Most of us have seen either Star Wars, Star Trek, Lost in Space, Interstellar, Gravity or at least Armageddon. But is going to space and becoming an astronaut really like it is in the movies?
As it turns out not really. There is so much more to it than being spun round in a centrifuge for a bit, being able to hold a screw driver upside down and then being strapped to a giant firework and jettisoned beyond the atmosphere. The selection process to become an astronaut sounds like the toughest in the world with only a few avenues that can lead you towards it. Even if you are somehow able to convince the selection panel you are worthy of the honour and privilege of the next step, the training could be enough to make you pack your own bags. It is varied, extensive and relentlessly on going. You heard the expression “jack of all trades, master of none”? An astronaut has to be above average in everything from robotics, circuitry, engineering and intelligence to photography, public speaking and water and wilderness survival. They don’t necessarily need to be a scientist by trade (many make their way through the military test pilot route) but need to be able to do experiments and record the results in space on behalf of the scientists back on terra firma. Add that to the mental and physical conditioning require to survive the launch and re-entry and the length of time in space without being driven mad, it’s not your everyday probation period. Even if you make it through selection to astronaut school and you get all your training signed off there is no guarantee that you will make it to space. There are various reasons for this but some astronauts will go their entire career without having left the exosphere. This should not diminish their title as an astronaut though.
Space missions will be planned years in advance before they actually happen. Right down to the smallest detail. This throws out any notion of unplanned spacewalks to pop out for some fresh air. Emergency spacewalks have been known to happen but are very few and far between. The planned ones will have been tried and tested and scrutinised countless times on the ground for a couple of years before the astronauts will do it for real just to make sure every possible risk, eventuality and scenario that could happen during the mission has been identified and then reviewed to death. If anything unsavoury happens at any point during the mission, between the day of the launch to landing, from the health of a crew member to a meteor striking the station the astronauts have to follow the “boldface”. A set of unbendable rules that tells the crew exactly what they need to do in that situation. A Soyuz take off will have three emergency landing zones in the event of complications during the launch or flight. If the weather conditions at even one of these sites is not deemed acceptable then the flight will be cancelled even if the other two are.
Mir was the first space station built in 1986 by Soviet Russia and was decommissioned in 2001 when they dropped it back out of orbit to burn up in the atmosphere. The International Space Station (ISS) was launched in 1998 to replace Mir with various modules added on to it every now and again and has been continuously lived in since 2000. Since the three space shuttles was retired in 2011 the Russian Soyuz rockets is now the only way to get up to the ISS and is only allowed to be flown by a Russian cosmonaut. While the max living capacity of the ISS is six people the shuttle was able to carry up to eight. The Soyuz is only able to carry three. As a result, trips up to the space station are not as frequent as they were during the shuttle era, resulting in the astro/cosmonauts spending longer in orbit. The record is currently held by Valeri Polayakov on Mir for 437 days and 18 hours.
As a result of all of this I find it very unlikely that if you are trying to avoid storm troopers you would be able to just hop on a spaceship and jump to lightspeed on your way to Alderaan without at least a few months of committee meetings to make sure you know that a parsec is a measurement of distance, not time. Or if you are going to drill a hole in a meteorite on its way to destroy the earth that if you accidentally blow up a space station you won’t have to work out how to evacuate everyone and carry on your mission because you will have practiced that scenario several hundred times before and know exactly what to do.
Chris’s book was hard to put down and I hoped it would never end. Every once in a while, you will come across something that will change you. Your mentality, your outlook, your views on the world. Something that has made an impact on you as a being. This book did that for me. Chris’s work ethic and mindset are awe inspiring and I try emulate at least a little bit of it on a daily basis. You will never need another self-help book if you just try to live your life just a little bit like Chris Hadfield. When time get tough or tricky it has led me to start thinking WWCHD? What would Chris Hadfield do? This book is the biography of Chris’s journey from boy to astronaut, along with a detailed insight into the world of NASA, space exploration and everything in between. Chris was responsible for making space cool again, has cracking moustache and became an internet sensation with his rendition of David Bowie’s Space Oddity and video link experiments while on station. Even if you are not one for biographies, please read this one, I promise you will come away from it definitely having learnt something and maybe even found it has motivated you to do that thing you need motivation for.
