Chris Hadfield Quotes

In 2009 I went up on the space shuttle. I was in space for 16 days and docked at the space station for 11 days. The entire crew did five space walks, of which I was involved with three of them. When you're doing a space walk, you always have a buddy with you. It's a very dangerous environment when you're doing a space walk.

My job during the EVAs, the spacewalks, is to act as the inside coordinator. I remain on the aft flight deck of the shuttle, and I act in a manner to help the gentlemen outside, my fellow crewmates, who are performing the EVA tasks.

You're very well trained for the spacewalk, so when you go outside, it's not like the movies.

I'll be helping them getting suited up, getting them in the airlock, getting the airlock prepared, and getting them out the hatch, and then talking them through these three spacewalks.

I can't think of anything that's as exciting as I'm sure this mission will be, and actually being in space. But, we did some training as a crew together.

I don't have to go into outer space to write about an astronaut.

I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space shuttle.

Finally my dream came true in that there was a possibility that I could travel to the International Space Station. I've gone through the medicals and the training and now I'm officially, by the Russian Space Federation, a cosmonaut in training.

Walking in space is absolutely the most exhilarating part of a mission. The view is just incredible.

On my first mission, I was the spacewalk supervisor: the person that runs the spacewalk from inside the vehicle. As such, I was the one that closed the hatch when my colleagues left to work outside for six hours. And I was also the person who opens the hatch when they come back, and we repressurize.

In space for a short time, I think most people could survive that. If you're sending an average person who's healthy for a short period of time, I think that's quite doable.

You absolutely know you're in space when you're doing a spacewalk. That was pretty interesting because you can feel vacuum. It actually changes your vocal cords because the pressure inside the suit drops quite a bit, so your voice feels different.

Any astronaut can tell you you've got to do everything you can to learn about your life support system and then do everything you can to take care of it.

Astronauts are very professional and when they're preparing for launch, they prepare for it as the most serious endeavor of our lives.

You don't think about the danger. The spaceship becomes your home.

The excitement really didn't start to build until the trailer - which was carrying me, with a space suit with ventilation and all that sort of stuff - pulled up to the launch pad.

Being in space, I'm really looking forward to working with this team of folks that I'm with.

The only time I had what you would call life-threatening fear was when I was on the Moon. Towards the end of our stay, we got excited and we were going to do the high jump, and I jumped and fell over backwards. That was a scary time, because if the backpack got broken, I would have had it. But everything held together.

When I did my spacewalks, it was during space station construction. So the shuttle was docked to the fledgling ISS at the time. So we would always stay tethered.

Spacewalking is a little like rock climbing in that everything, including and especially oneself, must be tethered or docked at all times. If you forget to tether a tool, it's gone. Ditto yourself.

I had been lucky that my physiology is well suited to space training.

To be on my very first spacewalk, to be outside, and to have contamination in my suit to the point that I couldn't see in either eye - that, I think, would cause some people to lose control.

NASA was going to pick a public school teacher to go into space, observe and make a journal about the space flight, and I am a teacher who always dreamed of going up into space.

In the film, I'm not very mobile, like in the space suit.

I've been approached to do some things with astronauts and the preparation that astronauts go through.