When the whole planet was visible through the window, I felt a certain bond with all seven billion people who call it home.
Loneliness, it seems to me, has little to do with location. It is a state of mind. The loneliest people usually live in the centers of large, noisy cities.
One morning I woke up and caught myself thinking something strange: the socks I am about to put on will be on me when I leave Earth.
Notes on the book An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield.
Learning
Astronauts learn their whole lives. Make one serious mistake and someone else will take your place. From the outside it may seem that being an astronaut is mostly about life on the ISS and spacewalks, but in reality it is even more about training for years and turning yourself into a Swiss Army knife of a human being.
I was determined that I would be ready for a spaceflight if I ever got the chance, but I was almost equally determined to enjoy the preparation itself. If my choices had made me miserable, there would have been no point in continuing.
I would take the airplane right to the edge of controllability and then try to understand how to recover it when the fighter was falling to the ground.
For two years an astronaut trains almost in isolation, one-on-one with instructors, and then, six months before the flight, when everyone already has the necessary skills, crew formation begins.
Backups do everything the primary crew does, right up to the last hours before launch.
Professionalism
A professional is someone who does not lose their head in a crisis, does not abandon the task even when it seems hopeless, improvises, and finds good solutions to hard problems when every second counts.
It seems simple to me: if there is time, use it to prepare. Yes, maybe you will learn to do something you will never actually need to do. But in my opinion it is much worse to run into a problem you cannot even begin to solve because you would not know where to start.
I set myself a task that will demand total commitment; determine what knowledge I will need to carry it out; and practice until I reach a level of skill where I feel comfortable taking it on.
Unexpected situations
Trouble happens constantly. Technology is incredibly complex, and a huge number of people are involved in building and preparing it. In an unexpected situation, all an astronaut can do is assess it and start working the problem with a cool head.
In NASA language, “work the problem” means following a procedure that describes a sequence of actions for a given situation, methodically trying one solution after another until the oxygen runs out.
When I had just become an astronaut, I thought that the moment I heard the fire alarm I was supposed to grab an extinguisher and start fighting for my life. But now, after 21 years, I had replaced that reflex with another set of reactions that can be described in three words: warn, gather, work.
To an outside observer our actions might have seemed a little strange: there was no anxiety, no shouted commands, no rushing around.
Disaster simulations train you to accept that the worst can happen, but you never get so used to the idea that you become indifferent to it.
Anticipating problems and thinking through their solutions is not the same thing as ordinary worrying. On the contrary, it is productive.
While driving down the highway you can listen to the radio and enjoy the sunset. Or you can monitor the road carefully, noticing every potential threat. For example, you see a tanker truck ahead and imagine what will happen if, exactly as you are passing it, a truck that has been behaving oddly in the left lane for the last ten minutes cuts you off. Thinking through that problem in advance is the best way to avoid it.
When I step into an elevator full of people, I think: what are we going to do if this elevator gets stuck? And I start thinking about what my role would be and how I could help solve the problem.
Before a difficult F-18 flight I would take a map of the area and draw out my route, even though I knew I would not be able to see the ground once the plane left the runway.
An astronaut who does not pay attention to details is a dead astronaut.
Situational awareness, the ability to see the whole picture and focus on the nearest mortal danger, is what saved me after I regained consciousness. I did not waste a single second trying to understand why I had blacked out. In a critical situation, “why?” is the wrong question. I had to accept what had already happened and identify the most important task at that moment, and that task was to get back to the airfield as quickly as possible.
Mistakes
Failures are often useful if you learn from them. Every action is recorded and analyzed.
At NASA everyone is a critic. Over the years, hundreds of people constantly evaluated our work. Our worst mistakes were studied under a microscope, so even more people learned about them: “Check Hadfield’s actions. Let’s make sure no one ever does that again.”
NASA does not merely expect us to respond positively to outside criticism; it demands that we go a step further and notice our own mistakes and miscalculations ourselves.
After a spaceflight, the debrief lasts all day for a month or longer, one subject per meeting.
Rules
The result of analyzing mistakes is a system of rules based on real experience. For every action there is a set of rules with assumptions that define the boundaries within which you are allowed to operate.
Flight rules are a hard-won body of knowledge written down as instructions. They spell out the sequence of actions in various situations and explain why things must be done that way.
“Boldface” is a piece of pilot slang, a magic word that describes an emergency procedure that can save your life. We say the boldface is written in blood, because these instructions are often created as a result of accident investigations. They highlight the exact steps that should have been taken to avoid a fatal disaster.
Leadership
In space, people have to spend a lot of time together in a confined space, and healthy interpersonal relationships are a necessary condition for a successful mission.
The lesson I took from that situation was this: a real leader clears the path and leads others along it, rather than simply forcing their opinion on people. Threats, arguments, and rivalry, even in less risky situations, are a reliable way to destroy morale and sharply reduce effectiveness.
When I was scouting the route for our descent, I was extremely careful. I knew that if I twisted my ankle, I would be neither a hero nor a martyr. I would be the guy who jeopardized the mission.
The most important thing I took from survival training is that when you are part of a team, on Earth or in space, the first question you need to answer is: how can I personally help the team achieve its goals? You do not have to be a superhero. Empathy and a good sense of humor are often more important.
Complaining and whining are the complete opposite of what I call the expeditionary model of behavior, whose whole essence is bringing people together around a shared goal.
If you need to criticize someone sharply, do not pounce on them. Use a surgical approach: focus attention on the problem, not on the person. Never ridicule your colleagues, even with an improvised remark that seems witty or funny to you. The higher your position in the hierarchy, the more impact your careless or flippant comment will have. Do not slap people on the nose when you work with them.
It is not enough to suppress your competitive instinct. You have to try to help other people succeed. Some people think that is like shooting yourself in the foot: why help someone else build a competitive advantage? I see it differently. Helping someone else look better does not make you look worse. In fact, that kind of help often improves your own performance too, especially in stressful situations.
Over the years I realized that in almost any situation, whether in an elevator or on a spaceship, the way people around you see you can usually be described in one of three ways. You are “minus one”: the person who creates problems and only makes things worse. You are “zero”: your influence is neutral and does not shift the balance either way. Or you are “plus one”: the person who actively does something useful. Of course everyone wants to be useful.
One advantage of aiming to be “zero” is that it is an achievable goal. And it is also a great path toward becoming “plus one”.
If you are confident in your abilities and in your own dignity, then it makes almost no difference whether you are steering the ship at the controls or rowing the oars. Your ego will not suffer if you are asked to scrub the toilet or unpack somebody else’s socks.
The International Space Station is a 400-ton spacecraft the size of a football stadium, covered in solar panels with a total area of 4 square kilometers.
Russian engineers nailed, tightened, and sealed the hatch on our docking module with perhaps a little too much enthusiasm, in several layers. So we had to do something truly cosmic: open the hatch of the Mir station with a Swiss Army knife. Never leave the planet without one.
Nearly all the walls of the module are covered with the fuzzy side of Velcro. In space, small objects like spoons, pencils, scissors, and test tubes simply float away and then, a week later, turn up somewhere in the air filter that covers a ventilation duct. So they get attached to the wall with Velcro. The hook side can be found on the back of almost everything, and that is done so the objects can be stuck to the “sticky” wall.
Even back in the shuttle days, I knew that a sleeping astronaut is a curious sight. Their arms float in front of them, creating a kind of Frankenstein pose, the hair drifts like a mane, and the expression on the face suggests contentment.
When I close my eyes, I sometimes see very faint, blurry flashes of light: cosmic rays, high-energy particles from distant stars, cross the universe and hit my optic nerve like personal bolts of lightning.
Many astronauts, including me, eventually start craving spicy food because the blood shift caused by weightlessness makes food taste as if you have a cold.
Just to prepare the shuttle for reentry into the dense layers of the atmosphere required a huge number of system checks and reconfigurations. Here is only one trick: we had to point the belly of the ship toward the Sun and keep it that way for several hours to warm up the rubber landing gear tires before touchdown.
Tears need gravity. On Earth, a small duct above your eye secretes tears that wash out any irritant, then run down your cheek, and as the tear duct dries out your nose starts running instead. But in weightlessness tears do not run downward. They stay in your eye, and as you keep crying, the ball of salty liquid keeps growing, forming a trembling droplet on your eyeball.
When we came back to Earth, a lot of people asked whether everything went according to plan. The truth is that nothing happened exactly as planned, but every deviation stayed within the range we had prepared for.