Sweat the Small Stuff
Astronauts learn to ask, “What’s the next thing that’s going to kill me?”
An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth
By Col. Chris Hadfield
Little, Brown Press 2013, 295 pages
Reviewed by Robin Tatu
Beyond its luminous spacescapes, the 2013 film Gravity played to our fantasies of astronauts with scenes of George Clooney gunning his jet pack and Sandra Bullock float-swimming through zero gravity. But as one who has actually walked the space walk, Chris Hadfield is quick to reorient us: “If the only thing you really enjoyed was whipping around Earth in a spaceship,” he writes, “you’d hate being an astronaut.” The “life on Earth” part of his title helps emphasize the decades of work it takes to prepare for a single flight. Hadfield would know. The former Canadian astronaut has served NASA as director of operations in Russia, as chief of robotics at the Johnson Space Center, and as CAPCOM – head of mission control – for 25 space shuttle flights. He also earned his chops on three separate missions to the final frontier, including Expedition 34/5, which returned in May 2013 after five months’ residence at the International Space Station.
Hadfield allows us the thrill of a launch in his opening chapter, recounting “an enormous, violent vibration and rattle [that] feels as though we’re being shaken in a huge dog’s jaws, then seized by its giant, unseen master and hurled straight up into the sky.” It was his first and felt “like magic, like winning, like a dream.” But today anyone with enough money can enjoy a similar ride; spaceflight isn’t what makes an astronaut. In these pages, the author relates what does, providing a fascinating look at the technical training, ongoing classes, simulations, and research focused on each contingency of life aloft.
While astronauts typically are highly competitive – Hadfield had to best 5,000 other candidates to secure his first spot – they seldom fit Hollywood’s stereotype daredevil. The most successful are methodical, detail oriented, and expert at what the author, trained as a mechanical engineer at Ontario’s Royal Military College, calls the power of negative thinking. Ongoing simulations teach rapid and skillful response to disaster. Rolling simulations raise the stakes, piling on further malfunctions even as the previous ones are still unraveling. Such endless rehearsal for grim scenarios may seem “like a good recipe for clinical depression,” Hadfield writes. But to him, it is “weirdly uplifting” to learn to handle catastrophe with a sense of calm. Sweat the small stuff, he says, and come out smiling. Time and again, it paid off under real circumstances, like the emergency space walk he coordinated to fix an ammonia leak, just hours before departing the ISS in May.
Astronauts learn how to focus to exclude all distractions, on alert for “the next thing that is going to kill me.” By way of example, Hadfield relates an early experience as a fighter jet pilot when he discovered a bee trapped within his visor. It took enormous willpower to ignore the insect crawling near his eye, but he was in tight formation and other lives were at stake. Nothing hones your concentration like flying a jet, he says. It’s one reason NASA requires astronauts to train on T-38s, learning split-second decisions not unlike those required aboard a spaceship.
An Astronaut’s Guide draws from a sophisticated foundation of knowledge but does so with engaging anecdotes, as when Hadfield tells of finding a snake writhing in his jet cockpit. Recalling a moment when Atlantis docked with Mir, he writes that Russian engineers had wrapped their module’s hatch so securely that the astronauts ultimately had to slice through with a Swiss Army knife: “Never leave the planet without one,” he quips. This is the man who carried a guitar to the ISS and at the end of his last mission recorded a gravity-free video to the tune of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” Within three days on YouTube, the clip had garnered 10 million viewings.
Read this book to learn about the work and research of aerospace engineers and to glean lessons about perseverance, teamwork, and humility. But read it – and recommend it to students – primarily because it will capture your attention from start to finish.
Robin Tatu is Prism’s senior editorial consultant.