

That’s the great question. What’s the purpose?

Chris Hadfield:

Why would we go to Mars? If it’s just as a stunt, if it’s just to show that we can, then it’s a race. And when the tape breaks across the first person’s chest to do it, the race is over. And why would you ever go again? You’ve already shown that you can. And that’s sort of what happened in the Apollo program. It was a proxy for the Cold War. Kennedy was coming out of the Bay of Pigs problems, and trying to be a very effective and far thinking president, and had all sorts of opposition. But it was a race, and the United States won, but it led to a great crash of space flight afterwards for a long time, because it was a race that ended. And I think people confuse exploration and entertainment, sometimes. And sometimes they overlap, but the purpose of exploration is not just entertainment.

It’s trying to scientifically understand the rest of the universe and how everything works, what dark matter is, and where did life come from, and what is the future of the planet Earth, and can we learn from other planetary systems? So that will always be one of the drivers. Going to Mars just as an entertainment event, I think is self-defeating and doomed. So I think the logical progression of what we’re doing is actually what’s going to prevail. We’re going to continue to live on space station for the decade or so. We are going to set up a temporary and then permanent habitation on the moon, where the moon just becomes another place that people live, just like, I don’t know, Maine, or Alaska, or Antarctica, or the 11 million people a day that are onboard an airliner, in an extremely hostile environment. It’ll just be a place, so long as the moon becomes self-sufficient, you can go there like anywhere.

Derrol Nail:

Would you live on the moon?

Chris Hadfield:

Sure. I’d love to live on the moon. Why not?

Derrol Nail:

Some people say Earth just is the most incredibly beautiful place.

Chris Hadfield:

Well, some people say that their hometown is the most incredible place, or their house, or their living room, or their backyard. And for them, that’s right, and that’s fine. But it’s not the only place. And life is kind of what you make of it, given the environment that you’re in. I’ve lived in many places around the world, and been around the world 2,600 times. I would love the opportunity to be part of the team that is settling the moon, try and make that part of the human experience. We know virtually nothing of what’s under the surface of the moon. It’s all sort of hypothesis. We have no idea what mineral resources there are on the moon. It’s just that it’s larger than Africa, from a surface area. And we know nothing about it, except we’ve looked from a distance.

Imagine if we just discovered a whole continent bigger than Africa, that nobody was living on, and what are we going to do next? That’s where we are with the moon. And the fact that our technology now allows us to not just briefly visit like the Apollo astronauts who bravely did, but actually start living there, to me it’s a great moment. And a lot of people are fascinated with Mars as well, and we’ll get there eventually. But there’s a bunch of stepping stones between here and there, before we go to Mars. And to me, that’s where the real interest is, in each one of those stepping stones.

Derrol Nail:

Do you think there’s some life on Mars? Ancient, microbial life, that we might discover?

Chris Hadfield:

I work a little bit with the Breakthrough Initiative, which is looking to try and find life somewhere besides Earth. I think that’s a really fascinating question. We don’t know the answer to it. People imagine that they see little green aliens all the time. You see something in the sky you don’t understand, and people, “Oh, it’s a UFO”, and that’s fun and entertaining. But the reality is, we have never seen life anywhere except Earth. But we’re looking, and our big telescopes have seen thousands and thousands of planets around other stars, so much so that now we know how many planets there are in the universe, roughly, to an order of magnitude. And it’s one and 28 zeros. The number is so unbelievably huge, of the number of planets that exist, that it would be really surprising if life only existed on Earth. It would make no sense at all, statistically, especially since we know that life has been on Earth continuously for four billion years.

Not advanced life, not complicated life, not thinking sentient life, but… So I’m personally confident that when our sensors and detectors get good enough, we will find life somewhere besides Earth. But until we find it, no one knows, but will we find it in our own solar system, on Mars? Maybe. Mars was a lot like Earth four billion years ago, when life developed on Earth. So why would we think it wouldn’t develop on Mars? Mars has had a very different history since then. We have found moons of other planets that have more water than Earth, more water than Earth around a moon. And that has heat, liquid water. And if you’ve got billions of years of liquid water, then perhaps life has developed, in a very green, slimy form in moons of Jupiter or Saturn. That’s possible. So I think we’re going to find life somewhere else, but we have to go look. And that’s the very essence of one of the great pillars of exploration.

Derrol Nail:

And the big question that surrounds it, what happened to it, if it was there, if it existed four billion years ago? Chris, you of course became one of the few highly popular celebrity astronauts after you went into space. And I believe most of it came from your music that you played.

Chris Hadfield:

Yeah. People forget, my first space flight, it was on the cover of Time magazine back in the ’90s, but you’re right. People don’t really understand space flight. I’m fascinated by it, have been since I was a kid. But for a lot of people, it’s just another thing in the news, and interesting. And so, yeah, if you were commanding a spaceship, apart from doing all the work, how would you share the experience with people?

Derrol Nail:

I’d tell everybody I could.

Chris Hadfield:

But how? When my first flight, there was no social media, and the internet was still in its infancy. So a very limited megaphone to talk through, or telephone wire. And by the time I flew in space the third time, we had not just Facebook, but Twitter, and a way to digitally record. On my first flight, it was all filmed. It’s very hard to share a picture if it’s just on film. To be able to digitally share information…

So in addition to commanding the space station and getting, we set records for the amount of science we got done, I also worked hard in my spare time up there to try and share the experience as best I could. And there’s a guitar up there. There’s lots of astronauts who are musicians. And so I wrote a whole album of music while I was on the space station, and I played with other bands on Earth. I played with the Chieftains, and did a thing with schools where 700,000 kids sang a song simultaneously with me, all around the world, on a program called Music Mondays. And I also did a cover of a Bowie tune that a lot of people have seen. So to me, it was part of who I am, and I’m a musician, but it was also a wonderful way to let people in on what it’s actually like onboard a spaceship. This is part of life off the Earth. I really can’t wait to hear the music from the moon. Think about bluegrass music…

Derrol Nail:

…What kind of inspiration?

Chris Hadfield:

…Or New Orleans music. Would never have the jazz and the blues that we have, if all those influences from the world hadn’t gone to a new place, and been sort of a melting pot of ideas, and created this own, what is now a whole new genre of music, or art, or human understanding. And it’ll be interesting when they open the first little bar on the moon, and someone steps up to the mic and starts playing local music. That’s going to happen pretty soon.

Derrol Nail:

Would love to imagine just what that would sound like, right?

Chris Hadfield:

It’s coming soon. It’s going to be fun.

Derrol Nail:

In the meantime, there was a guitar up at the international space station.

Chris Hadfield:

There is, it’s a Larrivee made him Vancouver. Yeah.

Derrol Nail:

A nice one.

Chris Hadfield:

Yeah. It’s a nice little guitar. It’s a little small, but it’s good.

Derrol Nail:

There’s a guitar here, Chris, that I mentioned-

Chris Hadfield:

Yeah. It’s a Larrivee?

Derrol Nail:

Yeah, no, no, I don’t think so. But it’s a guitar, nonetheless. We would wonder if you, because you’re still into music and you’re playing, and you’re touring.

Chris Hadfield:

Yeah, I play, and I write, and record, and tour. And Bowie’s band has asked me to tour and play with them. So I do.

Derrol Nail:

David Bowie’s band, you were touring with?

Chris Hadfield:

Yeah. Yeah. They’re great people, Earl Slick, and Mike and company. They’re great. But yeah, I don’t deserve to be in that band, but they humor me, and they let me come, and I’ve played in several cities with them, which is fun. But to me, music is just a wonderful way to celebrate. It’s an intrinsic human way to celebrate life. And also, to help explain things that maybe you can’t put into language any other way. So yeah, there’s music on the space station, but there’ll be music everywhere we ever go.

Derrol Nail:

That’s fascinating. I play a little guitar. Is it different, as you get ready to play the guitar here in the studio, is it different playing the guitar in microgravity than it is here?

Chris Hadfield:

Well, two big differences. If, for those of you who are watching this, the guitar of course has a little sculpted area where it sits on your knee, because the gravity pushes down on the guitar and then the guitar will stay in place. Without gravity, of course, that won’t work. Or, if you’re standing, you hang it with gravity, with a strap. And that holds the guitar in front of you. So your hands are free. But if you’re weightless, then the guitar is floating. And every time you move your hand up and down the fret board, the guitar just takes off, left and right. So if you watch the video of me playing various things on the space station, you’ll see I pinch it under my bicep, and that was to hold it in place. It’s weightless, but it still has mass, and it still has inertia.

But it’s also a wonderful place to play, because you can float weightless next to one of the huge windows on the ship, and watch the world pour by silently beside you. Really inspirational and thoughtful place to be. And so, yeah, I wrote a variety of music up there. And the album, which is called Space Sessions, Songs from a Tin Can, even Bowie sent me a lovely note when I released it. And he really loved the version of Oddity that I did. So, because he always wanted to fly in space. So it’s been a lovely come around, in amongst everything else.

Derrol Nail:

What song do you think would help us understand the nexus between music and space the best?

Chris Hadfield:

Oh, there’s all kinds. But part of it is, you can see the whole world, you go around the world 16 times a day. So you see all seven and a half billion people every day, but you’re physically separate from them, people you don’t know, and your friends and your family. I wrote a song, because my kids have put up with me playing music my whole life, and I sung them all lullabies as a kid. And so I wrote a thing for my daughter, who’s the youngest of my three children, as if I was singing her a lullaby. But this one was being sung across the thousands of miles, from me onboard a spaceship, orbiting the world. It’s called Space Lullaby. I’ll do a little bit of that, if it’s okay.

Derrol Nail:

We would love to hear it.

Chris Hadfield:

Just picture me both sitting on the foot of her bed, singing this song or floating weightless by the window, looking back across my lifetime of memories of sitting on the foot of her bed. And this is Space Lullaby.

(singing) Darkness falls. A favorite blanket that surrounds us all. A quiet ending to a busy day. Of noise and troubles we have put away to sleep. You and I. You in your bedroom, me up in the sky. As close as dreaming. We are holding hands. You tuck so tightly as we lay now down to sleep. You say I’ve been away too long I’m only here and then I am gone. But I am coming home to tuck you in to bed. And I will love you now and always to the stars above. Rainbow of color swirling overhead. A favorite story that you read to fall alseep. To sleep. Lay now down to sleep.

Derrol Nail:

Wow. That was beautiful.

Chris Hadfield:

Space Lullaby.

Derrol Nail:

Well done. I actually-

Chris Hadfield:

Nice guitar.

Derrol Nail:

Yeah. Oh, Well, thank You for that.

Chris Hadfield:

Sounds nice.

Derrol Nail:

And beautiful song, that captures the emotions that happen when you’re so far away from a loved one, and yet you’re doing your job, and you’re looking back on Earth. She’s down there, and you’re up there. Wow. That’s heavy.

Chris Hadfield:

Thanks for bringing the guitar in.

Derrol Nail:

Well, thanks for playing. The future. You’ve mentioned a lot of the projects that you’re involved in. I see you’re still very active on Twitter. You talk to schools whenever you get the chance. What’s the big thing you’re working on, and working towards?

Chris Hadfield:

Yeah. I teach at university, I’m a professor, but I also use Skype. As soon as Skype was invented I thought, “Wow, I can just sit in a classroom with kids, with no overhead? They’ll just type and we can have a chat?” So I started that back as soon as Skype was invented. I did it at lunchtime, called it On the Lunch Pad. And so I’d just sit with the kids for a half hour and answer questions. And the teachers use it as a way to put some science and technology and ideas into their regular day. I’ve written three books as well, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, which is how to lead a better life, and a book of pictures, and a children’s book called The Darkest Dark. I’m writing a fourth book right now, but it’s still under embargo. I can’t tell you. But it is historical fiction. So that’ll be fun.

Derrol Nail:

Historical fiction?

Chris Hadfield:

Yeah. It’ll be an interesting book. I’m in the process of writing it right now. And to me though, I think a real fundamental question is, what is this all for? Why are we doing these things? And the real comeback to it all is, how does this help me lead a better life? How can I look at all these ideas, and either use the technology, like something that tells me the temperature when my kid has a fever, or a cell phone that is using all this technology to communicate, or whatever, or maybe perhaps by pushing ourselves to the very edge of our existence, we can learn things about ourselves.

How do you deal with fear in your life? How do you deal with the real dangers of life? How do you deal with catastrophic loss? How do we, as individuals, get outside the little confines of our normal life and be ready for the real broad complexities and richnesses of life? And when you push people right to the limit, sometimes that’s where you experiment not just with the hardware, but with humanity itself. And to me, that’s a large part of exploration. It’s not just physical exploration, but it’s also human exploration. And so I speak all over the world on those ideas as well, because in amongst all the fun technology and playing music, I think the real value is in helping as many people as possible look at what they’ve done so far in their life, think about some of the possibilities that they haven’t got to yet, and maybe make a few new decisions about where they might head next.

Derrol Nail:

Right. And possibly space flight, which brings me to ask you, do you think you’d ever go to space again?

Chris Hadfield:

I’d love to fly in space again. Here at the Kennedy space center, I was over standing next to Atlantis very recently, and that was a magnificent bird to be able to fly. I’ve had a ridiculous richness of space flight, of flying the space shuttle a few times, and living half a year and commanding the space station. So I’m not sure I would go for a ride with no purpose. Imagine if someone pulled up next to you with a nice new, I don’t know, a Corvette, and said, “Hey, you want to go for a ride?” And you said, “Yeah, sure.” And you went around the block in the Corvette. Then he came back and the next day said, “Hey, want to go for a ride?” And you’re like, “Okay.” And then came back a third day. After a while, “Okay, I’ve already had a great ride in that car, but what are we going to do with it this time?”

And that’s sort of where I am in space flight, is what would be the purpose of it? The ride itself is titillating, but what are we going for, and what purpose does it serve? And I would love to be involved with the team that is figuring out how to successfully build a station around the moon, and the first settlements on the moon. To me, that’s a huge, interesting challenge, not just going for a ride. But yeah, if you’re offering, sure. I’d love to go for a ride.

Derrol Nail:

We’ve got some rockets and spacecraft around here, Chris.

Chris Hadfield:

I’d love to.

Derrol Nail:

We’ll see what we can do.

Chris Hadfield:

Sure.

Derrol Nail:

We appreciate you so much taking the time to be here, not only to enlighten us with all of the projects you’re working on, but also playing for us. It was truly a treat to have you.

Chris Hadfield:

My pleasure. And you need to bring two guitars, we can play together next time.

Derrol Nail:

I’d love that.

Chris Hadfield:

All right.

Derrol Nail:

Chris Hadfield. Thank you.

Derrol Nail:

I’m Derrol Nail, and that’s our show. Thanks for stopping by The Rocket Ranch, and special thanks to our guest, Chris Hadfield. To learn more about Chris and all the exciting projects he talked about, you can go to Chris Hadfield, that’s H-A-D-F-I-E-L-D, .ca. And to learn more about everything going on at the Kennedy space center, go to nasa.gov/kennedy. And we’ve got other cool podcasts you’ll find at nasa.gov/podcasts. A special shout out to our producer, John Sackman, and our soundmen Lorne Mathre and Isaac Watson. And as always, remember to keep looking up.