Back on Earth, astronaut Chris Hadfield writes about space

What does one do when returning to Earth after three trips to space?

That’s the question Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield faced when landing on his final mission.

“You come off that ship almost as a newborn baby,” Hadfield said in one episode. Bookends with Mattia Roach,

“This is a really good moment to take stock and think, ‘What do I want to do now? What excites me and thrills me and what challenges me?’ And perhaps, more importantly, ‘What is it that I want to achieve?'”

One of those things was writing a book. And Hadfield has done so many times.

His work includes nonfiction, children’s books, and most recently, three fast-paced thrillers based on his adventures in space, called The Apollo Murders Series.

last class is the latest in the collection, and it is set in 1975 during the Cold War when the United States and the Soviet Union were in the Space Race.

Hadfield joins Roach to discuss his transition from astronaut to author and the real-life stories and research that color his imagination.

Look Chris Hadfield on Bookends with Mattia Roach:

Mattia Roach: Why was becoming a writer always part of the astronaut’s post-life plans?

Chris Hadfield: This was my favorite subject in school. This was the thing I had the most intuition for. I liked to read. I loved writing. I wrote poetry. I wrote short stories. I wrote a book about Limerick. I found the study of language and the ability to manipulate language and share ideas through the written word really interesting. This is where I learned most of the things I know.

I knew that if I got an English degree, they wouldn’t let me command a space shuttle.-Chris Hadfield

So, I always wanted to write, but I knew that if I did an English literature degree, they wouldn’t let me command a spaceship. So, I just put it off.

last class It is set during an actual joint mission between the US and the Soviet Union in July 1975. What happened in that mission and what is the long story?

It emerged from slow negotiations between Soviet upper-level personnel and American upper-level personnel. It took five years of work led by NASA’s Glynn Looney, who is named in the book, and several others who had to figure out how to dock together two ships that did not have compatible docking mechanisms.

How do you communicate when we don’t use the same frequencies or languages? And how will Mission Control in Moscow talk to Mission Control in America

It was quite complex, but the geopolitics and the change in purpose and convincing all the people and all the different levels that it was a worthwhile endeavor.

Ultimately we decided to dock the Soyuz and Apollo together. They recruited highly experienced crews from both sides and managed to dock and undock successfully in July of 75, demonstrating that even in times of darkness, there are rays of light.

I want to talk about Kaz Zemeckis, the main character who appears throughout the series. He is a flight controller and lost an eye due to a bird collision while flying a plane. Can you share stories, one that happened to you and one that happened to your friend, that prompted the accident?

I was a test pilot. Every airplane one flies has been tested thousands of times by a specially qualified and trained type of pilot.

One of the things we were testing on the airplane was how it senses speed and altitude. One of the ways you do this, this sounds very strange, but you fly at exactly the same height above the water. First, you go up to 200 knots and then 250, then 300. You go through a little visible tower and the technicians in the visible tower monitor your arrival and at that time, you record what all your instruments show and they record what was happening externally, and from that they can then calibrate your entire system. So it’s old fashioned, but it works. This is called tower flyby.

The top speed I was doing tower flyby was 550 knots, that’s nine miles per minute. As I hit the first tower, I saw something on my windscreen in the head up display in the distance. Then I realized it was a seagull. I’m going 550 knots, making speeds you can hardly understand.

Just as I was about to collide with the seagull, he made the fatal mistake of diving, which works for most things, but the F-18 was not going that fast, and he folded his wings. Instead of it coming straight through my windscreen, which was supposed to happen, I just banked the airplane to the right and I heard it hit the side somewhere on my airplane. I thought it went down my left engine.

So what do you do now? I idled my left engine, zoomed out because I had so much speed. So I got up nice and high, declared emergency, came, went back, landed on the runway.

A friend of mine who was flying in similar conditions collided with a bird. It came through the windscreen and actually hit him in the face and took out his left eye. And then he had to close his eye and turn his head so that the gusts of wind would flush the blood out of his good eye so that he could see the ground well and be able to land. And he managed to bring his plane back to the ground. From then on his call sign was Cyclops.

I took his story and then I took my F-18 story and I combined them both to wound Kaz and prepare him for the rest of the series.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Alicia Cox Thomson, courtesy of Sarah Cooper.