Instant Genius - How to keep yourself busy in space

Episode Date: June 6, 2018

Chris Hadfield has been to space three times, completed two spacewalks and visited two different space stations, but for many, he is best known for his rendition of David Bowie’s Space Oddity performed aboard the International Space Station. We find out how close the late songwriter’s vision of space was to reality, the life of a retired astronaut, and keeping yourself entertained on the ISS. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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the combination of things that no one in human history has ever done. And yet it's still difficult for people to grasp until you express it in a way that is maybe more, familiar or more primal, and music is both those things. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Alice Lipscomb-Southwell,

the production editor of BBC Focus magazine. Chris Hadfield has been to space three times, completed two spacewalks and visited two different space stations. But for many, it is a video of him with a guitar floating around in zero gravity aboard the International Space Station while playing David Bowie's space oddity that he is best remembered. In this week's Science Focus podcast, we talked to him about how close David Bowie's vision of space was to reality, the life of a retired astronaut, and how to keep yourself entertained aboard the ISS. Well, I'd like to kick things off by just sort of saying that you've been into space three times. You've done a couple of space walks. You've been on two space stations. But I think one of

the things that sort of a lot of the world outside of space fans know you for is your Bowie song that you did. Why did you decide to pick up a guitar out in space and record it? Well, I pick up a guitar pretty much every day. I've been a musician my whole life in amongst all the other things I've done and written music and recorded music with lots of people and performed all around the world. So it's natural to play guitar. There's always been music everywhere we've ever explored. You know, the earliest explorers brought music with them, on board ships and things. And there have been musical instruments in space almost since the beginning. They had a harmonica on Gemini. I mean, music is fundamentally human. It's, it's.

It's in the caves from 42,000 years ago on the shores of the Rhine. There are hollowed out like bones of cranes and vultures that people turned into flutes. So none of that is anything new. And in fact, it's vital and necessary for mental health. And so I played the guitar, whatever I could squeeze in the free time, which wasn't too often on the spaceship. But they scheduled seven hours or seven and a half hours of sleep a night, and I would steal that. time that I was supposed to be asleep to pursue the things that were more personal and taking photographs and writing and playing music. And so I wrote an entire album of music on the space

station called Space Sessions, songs from a tin can, which has done very well. And when I released one song from the space station, a Christmas carol from a different perspective that my brother Dave and I had written, when it got released on SoundCloud, there was sort of an internet clamoring to do a cover of space oddity, which is both impossible and arrogant to try and cover Bowie. But my son said, hey, just give it a shot, Dad, you know, what the heck. And the song is strong enough and ethereal enough that it really suited the place beautifully, just the vocal track. And then I had friends on Earth, including M. Griner, who used to play in David Bowie's band,

and friends on earth put the instrumentals underneath my voice and guitar that I sent down. Came up with a really lovely version that Bowie himself loved. And one day, towards the end of the flight, I floated around singing along with the final audio track to give some raw material for the video. And my son edited it together. And since that, it's been seen hundreds of millions of times, which is, as you say, I've pushed right to the very edge of the human experience. the combination of things that no one in human history has ever done. And yet it's still difficult for people to grasp until you express it in a way that is maybe more familiar or more primal.

And music is both those things. And so I'm delighted that people can maybe see exploration and see spaceflight a little more personally, a little more clearly, perhaps because of the way that I had. a chance with Mr. Bowie's immense help to express it musically. It sounds like the way you're talking about is it's quite emotional thing to do. There must have been a huge amount of emotions that you've gone through both just being in the ISS and paying homage to such an incredible song. How can you sort of explain that?

Have you tried to explain that through the songs that you've written? Well, I think good music should bring emotions to the surface no matter where you are. If you're listening to something, it should at least be evocative and put emotions into you that maybe weren't there when it started. But to play a song like that where it had never been played before in the place where Bowie dreamed of always going. I mean, it was a constant thread through his artistic creativity, his whole life with Mars and Starman and everything. And he wrote Audity when he was 19, you know, turning 20. He was just a kid. And before we walked in the moon, in fact.

And so to find that he'd guessed right as to what it might feel like, just having watched some of the early space imagery, and that he then, like a really good artist does, found a way to carry emotion from one place to another through music. So, yeah, I mean, lots of songs bring me to tears. They should. they're just beautiful poetry. And that's part of the reason I play music is it helps me understand what I'm doing.

It helps express my own activities to me. And most of the great songs in the world, I didn't write. But I've learned others, other peoples. And so, yeah, it was an unexpected pleasure, for sure. I never intended to record a bowie-tuned space. It's the only Bowie tune I've ever played, really. But it's sort of like playing Super Tramp or something, or Bach. You're not just going to cover it and move on.

But no, it makes me think about, especially the way M. Griner put that lovely, soft, thoughtful piano intro into the start of it. It sets the tone really well with the sound of the clicking of the life on board a spaceship in the background. I really like the way that we ended up mixing it and releasing it, because it immediately takes me right there, like really good music should. So back on Earth, obviously, you'd already been up a few times, but the last time you came down,

you'd sort of gone viral in the sort of internet sensation with the song. How is Earth for you now, having been up to space three times, and then to come back and just to be this huge celebrity astronaut? Well, I think celebrities are, right? It depends what you're being celebrated for. And I never set out to be a celebrity. I just tried to do complicated things that I enjoyed as well as I possibly could. And, you know, when I was a fighter pilot or I was a downhill ski racer for several years as well, or as a test pilot.

And then the 21 years as an astronaut, I was just trying to do something that really challenged me and get as good at it as I was possibly capable. of being and then do it as well as I could. And I think the delight is to see the impact that that has had on other people's thinking, and more importantly, on their own decision-making and their behaviors. You know, I've written three books about it with the same purpose of sharing the experience because it's still so rare and letting other people see what's practical and useful out of those ideas. And I think the number of people that follow me on the various social media outlets has quintupled since I landed. I had like three quarters of a million people following before oddity, so it wasn't like suddenly there was a huge change. But of course, that caught

some people's attention. But it's the ideas that matter. There have been lots of astronauts fly in space. But what really matters is, are the ideas valid? And are they expressed in a way that means something and it is personally memorable and are they applicable at an individual level? Is the idea of seeing the entire world in 90 minutes as one joined place? How do you set yourself a dream and a goal in life that is probably never going to happen and yet pursue it happily every day for decades and stay cheerful in the pursuit? How do you deal with great success and integrate that into the rest of your life and not make the rest of your life pale in comparison? You know, all sorts of ideas and just the straight raw imagery and experience itself.

So yeah, I teach at university and I just did that series on BBC called Astronauts and the series on National Geographic called One Strange Rock. And I'm producing a series on YouTube called Rare Earth that we've done. and 57 episodes of that I really enjoy its stories from all around the world. And to me, all of those are connected. The same reason that I dreamed of being an astronaut as a kid. It's just a continuance of all of that. And I'm delighted that everyone around the world, well, not everyone, but so many people around the world share the dream and the interest,

but also the curiosity as to what it means. And yeah, I speak. all over the world all the time. And so I get to immediately see the reaction in people's eyes and thoughts. So one of the things that you're doing is you're doing the Space Shambles show in the UK. What a treat that. It's a royal over-call with Robin and the company. We've got a real good cast of rogues for the stage.

I think it'll be a fun night. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. I was just thinking that is like what you've sort of got is you've got this wonderful experience of science, but also mixed in with music and comedy as well. And I was just sort of wondering, obviously, when you're out in space and the International Space Station, how do you keep laughing? How do you keep yourself entertained while you're up there? You're incredibly busy.

We run about 200 experiments on the International Space Station. And it's the largest or the most complex thing we've ever built off the planet. And there's only, right now, they're just three people up there. They have to run all 200 experiments, fix everything that breaks, run the ship, you know, work with the five different mission control centers. around the world. It's a busy, busy focus of a place to be. So there's a great joy in productive busyness. You know, you don't spend a lot of time being Hamlet, you know, or staring at your own navel. So it's an immensely rewarding place. And when you get tired, just wait a little while and the work that you have to do will radically change. You know, you're doing a nanoparticle

experiment and then you have to disassemble the entire toilet and rebuild it and then you speak to the queen and then you exercise for two hours and then you know it's just it's the days are busy and then in the evening you have a chance to look out the window and see the entire world and or play with weightlessness which which is just it's a toy that never winds down it's just so joyful and you're up there sharing it with other people there are other people you can grab by the shoulder and say look that, you know, which is great. And some people, even Bowie guessed that it was lonely. And, you know, Elton John's rocket man, of course, it's not about spaceflight. It's about being a gay man in the 70s in the public eye, but it's still about loneliness. And he used spaceflight as a

metaphor for loneliness. But it's really not lonely at all. You see all seven and a half billion people every day, multiple times. And you're there with other people. And you're right in the very hub of something, on the cutting edge of what anybody has ever experienced. So, you know, the loneliest people I've ever met live in the middle of big cities. It's not a geographical thing. It's whether you feel that your life is busy and productive and whether you're involved in something that you dream about it and that you enjoy, I think. So, yeah, it's a fascinating place to be.

Do you think that when you were aboard the ISS, that when you come down, you'd be making such an impact with events like this, you know, comedy and music. And did you see yourself that was what you're doing? I've always looked to the future, of course. And my wife and I have been together for almost our entire lives. We met in a high school play when she was just turning 15. So I met her when I was just 16 and she was 14. So we've always talked about the future and what to do next.

So we've always talked about what to do next. and we've always had different options, and you never have any guarantees at all. But about to 10 years ago, when we were about five years away from what we knew was probably time to leave the astronaut office after so many years

and move on to something else, we basically said we love all the stuff we're doing right now, and it's not space flight that I love, or the only thing I love. I was an astronaut 21 years. I was only in space for six months. So it's obviously the rest of the stuff

that I really enjoy. And so we just made up a list of all the things that gave us a good feeling about ourselves and made us feel productive and like the week or the year or the day had been worthwhile. And we said, let's try and develop a life together that has as many of these things in it as possible. Still have to pay the bills and make a living, but at the same time, let's have a life. And so we made up a list and had lots of different options. and we've been pursuing them both in parallel and serially since then. And some of them have worked out really well.

And some have just sort of either not yet happened or have turned out to be different than we expected, which is great. And we're still tinkering with life, of course. But I think it's delightful that I've had experiences and learned things and have found a way to express them that other people find valuable. And you can just do it in writing an article for a newspaper or through radio or writing a book. But to be able to express it musically or through poetry or public performance to me is great. And I've always enjoyed public speaking. I won a public speaking contest in eighth grade. And they taught me how.

And then the military stressed really hard. public speaking and, you know, gave training in it and such. But I think it's a useful skill, like other things. And so I've gotten to know lots of people very much in the public eye, which was fun. I'm working with Sean Penn right now. He's doing a TV series, his first TV series called The First, where he's the commander of the first crew to Mars. I think it'll air in the fall if they've finished shooting. But he contacted me out of the blue and said,

hey, you know, I'm a commander of a spaceship and I know nothing about it, but I've read your book and I've seen your TED talk. And I'd really appreciate it if, you know, if you could spend some time with me and counsel me on how to do this well. And so I've gotten to know Sean pretty well. And, you know, he's a really interesting, smart, complex guy. There's a great public understanding of who he is, which is, of course, not accurate. But that's, you know, that's fine. You have to have a persona, I guess, especially in that line of work. But he's a fascinating guy to talk to. And it's really nice to compare the public perception of who he is, the great skill he's shown winning the Academy Awards for acting, but also just to see the problems he has in his late 50s. You know, we're about the same stage of life and a lot of the same concerns at life.

And so it's nice to meet the people. And, you know, the queen and Prince Philip invited us for a sleepover at Windsor Castle, which was, you know, a highlight of my life and my wife's life. to get to know them, people who've seen and met everyone who've been in the public eye since birth, basically, and yet have found a way with the unrelenting expectation of billions of people to still conduct the life and do things that they're proud of and try and live up to their own responsibilities. It's lovely to have a chance to meet people like that and then compare your own small life and the things that you've done and how to perhaps try and do it better. The next batch of astronauts that go up, do you think that there will just be engineers and scientists or do you think there will be more artists and writers and musicians? Astronauts, you know, we're not insects. We're, you know, we're not, we're multifaceted. And the commander of the space station right now just took over last week, Drew Foistel, he's, he's,

lead guitarist in one of the bands that I was in. And he's a Jaguar mechanic. And he's a really almost a world-class water skier. And he has a PhD in geophysics. And he's the commander. He did a critical repair during a spacewalk to save the Hubble telescope. And now he's commander of the space station. So the real question is, when will space travel become safe enough that we can take people

who aren't supremely qualified, but people who are just specialized in a non-heaval? technical area. And we're getting close. What Richard Branson's doing, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, we're right at a tipping point now, I think, where they're evolving the technology so that it'll be safe enough. It'll still be very expensive at first, but like air travel used to be, or even train travel, or luxury yacht travel, but the price will come down. And I think the experience is rich enough, you know, and stimulating enough that it'll really be. do things and inspire things out of artists that none of the current astronauts have been capable of, which I really look forward to.

That was Commander Chris Hadfield talking to ScienceFocus.com editor Alexander McNamara. You can hear more from the Canadian astronaut, along with former BBC Focus columnist Robin Inns, space scientist Professor Monica Grady, Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweighardt, and comedian Stuart Lee in Space Shambles at the Royal Albert Hall on Friday the 15th of June. Thanks for listening to the Science Focus podcast. In our June issue, which is on sale now, we find out whether we could use wormholes to take handy shortcuts through space, investigate Stephen Hawking's last theory,

talk to Jane Goodall about her career in chimpanzee conservation, and delve into the science that could help us close the gender pay gap. Did you enjoy this podcast? If you liked what you heard, then why not subscribe and leave us a review? You can find us on iTunes, Acast, Stitcher, and many of your favourite podcast apps. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team.

We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal,

Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com. Santa Monica College is the number one transfer college to the UCs for 35 straight years. With caring faculty, dedicated counselors and affordable tuition, SMC helps you reach top universities with confidence. Summer classes start June 22nd. Learn more at SMC.edu.