Where: Orpheum Theatre A conversation with Colonel Chris Hadfield leaves one wading through a wide range of thoughts, topics and emotions.
When asked how he plans to cram so much into such a short span of time, Hadfield admitted to feeling a bit daunted by the idea. “I decided to be an astronaut when I was nine,” he recalls. “So, I thought about it and studied it and changed who I was; took many, many courses and gained all sorts of skills so that the Canadian Space Agency decided to hire me when I was 32. And then my first flight, I was 35. So, 26 years after I decided to start turning myself into an astronaut, I flew.”
“You’re doing something really, really hard. Something that almost nobody is qualified to do and something that is at the edge of your own capability. With a very high consequence, where, if you make a mistake, everybody dies. And there is huge financial implications. But, you’re doing it really well because of the fact that you have been training to do it since you were nine,” he says.
“Just in the last two months, the Chinese have landed on the far side of the moon; we drove by this double-knobbed asteroid that’s one and a halftimes further away than Pluto; we have landed something on the surface of Mars that is drilling down deep to see whether there is liquid to discover how deep you have to go on Mars to get above freezing to know if there is a decent chance of life on Mars; the Chinese have put an orbiting satellite around the moon to relay information back; and the very...
“In order to sustain it, he says, we have to solve these “big problems.” And, according to Hadfield, the answers lie in further exploration. “They normally get human emotion right. And human interplay. That’s mostly what most movies are about,” Colonel Chris Hadfield says. “The technical stuff, they almost always get wrong, no matter what the topic is. Because, they’re not documentaries. They’re not trying to tell people how nuts and bolts and circuit boards work. Those are just vehicles to tell the human story. And that’s OK.”