Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys

The right stuff: astronaut autobiographies from Glenn to Hadfield

An enduring image of an ‘astronaut’ was created for the public by NASA, Time magazine, and Tom Woolf’s The Right Stuff. These caricatures of the original seven American astronauts, the so-called Mercury-7, chosen to assert American supremacy over the communist threat of Sputnik have seemingly endured way past their use by date. A resurgence in interest in ‘astronauts’ was made almost single-handedly in the English speaking world by the Canadian Colonel Chris Hadfield. His much publicised exploits, through the media of YouTube, as commander of expedition 35 aboard the International Space Station made obvious a change from May 5, 1961 when Alan Shepherd rode Freedom 7 into the history books. In his autobiographical An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, the now retired Hadfield provides one of the most readable and honest stories of his journey from being a glider in the Royal Canadian Air Cadets in 1975 to commanding the international space Station in 2013 - after ‘only’ 21 years of astronaut training. He candidly describes the effort and training to get to being a modern astronauts - studying, practicing, learning, waiting, preparing for the worst - then being flexible enough to deal with the unexpected. What I liked is his can do approach as explained in his response to the 1969 Apollo 11moon landing and wanting to become an astronaut: I also knew, as did every other kid in Canada, that it was impossible. Astronauts were American. NASA only accepted applications from U.S citizens, and Canada didn’t even have a space agency. I was old enough to understand that getting ready wasn’t simply a matter of playing “space mission” with my brothers in our bunk beds, underneath a big National geographic poster of the Moon. But there was no program I could enroll in, no manual i could read, no one to ask. There was only one option, I decided. I had to imagine what an astronaut might do if he were 9 years old, then do exactly the same thing. His laconic, sometimes counter-in...