Astronaut Chris Hadfield Answers the Web's Most Searched Questions

My name is Chris Hadfield,

I'm doing the WIRED Autocomplete Interview.

[space music]

Let's begin.

What Chris Hadfield, in the search engine, here we go.

What inspired Chris Hadfield

to become an astronaut?

The first people to walk on the moon.

When Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong

walked on the moon on July 20th 69,

I thought, If they could do that, I could do that.

That inspired me.

What was Chris Hadfield's education?

I went to a bunch of different schools,

but basically I'm a farmer and a mechanical engineer

and a pilot, fighter pilot, test pilot.

That's was my education to become an astronaut.

What was Chris Hadfield's first job?

I grew up on a farm, but when you're grown up on a farmer

it's not really sort of a job,

it's just what you do every day after school.

My first real job was working

in a scientific shipping warehouse.

When a school ordered scientific equipment,

I was the guy back in the shipping department

that would collect the pig fetuses or the waste scale,

put 'em in a box and mail them to your school.

That was my first job.

What did Chris Hadfield find in space?

Wow, what did I find in space?

A new way to look at the world.

What did Chris Hadfield, this is terrible English.

What did Chris Hadfield learned from going blind?

Well, I learned better English from this sentence here.

During my first spacewalk,

there was contamination inside my space suit

got in both my eyes, blinded me.

What did I learn from that?

Number one, don't panic.

Panic doesn't really help,

especially if you're all alone in space.

And the second was you need to do a better job

of cleaning the visor of your space helmet,

because it's was actually the anti-fog

in the visor that got into my eyes

that made me go in blind.

So remember, if you're doing a spacewalk,

clean your visor really carefully

and don't let it get in your eyes

and you probably won't go blind.

Emerging from below, as often scrolls on a computer screen,

these are the questions that begin with where.

Where Chris Hadfield?

Where does Chris Hadfield live?

I live on earth.

Wasn't always true.

But right now I live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

And like it there, it's a nice city,

it's well run, good place.

If you get a chance to live in Toronto.

Where was Chris Hadfield born?

I was born about, I don't know, maybe,

a couple hundred yards from the US border,

right on the edge of Canada in a town called Sarnia, Ontario

in Sarnia General Hospital.

August 29th, 1959, makes me a Virgo.

Where is Chris Hadfield right now?

On earth.

I'm in Las Vegas, baby.

And what happens here, falls on the floor.

Where did Chris Hadfield go in space?

I went around and around and around the world.

We launch out of Florida, or actually on third flight

we launched out of Kazakhstan, just South of Russia.

You go straight up for awhile,

then the spaceship turns over,

start going faster and faster and faster parallel

to the surface of the earth.

So that the whole trajectory of the spaceship,

is to go around the world.

And if you can get going

17 and a half thousand miles an hour,

five miles a second, 25 times the speed of sound,

then you'll stay in space basically forever.

You'll just coast once you get there.

So, that's what I did, got in three different rocket ships,

blasted off, went around the world 2650 times.

So I went on a pretty amazing world tour.

More than Keith Richards.

Alright.

Oops.

All right, this one at risk of putting shadows on my face

says, when Chris Hadfield, when, when Chris Hadfield?

Let's choose a verb here.

When did Chris Hadfield first walk in space?

I first walked in space during my second space flight.

We were onboard Space Shuttle Endeavor.

We were building the International Space Station.

Imagine you're wearing the most uncomfortable clothes

you've ever worn, like a big snow suit or something.

And gloves and a hat and big boots, so you can hardly move.

You grab onto both sides of the hatch

and you sort of like maybe a chick coming out of an egg.

You know, you have to sort of fight your way out,

but then you pull yourself out and you're weightless.

Let go with one hand and you float around

gently the other way and suddenly,

you've gone from this claustrophobic little dark place

to now being surrounded by eternity.

Where the whole world is silent next to you,

like this big magic globe, but it's separate from you.

But all around you is the three dimensions of everything.

And it's perfectly black.

It's unbelievable.

Like you've given birth to yourself into a whole new place.

If you get a chance, go on a spacewalk.

When was Chris Hadfield last space flight?

Seven years ago right now.

I was onboard the international space station.

It was 2012, 2013.

It was so cool 'cause, I was up for half a year,

so we went halfway across the solar system.

Like we went from one side of the sun to the other

while I was onboard the ship.

Pretty neat, watch the whole world like swap ends.

What was winter in the Northern hemisphere, became spring.

We got to watch the snow and everything move

and things start turning green the time I was up there.

Okay, when will, when will Chris Hadfield, drum roll please,

get out of space?

I don't even know what that question means.

Maybe people out there searching on Google,

maybe they think I'm still in space.

I'm still spaced out.

Well, no, I've been back for seven years and happily so.

There's no choices, we're all in space all the time.

Where would I go?

Spaces all around us.

Why Chris Hadfield?

Alright.

Why is Chris Hadfield a hero?

He's not.

Why is Chris Hadfield important to Canada?

I was the first doing several things.

I was the first Canadian to do a spacewalk.

I was the first Canadian to command a space ship.

I was the first one to use the big robot arm,

and if you're Canadian, you're really paying attention

you'll notice the name of the robot arm, is the Canadarm.

So there is this great big arm, with Canadian flags on it,

out in space, being operated by a Canadian

with a Canadian flag on a shoulder for the first time.

Great, big, ridiculously Canadian moment.

So I think that's why I'm important to Canada.

Why did Chris Hadfield retire?

Because I got old.

Look at my hair.

Because I was never gonna fly in space again.

And once you've done all the things you should do

in astronauts it's time to go do something else.

Why is Chris Hadfield Space Oddity?

An odd phraseology but,

I did a version of David Bowie's classic tune Space Oddity,

which was a play on the word Space Odyssey.

And I played it on guitar and recorded on the space station

and lots of people have seen it.

It's actually a really beautiful song.

And David Bowie loved my version of it,

which was a huge compliment.

He said really nice things, which was great.

Why is Chris Hadfield under the ocean?

This you may not know.

I lived at the bottom of the ocean for like two weeks.

Because living at the bottom of the ocean, inside a habitat,

it's sort of like living in space, inside a habitat.

It's a good way to train

for the technical stuff, but also psychologically.

If you can't immediately come up to the surface,

if you have to solve all your problems yourself,

it's not a bad psychological training ground

for being an astronaut.

So, if you see Chris Hadfield under the ocean,

that's probably why.

What Chris Hadfield?

Okay, let's choose a word.

What is Chris Hadfield famous for?

I think I'm most famous for strangely enough, playing music.

I mean, I'm an Astronaut, I've done spacewalks,

I was NASA's Director of Operations in Russia,

I intercepted Soviet bombers off the Coast of North America

during the height of the Cold War.

But I think I'm most famous

for playing guitar and singing Space Oddity in orbit.

I made a lot of effort to communicate with people

using social media during my third space flight.

I made a bunch of videos.

If I go into any school around the world,

they've been watching those videos sort of as part

of their science classes.

The ease of Twitter and such allowed me to communicate

with so many people around the world.

Almost on a one on one basis.

What is Chris Hadfield favorite color?

Blue.

Sort of a sky blue.

It's a nice place to be.

Color of my eyes.

What awards has Chris Hadfield won?

I've won a lot of awards.

In grade eight, I won the public contest in my school.

In grade five, I won the posture contest.

I was also the top test pilot

at the US Air Force Test Pilot School

and top test pilot in the US Navy.

The award that actually meant the most to me was,

as I was a test pilot, I did this really complicated test

to put a hydrogen burning engine

for a hypersonic airplane out on the wingtip of an F18

and I presented at the Society for Experimental Test Pilots,

big annual conference and I won best project

for being a test pilot for the whole world.

And that kind of opened the doors

to get chosen as an astronaut.

Your life sort of trundles long and hit a big watershed

and after that everything after is sort of the result

of one moment in time.

That might've been the one I'm most proud of,

one that had the biggest impact on my life anyway.

What is Chris Hadfield's, it's a little tiny one,

what is Chris Hadfields, Oh, IQ?

Aahh, I don't know.

But I actually, when I was a teenager,

I was kind of, you know, insecure like everybody

and I wanted to join Mensa,

the organization of people that had high enough IQs.

And it turns out when I did the Mensa test,

my IQ was high enough to join Mensa.

But then once I joined Mensa,

I didn't really know what to do next.

But at the time it seemed important.

All right, what languages does Chris Hadfield speak?

I speak English.

And then I'm from Canada and so we teach French in Canada.

[speaking French]

And then as an astronaut,

I wanted to be able to fly a Russian spaceship

and work with Russians.

And so, [speaking Russian].

I speak a little bit of Russian, a little bit of German,

but I've kind of forgotten all of it.

How to eat in space Chris Hadfield?

Well, your food floats for one thing,

so you don't need a plate, like a plate would be useless.

So what you do is you get your package,

you either make it cold or hot

and there's just like this little easy bake oven

where you can warm up the package, you can't really cook.

But it might be dehydrated food

and then you slide it over a needle

and you dial and you push a button

and it fills up the package with the right amount of water.

Now you've got your package and you mix it up

and you Velcro it to the wall, let it sit,

soak up the water and then you carefully slit it open,

'cause if you open it quick,

you'll get like a little spoogy stuff all over the room.

So you don't want that.

So you carefully open, so nothing comes flying out,

'cause nothing's gonna fall to the floor.

And then you get a spoon, spoon is a great utensil.

And you want a long spoon

so it can go all the way to the back of the package.

And then you eat everything out of one package.

You don't like have peas and meat and potatoes and corn.

You just eat all of your peas first

and they have to be cream peas so they don't float all over.

Then you ball that up super tight

'cause you got to get rid of your garbage,

put it in the garbage and then you open your next thing,

which might be, I don't know, a tortilla.

So that's how we eat in space.

One thing at a time, in it's package,

it's sorta like, I don't know, eating on the bus

or eating on a camping trip or something.

Here's a funny thing about being in space, and that is,

because there's no gravity, that means

that the stuff in your nose and your sinuses never drains.

So it's sort of like you always have a head cold.

You can't really taste your food as much,

you know, when you're like this,

your food all sort of tastes bland,

'cause you're not smelling it,

you're not getting it in to all of your sensors.

So food in space, tastes sort of bland.

And the food that has the strongest spice naturally in it,

is shrimp cocktail, because we have had cocktail sauce on,

which is, you know, a lot of horseradish.

You wouldn't think you would have shrimp cocktail

on a spaceship, with a nice red hot sauce on it,

you bite into it, it's got that nice crunch

and then you get that surge of eye watering,

horseradish cocktail sauce and for a moment or two,

it clears your sinuses.

So my favorite space food was shrimp cocktail.

How to sleep in space, Chris Hadfield?

First you have to decide when, right?

'Cause you're going around the world 16 times a day.

So when is it night?

It's night every, you know, 45 minutes.

Of course, you're gonna get a sunrise every 90 minutes.

So you have to cover all the windows

for the sun doesn't get in your eyes.

And then you float into your little sleep pod

and there's a sleeping bag tied to the wall with a string.

You float in carefully, you float into your sleeping bag,

it's got arm holes,

and then you could zip up your sleeping bag,

and now you're just sort of floating

like a fish and aquarium inside your sleeping bag.

You pull the little doors closed on your asleep pod,

you turn the fan down as low as you can,

you don't wanna suffocate, but make it quiet.

And then you shut off the light and then you relax

every muscle in your body.

When your arms float up and your knees float

and your waistbands and your head comes forward,

and your whole body's perfectly relaxed

and you don't need a pillow and you never have to roll over,

your shoulder doesn't get sore.

It's like the most calm and comfortable sleep

you've ever had in your life.

I think if we start flying tourists in space,

it's gonna be feeling like the space spa,

the best sleep you've ever had.

How to meet Chris Hadfield?

Well let's see, I speak all over the world.

I'm constantly traveling, I've met millions of people.

I don't just hide.

So if you wanna meet me, you could go to my website,

chrishadfield.ca I think,

and see when I'm gonna be somewhere.

Or you could send me a note.

We could e-meet.

I'm on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and such.

Or you could write me a nice letter.

I'd love to get a letter from you.

And if you draw me a really nice picture,

I'll stick it up on my fridge.

How long was Chris Hadfield

commander of the International Space Station?

About two or three months.

We take turns.

And we go up in a little spaceship

or the Russian on the Soyuz,

pretty soon we'll be going up and down

on American ships built by Boeing and built by a SpaceX.

But, when I went, we took turns,

there were new crews every three months.

So if you think about it, we rotate who's in charge

every two or three months.

Okay, this is a big question, at least you know, physically.

How, did Chris Hadfield contribute to space exploration?

Well, when you're the first to do things, people notice.

Because if say for example, there'd never been a Canadian

who was the mission specialist, which is like a fully

integrated crew member on the space shuttle.

I was the first Canadian.

So that was sort of a big contribution

for the 37 million people that live in Canada.

Did a bunch of research while I was up there.

I help run the 200 experiments on the space station.

I help build two space stations.

That's kind of a you know,

with your hands kind of contribution.

But I was NASA's Director of Operations in Russia,

so I helped the space program of Roscosmos of Russia

and NASA of the United States, work and get along.

So I contributed there

and I served as an Astronaut for 21 years.

Every single day for 21 years.

So that was a big contribution as well.

This question is unnamed, it just has my name.

I'm can open it from right to left just for variety.

Okay.

The first Canadian in space,

and now we have to choose the modifier,

was, [laughing],

was Chris Hadfield the first Canadian in space?

No.

The first Canadian space was Marc Garneau.

The second was Roberta Bonder.

The third was Steve MacLean, I was fourth,

fourth Canadian in space, very proud.

Did Chris Hadfield walk on the moon?

I never got the chance.

And we haven't had anybody walk in the moon since I was 12.

Soon we will.

There are astronauts training right now

and we're building hardware right now for people

to not just walk in the moon

but actually start settling on the moon.

Start living there, just like we live in Antarctica

or some of the more remote parts of the world.

So it's happening.

So maybe, I'll still get a chance

to do what I dreamed about when I was a little boy.

Okay, here's the next question.

Go to space with, who did,

who did Chris Hadfield go to space with?

I went to space with Russians and German

and Americans, I think.

But that's all just kind of arbitrary.

I went to space with people from earth.

Okay, one more question here in the unnamed section

and that is, is Chris Hadfield okay?

Yeah, thanks for asking, I'm okay.

Part of what happens in space though is,

a lot of things degrade in your body.

You lose part of your skeleton,

your muscles sort of waste away

'cause there's no gravity that you have to fight

so your body gets lazy, your heart gets smaller,

your balance system gets confused 'cause there's no gravity.

Some astronauts in fact, their eyeballs

because of the change in the internal fluid pressures

of your body, their eyeballs change shapes.

So they see not as well after they'd been in space.

But I've been back from space six or seven years now

and my bones are dense, my muscles are strong,

my eyeballs are okay.

Everything seems to be all right.

My balance system is good.

So yeah, I'm okay.

Thanks.

So that's a lot of questions about me,

how about, do you have any questions about, I don't know,

astronauts in general?

All right, oh, cool.

What astronaut?

Here we go, what are the requirements to be an astronaut?

That may be changing right now.

Because with Elon Musk and Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos

and other companies trying to allow

anybody who can buy a ticket to be an astronaut,

or at least to fly in space, I think that'll be good.

But up until now you had to kind of really be

ready to fly a spaceship.

So if you wanna fly a spaceship, what are the requirements?

Well you need to understand complicated things like,

orbital mechanics.

How do you maneuver in space?

How do you, how do you make things accurately work?

How does a space suit work

or the physiology of the human body

or a little understanding of solar physics

and rocket propulsion systems and communication systems

and being able to reprogram the computers.

And plus it's an international space station

so learn to speak some other languages.

So, there's a lot of requirements,

but the fundamental three things you need are number one,

a healthy body that fits in your space suit.

So not too big, not too small and healthy.

Number two, the proven ability to learn complicated stuff.

So how do you know somebody can learn complicated stuff?

Choose people with multiple university degrees

who've proven that they can get a high score on a test

or do original research.

And then the third people who can make good decisions.

So we choose people who have had a complicated jobs like,

test pilots and medical doctors, life or death,

the people have run programs.

In my case, to become an astronaut,

I didn't really know what to do.

I'm from a country that doesn't have very many astronauts,

but I looked at the astronauts of the world

and the cosmonauts, and I thought, Okay,

everybody needs a university education.

So I went to four different universities.

And I did it all in technical mechanical engineering.

And I thought, Okay, I look at, you know,

Neil and Buzz and Sally Ride and everybody

and they have good, healthy bodies.

So okay, I need to keep my body in shape.

So think about what I eat and exercise a little bit

and keep myself strong.

And then I thought, astronauts fly in space.

You know, that's a verb, I can learn to fly.

I just have to do it.

So I started learning to fly when I was a teenager.

I joined the Air Cadets, they taught me to fly gliders

and then powered airplanes and then I had joined

the Royal Canadian Air Force and flew a bunch of airplanes,

eventually flew fighters and so I was a CFA team pilot,

and then I went to Test Pilot School

with the US Air Force and then

I was a Test Pilot with the US Navy.

Then Canada had an astronaut recruitment,

and they hired me to be an astronaut.

So I guessed right, when I was a kid.

What is astronaut ice cream made of?

You've probably tried astronaut ice cream.

You bite into it and it sort of

melts in your mouth and crumbles.

It's like a block of cotton candy.

I think astronaut ice cream

is mostly made of sugar, like whipped sugar.

The secret is we don't actually eat astronaut ice cream

in space, it's not really astronaut ice cream,

it's science center ice cream.

Because if you think about it,

when you bite into that astronaut ice cream,

it makes crumbs, because it's that hard, brittle,

sugary stuff and those crumbs would go everywhere

without gravity, they'd be in your eyes, you breathe 'em,

they'd be in the filters.

So it would be bad space food.

What is astronauts centrifuge?

When you fly a rocket ship,

because it's accelerating through the atmosphere so hard

with the big engines pushing you,

you get push back in your chair

and you sort of get crushed by the force of this rocket.

F equals MA, right?

Force equals mass times acceleration.

When you got that big force in your a mass,

so you're getting accelerated.

And you feel that acceleration

is like multiples of your own weight.

And the big rocket motors can crush you in your chair

with like four or five times your weight.

And when you come back into the atmosphere

and we're letting the air slow us down,

you can get crushed like with eight times your weight,

which is really brutal.

But how do you get ready for that?

Well, what we do is we get in a little simulated spaceship

and that's on the end of this huge arm

and it spins us around and around and around

until we're getting pinned

against the outside of this little thing.

And then we have to operate the spaceship

and show we can do what we're supposed to do.

This thing is called a Centrifuge,

depending on how you operate your capsule coming home.

If you mess it up, then you're gonna pull

a whole bunch of G, you're gonna crushed a lot,

and you'll have to wear the result of your mistakes.

So it's a really good reinforcing place to train.

What kind of music do astronauts like?

Astronauts come from everywhere.

We like all the music there is.

We actually disagree about music onboard.

This astronaut likes music

that has a melody that stays in your head

and words that mean something.

And there's lots of astronauts who are musicians.

We keep musical instruments up on the space station.

There's a guitar up there, there is a ukulele,

there's a keyboard powered by batteries.

So when we're relaxing in the evening

or when it's somebody's birthday or when it's a holiday,

then we get together with the instruments on board

and play music, just like you do on earth.

The next questions are where, where astronaut.

Where, I think it's gonna say do, no, where is.

Where is astronaut training?

Astronaut training for the United States

is primarily at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas

or just outside of Houston.

And then in Russia it's at the,

Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center.

But then we also train in Canada,

at the Canadian Space Agency, on the outskirts of Montreal.

And we train in Europe, in Germany

at the European Astronauts Center,

which is just outside of Cologne, Germany.

And then also in Japan,

'cause it's an international space station,

so everyone's got their own training

and that one is in a little scientific training town

called Tsukuba, all around the planet.

Where astronauts feel the atmosphere begin?

That's cool.

You're floating weightless in space.

You turn your spaceship around backwards,

'cause you're going around the world in this perfect circle.

And you fire your big engine for like maybe four minutes,

and it changes your perfectly circular orbit

into kind of like an oval,

where there's a low part and a high part.

And that low part of your oval,

starts to just touch the top of the atmosphere.

Like if you stuck your hand out the window of the car

and not going too fast,

you can just feel a little bit of air pressure,

but you're going so fast, you're going five miles a second.

So even a tiny little bit of error,

really starts to slow you down.

And when you feel the top of the atmosphere,

the only way you can really feel it like,

is if you hold your checklist up and you let go of it,

and instead of just floating in front of you,

it now starts to gently fall towards the floor.

Everything starts to behave like a feather.

And you're still kind of just hardly sitting in your seat

that you're strapped into.

With every passing second,

you start to see the effects of gravity more and more.

And we sorta really call atmospheric entry,

about 400000 feet up.

We call that Entry Interface.

That's where you start to feel the atmosphere begin.

And if you look out the windows or the spaceship,

you can see that it's starting to get hot.

And as you come in it gets hotter and hotter

and there's flames pouring all around,

until if you can imagine that you were somehow

inside a blast furnace and then the red and yellow flames

are ripping all around your ship

as that huge deceleration is causing

all the friction and pressure and drag.

That's what the atmosphere does to you a little later.

But the early wispy atmosphere, 400000 feet.

Where astronauts hang out?

At the space bar.

Standard joke.

Well, we have to live near our training equipment,

so most astronauts live close

to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center,

in Star City Russia or the Johnson Space Center

in Houston, Texas.

There's a few obvious favorite places

nearby to those space centers where we go in the evening.

There was one classic called The Outpost,

which was close to the Johnson Space Center.

And it had all sorts of sort of contraband paraphernalia.

Old astronaut pictures and signed pictures

and stuff people had brought back from space

and stuck to the wall in this crappy, old,

fire trap of a building.

Eventually the fire inspector said,

Now we need to be grown up about this.

And The Outposts got torn down.

But, for a lot of years,

that's where the astronauts hung out, at The Outpost.

These next questions by popular demand, start with why.

Why astronauts never cry in space?

Well, it's not because we're not sad.

Actually sometimes you cry 'cause you're happy.

And what I've found actually, it's such a rich experience

that my emotions were closer to the surface the whole time.

I found myself laughing and crying way more often

than I do on earth.

But you can't really cry without gravity.

Gravity pushes the weight of the tears down out of your eye.

Well without gravity, then the tears

are not gonna get drained out of your eye,

in fact, they're just gonna stay in your eye,

until you can't really see properly.

And then you need a hanky or something to dry your eyes.

If you watch the movie gravity, I think,

when Sandra Bullock was crying, somehow

her tears were propelled across the spaceship.

Her tears were squirting across the room.

I don't know anybody who cries like that.

In space tears don't fall.

Why astronaut not use pencil in space?

That's not true, we do,

we use pencils in space all the time.

Pencils don't care where gravity is,

you can write up, you can write down,

you can write sideways.

So we use pencils all the time.

We use a grease pencils,

'cause grease pencils are really tough.

We use Sharpies, Sharpies work great.

Ballpoint pens don't work too well because,

you know, take a pen and write upside down for a while.

If your pen won't write upside down like a lot of them do,

then it's not gonna be a good pen to use

in a place where there's no gravity.

I don't have a Sharpie, but if I did, I would cross out not.

Why astronauts use pencil in space?

A little bit of a caveman phrasing but,

we use pencil in space because pencil work.

All right, why do astronauts exercise in space?

Being in space, is the ultimate lazy existence.

It's the ultimate place for a couch potato.

You don't have to fight gravity.

You don't have to lift a finger.

You don't have to hold your head up.

Everything just floats.

Nothing sags.

It's a great place to be.

But, as a result of the fact

that you don't have to fight gravity,

you can be super lazy.

Even your heart gets lazy,

'cause it doesn't need to lift the blood

from the bottom of your feet

all the way up to the top of your head.

It just has to push it through your blood vessels.

Your heart actually gets smaller,

your muscles would waste away.

You wouldn't have this big skeleton fighting gravity.

So your skeleton would dissolve.

So we have to exercise in space,

because we're coming home again.

And we don't wanna come back as like, you know, jellyfish.

So we exercise about two hours a day on the spaceship.

We have a stationary bicycle, no seat,

'cause you don't need a seat,

it's more like I don't know, a unicycle without a seat.

And then we have a treadmill that we can run on

and there are big elastics

that we wear on our hips and our shoulders

to hold us down on the treadmill

so we can run and pound away.

And then we have a resistive machine.

You can't lift weights 'cause you're weightless.

So between the treadmill and the bicycle

and the resistive exercise two hours a day,

you wanna be conscious of your own sweat

when you're weightless.

And so what we do is we keep a towel nearby,

and if you're good you can take the towel

and just floated there in space next to you.

And you work out for a while until you're getting sweaty

and then you dry the sweat off.

And so your towel becomes sort of disgusting after a while.

And then you just Velcro the towel to the wall

and the sweat evaporates out of it,

it becomes humidity inside the spaceship,

that's collected in the dehumidifier

and it's turned back into drinking water again onboard.

Your sweat becomes what you drink the next day.

Just so long as you have a good purifier,

it works all right.

I came home the same weight as when I launched,

but with 20% less fat.

So 20% more muscle, so it was good,

came back kind of ripped, it was okay.

And my cardiovascular was good,

but I didn't keep the bone density up.

The bone density in my hips and my upper femur

I lost about eight and a half percent of my bone,

which is a lot.

And so you run a big risk of breaking your hip

when you get back, until your body goes, whoa,

I'm back on earth and starts to build dense bones again.

Why do astronauts go to the moon?

Well, so far, only 12 astronauts have walked on the moon.

24 astronauts have gone to the moon.

A lot of them just orbited it, they didn't walk.

It's not like a lot of astronauts have gone to the moon.

But why do astronauts go to the moon?

We went because in May of 1961,

President John F. Kennedy stood up and said,

We choose to go to the moon.

That's why we went.

It was a form of Cold War between

the United States and the Soviet Union.

It was proof that we could.

It was to challenge the whole

industrial capability of the United States,

like why climb Everest?

Challenge yourself, see if you can do it,

make it part of who you are.

But now that we've done it, why go back to the moon?

I think now it's just like all exploration.

First prove that you can do it,

and then make it part of the human experience.

Eventually we'll go to the moon to stay

and live, just like everywhere else.

Why do astronauts train underwater?

How do you simulate being weightless?

I mean, sitting here in this chair,

I'm being crushed down all the time.

So it's a lousy simulation of weightlessness.

Now, we could all ride in the back of an airplane

and have the airplane push over and have us all sort of

float for a second in the back

or if you've got the airplane going like this,

you could float for maybe 20 or 30 seconds.

And we do that 'cause it's good

for little short experiments.

But if you really wanna train

like for an eight hour spacewalk,

you can't do it in little 22nd segments.

So we decided a long time ago, let's train underwater

and we use the buoyancy of the water

and then the weight of the suit to balance out.

And then it's sorta like being weightless.

It's not, of course,

'cause if you go upside down in the water,

the blood still rushes to your head

and you have the drag of the water.

Moving through the water, is way different

than moving through the emptiness of space.

It's like you imagine how big

a normal Olympic swimming pool is,

and then make it 45 feet deep.

That's what the space station

swimming pool training pool is like.

We call it the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory.

All right.

How, how astronauts,

how many astronauts have walked on the moon?

Well, it started with a Neil and Buzz.

It ended with a Harrison Schmitt and Gene Cernan.

So that's four and there were eight others in between.

Apollo 11, 12, not 13, 'cause they had problems

on the way to the moon, 14, 15, 16 and 17.

So 12 human beings have walked on the moon.

Brave guys.

How astronaut communicate in space?

We talk to each other on board the space ship,

and people are from all over the world,

so you have to choose a common language.

Majority of the international space station was built by,

English speaking people and Russian speaking people.

So onboard, we speak primarily English,

but lots of Russian too.

Sort of in a mixture of both.

[speaking Russian]

So I had to learn to speak Russian 'cause I was a member

of the crew on board the space station.

And their cosmonauts equivalently learned to speak English.

But that's just amongst ourselves,

we have to talk to earth.

So here's what you do.

You grab the microphone in the space station

and you push the little transmit button on the wall.

And your voice, goes through the air,

to a little microphone on the wall.

The microphone turns it into an electric signal

that then goes through the wires to a little digital thing

that turns it into a digital signal,

and then that goes outside of the ship to a big antenna

and we send it up to a geostationary satellite

20 or 2000 miles away from the earth

and it collects that signal from us

and then redirects it down

to a great big dish antenna somewhere on the planet,

like the ones in New Mexico.

And then they collect that little digital faint signal

and then they take that digital signal,

send it through wires across the United States.

and it gets to the Johnson space center in Houston, Texas,

where there's another little machine,

that takes the digital signal and turns it back into

sort of a analog signal, and then it comes through a wire

up to a little speaker, that shakes the same way

that microphone did on the space station

and moves the air molecules and they come across

and goes to someone ear and they hear you.

How long that takes depends on how far away we are.

Sometimes we're on the other side of the world.

Radio waves go basically at the speed of light,

186000 miles a second.

But that's still, you know, 186000 miles is,

the world is 25000 miles around,

so if you've gotta go all the way out

to 22000 and back again and maybe even twice,

it can take a second or two.

So when I phoned my wife, from the space station,

it would go through all of those links

and then get, you know, through the Houston telephone system

and it would ring on her phone.

But the delay was so long, that she'd pick it up

and she'd go, Hello.

And I go, Hello.

But by the time she said hello and it got to me,

and I said hello back to her, it might be three seconds

and she always thought it was like a sales call

and she'd hang up on me.

So she actually got the numbers from NASA,

so that instead of it coming up as some unknown number,

it would say space.

So her phone would say space, Oh spaces calling.

And then she'd wait for me to answer.

The next question is how astronaut come back to earth?

When you say how do you get back to earth,

the real question is how do you slow down?

You don't wanna hit the world

at 17 and a half thousand miles an hour.

We don't have enough fuel

to just like fire our rocket and slow down.

We couldn't bring that much fuel with us.

So we just use friction.

We use the drag of the air to slow us down.

We just start to fall into the atmosphere,

and then once we're in the atmosphere, it catches us

and then we fly the spaceship as carefully as we can

to not have too much drag or too much heat,

big ass is all the way down to let ourselves get aligned.

And then when we get close to the earth,

if you're a spaceship has wings, like the space shuttle,

then you could land it on a runway.

But if your spaceship is just a little capsule

like a gumdrop, then it would just shmuck into the world,

so we have a great big parachute

or maybe two or three parachutes.

And then you can land in the water, which isn't too hard.

You've done a belly flop, water can be hard,

but water is a little more forgiving than dirt or rock.

So you can land your spaceship in the water

and then run the risk and it's sinking.

Or you can have it land on land,

and if you're gonna land on land, you can use airbags

on the bottom and that's what Boeing is doing now,

or you can have little rockets

that just before you hit the ground,

they go [making rocket engine sounds] and fire,

so that it slows you down just before you hit the ground.

And that's what we did in my third space flight

in the Soyuz has little retro rockets to cushion you.

or as the Russians called them, soft landing rockets.

It's like Greenland or the Cape of good hope.

You don't believe the, you know, the sales pitch.

It's a pretty rough landing.

All right, last questions.

How do astronauts poop?

I don't think you're asking how we poop,

I think it's how we use the toilet.

We poop like everybody.

Okay, I'm gonna get graphic here for a second.

How do you know when you have to poop on earth?

It's actually because of the weight of the poop inside you

tells you, Hey, it's time to poop.

You know how sometimes you're lying in bed and you're okay,

but when you standup, you go, Wow, I really got to poop.

Well, if you're weightless, then your body's

not gonna tell you it's time to poop.

So you almost have to learn this new sort of

fullness symptom that tells you it's time to poop.

You're counting on gravity

'cause gravity's gonna pull it away from you.

And without gravity, even when you're done pooping,

the poops just gonna stay sort of sticking to you.

So we wear a rubber glove sometimes you have to like,

physically separate the poop from your body.

But then taking the place of gravity

to pull the poop down into the toilet is airflow.

We have air pulled down into the toilet,

its got fans in it.

And that works for the pee as well.

So when you want to poop on the space station,

then you wait till it's your turn in the toilet,

'cause there's a limited number of toilets on a spaceship,

two for six people.

You enter the toilet,

we have it sort of like a little closed off area,

take your pants off completely

because you don't want them floating around

when you're on the toilet.

And then you sit on the toilet and you can either

hook your toes under some toe loops,

so that you don't float off the toilet

or on the space shuttle we had sort of like a little

seatbelt thing that clamp like, imagine wearing a seatbelt

so you don't float off your toilet but,

you don't wanna float off the toilet part way through,

it'd be a mess.

Then you turn the toilet on,

[making buzzing sounds]

loudest thing on the spaceship 'cause of all those big fans

to pull the air down into the toilet.

And then you pee and poop just like you do everywhere.

And the pee goes down into a sewage system

that has purifiers and filters

and gets turned back into drinking water again,

just like on earth except,

it's not quite as personal on earth.

And then your poop dough, goes down

and gets pulled inside a tank.

It looks like a big milk bottle on the space station.

When you're done, we use wet wipes

'cause you don't have a sewage system,

so you don't have to use toilet paper.

Get yourself nice and clean everything goes in there

and then it goes down inside the toilet,

and then you clean up for the next person.

You put the lid on the toilet.

And when the milk can is completely full of poop,

then we seal it with these great big

knurled knob dogs on the top

so that none of the smell will come out.

Then we store it down in sort of a cold storage area

in this station.

And then when one of the unmanned ships comes up,

we get all the food and supplies and scientific equipment,

and then we fill it with all of our garbage,

including, our solid waste or our poop.

And we seal that up and then when it undocks,

it's separates from the station

and we fire it down into the atmosphere

and then it burns up in the atmosphere.

So the next time you wish on a shooting star,

think about maybe what you're looking at.

I'm Chris Hadfield,

thank you for being part of my WIRED Autocomplete exercise.

I hope you learned a few things about space flight

and maybe a little bit about Chris Hadfield, Astronaut.