The Edge Breakfast - REPLAY: Chris Hatfield Speaks on Astronauts stuck in space

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

This is a podcast from Rover. The news travelled all around the world of a couple of astronauts who are meant to spend eight days in space. Sunita and Barry are now going to be in space until February. And we really have just got super curious about this whole situation and what they're doing up there. And someone who actually knows is Colonel Astronaut Chris Hadfield, who is in Canada and has spent 166 days in total in space. Good morning, Chris. Hey, good morning to Clint and Meg and Dan.

Nice to be talking to all three of you. That's 166 days. That must be some sort of record of amount of time spent. Well, it's a record for me, and it would be a record for anybody from New Zealand. But actually, there's been people from several countries that have stayed longer. The absolute record holder is living in space right now,

and he's been in space for over a thousand years. Wow. Two and a half years. He's an alien now. Well, no, he's the commander. And the record at one time for anybody who launched and then stayed without coming back is about 14 months. So people have stayed a lot longer. But 166 days, that means I went around the world 2,650 times.

So I've seen all of New Zealand right from the beautiful fjords and Mount Taranaki and all the way up to Wyatt Island and everything. It's gorgeous. You should come and be on land at one point. We'd love to have you. I've been many times. Oh, great. It's beautiful.

Yeah, I've driven north to south almost the whole way. It's a gorgeous part of the world. Well, I wanted to know how your perspective of Earth changed after seeing it from space, if it did change, Chris. For us, you know, we feel like everything is so big in our lives and maybe you go up there and you see how little the world is. Does it change perspective of life for you? Yeah, well, you do.

If you can go around it in 90 minutes, Meg, it's not very big, right? What did you do in the last 90 minutes? You know, it's amazing. Just if you can go around the whole thing and the time it takes to eat dinner in a restaurant, then it's little and it's finite. You know, it's limited. We're all in this together. Everybody's crewmates on this little ship that keeps us alive. But you know what? I think the big change, it made me eternally optimistic because the planet is tough. It's been here four and a half billion years and life has been here for four billion years uninterrupted. So we get all wrapped up in our own little problems, but the world's not going anywhere. Life isn't going anywhere, life isn't going anywhere. And so you come back with sort of eternal optimism,

but also a renewed sense of like personal responsibility for your own actions and thinking about how you can help other people. Wow. We're chatting with astronaut Chris Hadfield. He's been in space 166 days. If you've just tuned in, we wanted to talk to you about the astronauts, Sunita and Barry,

who thought they were going up for eight days and they've just been told they're not going to get back till Feb. How do they pass the time, Sunita and Barry, who thought they were going up for eight days and they've just been told they're not going to get back till Feb. How do they pass the time, Chris, over eight months when they weren't expecting to be there much longer than a week? Well, I think you've got it backwards. Astronauts feel like they're trapped

when they're on Earth. Wow. And when they get to space, that's what they train for. Sunita and Barry, it's what they train for. Sunny and, it's funny you call them Sunita and Barry. I didn't even know their names.

Their names are Sunny and Butch. Yes. Sunny and Butch. This is the greatest gift they could have possibly gotten. Wow. They thought they were only

going to be up there for a week or two. They get to stay up for a full long duration flight after training for, you know, 25 years of their lives. So this is a huge boon or two, they get to stay up for a full long duration flight after training for 25 years of their lives. This is a huge boon for them.

It's a great thing. They're integrated with the crew. We run 200 experiments up there and it's a big complicated place. Lots of things need fixing. They're as busy as can be and when they get back,

you know, Earth will still be here. So it's a great boon for them. And yeah, it's a shame that their spaceship didn't work the way they wanted. But they're going to be fine. They'll be back as soon as they can. Life is good.

Explain to us, Chris, what it's like inside the International Space Station. Like we were imagining it's a massive big, like Westfield-type- Yeah, we've watched too many movies, Chris. Size thing. But it's a massive big Westfield-type size thing. But it's not, is it?

It's quite small and cramped. We thought that you shut off the gravity and you could walk around. You could walk around like in the movies, like in The Martian. But it's not like that. Well, it's actually pretty huge inside. If you took like six or seven city buses and hooked them all together so you could go from one to the next to the next to the next to the next. It's about that big.

And there's only normally six or seven people in there. Everyone's got their own place to sleep. And the beauty of it is when you don't have gravity, everybody's not stuck to the floor. So you can use all three dimensions. So look around your studio. Imagine if some of you could be floating up in a corner by the ceiling and some down floating underneath the desk. You'll use the space a lot more.

So you can go half a day on the space station and never even see another astronaut because everybody's busy doing stuff. Okay, Chris, and one question before you have to go to a song and then we can take your questions listening on 0800 The Edge or 3343. I think Sonny and Butch are both married,

but we joked about, you know, if you're in space that long and you start catching feelings and then whether or not, you know, you'd be worried as a partner of them sleeping together. And then Dan said it's impossible to be intimate with somebody in space. True or false?

How many times has Dan been in space? Never. Never, but I'm just trying to imagine logistically, Chris, how it works. I think it would be easier with zero gravity. Well, you know, with the right crew, eventually, of course. But so far, it's a pretty small group of people. And, you know, if you start pairing off, it's going to cause a lot of psychological problems. You know, people are just people.

I'm not too worried about it. But, you know, they didn't just show up up there. They've been training and working together for 25 years. And they've been training in Japan and Europe and Russia and the United States and Canada. And so, you know, it's not like they just met each other. So they could do it in any of those places. All right, well, we've got more questions for you. Astronaut Chris Hadfield, it's been 166 days in space.