An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth is the closest you can come to an autobiography by a man whose principle achievement is vlogging from space and looking like how everyone imagines their ideal Dad would look like.
If you’re even the slightest bit interested in space exploration, chances are you’ve heard of this guy. He comes across as being infinitely patient, resourceful and knowledgeable. The kind of person who could turn his hand to any task and give it his best try. And maybe that shouldn’t come as a surprise to me — he’s an Astronaut, whom NASA entrusted several million dollars worth of Space Shuttle to, whom the world entrusted several billion dollars worth of International Space Station to. From the very outset of this book, you get an idea of just what kind of adversity Colonel Hadfield had to endure to get where he did. From purposefully stalling jet aircraft to see how they behaved, to famously singing Space Oddity on top of the world (which I’m pretty sure is the closest you can come to being awesome in space, just shy of getting your tackle out and flashing the entire Earth).
As the opening picture proudly displays, Colonel Hadfield is a Canadian, and in his mid-fifties. His is a generation who were impressed upon the ultimate in inspirational pictures. My Parents are a similar age, and I’ve asked them what it was like to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, and I’ve always been disappointed by their answers. They can either barely remember it beyond one night where there were a lot of people in the house, or that it didn’t inspire the same sort of wanderlust I’ve always associated with the event.
This always frustrated me! It made me feel like I must be mad for thinking that space is so incredibly cool. I can happily lose an afternoon rereading the Wikipedia entries for the Apollo program, I could read the entire Apollo 11 communications transcripts, and I’d still feel the hairs on the back of my neck rise when Neil Armstrong makes that first boot print. But not to fear – a young CH feels the same way, and decides he’s going to do the impossible and become a Canadian Astronaut. Think about that. Only Russians and Americans had been to space – no-one else in the world had the kind of resources that a space program might require. It is as pie in the sky as pie can be to want to become an Astronaut, but CH doesn’t let that defeat his dream. I have got to admire that ruthless determination that lies behind the mustache, something I so admire.
At a young age, I decided I’d like to be an Astronaut too. It’s not something I’ve really mentioned, when the topic of ‘what did you want to be’ comes up as it sometimes does. I usually rely on something jovial like ‘a fire engine’ or something. I think when I was about the age of eight or nine, I had a toy Space Shuttle, with retracting bay doors, ejecting crew compartment, a Canadarm, and tiny Astronauts. The missions usually ended with the Space Shuttle having some sort of accident and ejecting the crew pod (because if you have an ejector compartment, you’re going to use it). And what kid doesn’t want to be an astronaut? They’re the modern day explorers of our time, the best of what a person could be. I came to realise, however, that I simply did not possess the will and determination that the men and women who not only go into space, but who cast out probes and rovers into the infinite blackness of space seem to have in buckets. I might know what Delta V means, but I couldn’t tell you how best to use it or even how to calculate it. I wasn’t very good at Maths (a big problem), in fact I just wasn’t very academically gifted (also a problem), so it never resolved into anything other than whimsical fancy. It probably didn’t help that I was also afraid of the big rides, or rollercoasters for that matter. I dreamed, but unlike greater men, the dream remained a dream. Short of Virgin Galactic carting my lardy arse into zero-G, I will not go to space in my life time.
But back to the book – Getting to space! Everyone has a rough idea how it goes. Maybe you become a scientist and fly fighter jets on the weekend or something? It’s a lot more boring than that, although it does seem to involve a fair amount of Top Gun. Colonel Hadfield starts off with his early career as a fighter pilot in the Canadian Air Force (I mean even Switzerland has a military, I guess).
Then this progresses into becoming a test pilot, which the very first astronauts were, or had experience in similarly hostile situations. Think of this when you get cold sweats when your jumbo-jet crosses into turbulence. This background detailing is a necessary exercise in any autobiography, and while I’m sure it’s the part that everyone hates to read through it’s also why you’re here. You want to learn more about these great people, how they grew from people like us, and became super heroes. Because what else is an Astronaut but a super hero? One of the good things that CH gets across is that mixture of anxiety – but in the best sense of the word. An excitement, a pressure, a yearning to achieve this goal with the little flashes of hope that appear along the way along with setbacks that might throw everything away. We share in CH’s thrills and frustrations as he moves from Canada to Texas, Florida and Russia. An Astronaut’s Guide isn’t just a platform for CH to get over his life’s story, he takes time to express more general concepts, such as managing your fear, applying yourself to a situation you know to be critical and that you’ll be involved in. A piece that moved me was that Colonel Hadfield served as the ‘plus one’ on the Soyuz, the Russian spacecraft which takes people to the ISS and back. All he had to do was to sit on his backside and try not to get in the way, but instead of taking the easy route, he familiarised himself with Soyuz, its subsystems and asked his crew how he could be of use to them.
The difference between us mortals and astronauts is that while we train how to do something, they train how to do something and what to do when it goes wrong. They run through a hundred scenarios a day and try to figure out how to be better and how not to get yourselves killed. They remove panic and fear as much as humanly possible, and what’s left is just someone going about their motions.
When I started this blog, I knew that it’d be very difficult for me to be critical of anything I chose to read. I love books, and I love the people who write books, especially when they share an interest with me. But I made myself promise to try to be critical with everything I decided I’d write about, so here goes. This book reads like a PR newsletter, or rather like the PR department at Canada’s Space Program saw the worth in an autobiography from the Chris Hadfield and wanted to get it out to as many people as possible. Technical details are always sorely lacking, and I live for the detail. CH’s stay in space is glossed over in broad strokes to anything you could find out by watching any interviews with him. He covers peeing in space, shaving in space, sleeping in space. What I really wanted to see was the knitty gritty of what an Astronaut does from 9 til 5, what he does on his hours off, what his chief worries were while aboard the International Space Station, or what irrational fears he might nurture. Maybe he simply didn’t have these things? Maybe I’m asking too much from a man who’s already achieved twelve times what any mere mortal might do in fifty-five years of existence? As great as this glimpse into CH’s world was, I want more. I want to sit down with this man over a cup of something liquid and pick his brains, it’s what this book has given me a flavour of, and I have to have more. But chances are that CH will fade into the annals of history, another internet celeb that once was, and he won’t ever write something to follow up on this piece, and that’s a shame.
So let’s sum up:
What did An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth do that I liked?
- Well written.
- Clean, well flowing story-telling.
- Mustache.
- Space.
What did An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth do that I disliked?
- Brief, quick paced sections left the more informed reader hungry for more information.
- A little ‘greasy’, I felt like I was being sold something.
- Smacks of ghost writing.
From an impartial point of view, I’d give An Astronaut’s Guide 3/5. A well worth summer read if you’re looking for something to gouge through, but otherwise not particularly enthralling.
Next week, I’ll be returning to the 41st Millenium for some more Sci Fi.
-Dan
Rambling Book Reviews 
[…] of my impassioned First Heretic to the slightly less wordy but still passionate and well written Astronaut’s Guide, you might be forgiven for assuming I’m a huge 40k fan, and that a lot of what I read is […]
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