An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

Colonel Chris Hadfield, a retired Canadian astronaut who flew three space missions and commanded the International Space Station (ISS), draws on decades of training, space flight, and life experience to explain how the skills and mindset required for space exploration apply to everyday challenges on Earth. The memoir moves between chronological autobiography and thematic reflections, tracing Hadfield's path from a childhood dream to the pinnacle of his career and his eventual return to ordinary life.

On July 20, 1969, nine-year-old Hadfield watched the Apollo 11 Moon landing from a neighbor's cottage on Stag Island, Ontario, and decided he wanted to become an astronaut. The goal was impossible for a Canadian child: NASA accepted only U.S. citizens, and Canada had no space agency. Hadfield resolved to prepare anyway, making daily choices as if he were already training. He studied hard, read voraciously, and grew up on a corn farm near Milton, Ontario, where his parents instilled a fierce work ethic.

Hadfield joined Air Cadets at 13, earned a glider license at 15 and a powered-plane license at 16, then enrolled in military college, majoring in mechanical engineering. He married his high-school girlfriend, Helene, in December 1981. Their early years together were marked by long separations, near-bankruptcy, and the births of three children. After training on jets and CF-18 fighters, Hadfield was posted to Bagotville, Quebec, for NORAD duty intercepting Soviet aircraft. With diminishing career prospects and a growing family, he nearly left the military to become an airline pilot, but Helene intervened, telling him he would not be happy and urging him not to abandon the astronaut dream.

Hadfield discovered a passion for test piloting and won a slot at the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base after a planned posting to France fell through. He graduated as the top student in his class in 1988 and was posted to the U.S. Navy's Patuxent River test center in Maryland, where he tested F-18s by deliberately pushing them out of control to develop recovery techniques, piloted the first flight test of an external burning hydrogen propulsion engine, and was named U.S. Navy Test Pilot of the Year in 1991. When the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) advertised for astronauts, Hadfield submitted a bilingual résumé, one of 5,330 applications. After five months of psychiatric evaluations, medical tests, and panel interviews, a senior CSA official called in May 1992 to offer him a position. His predominant emotion was not joy but relief.

Hadfield arrived at the Johnson Space Center in Houston as one of 24 new astronaut candidates, instantly reduced from the top of his profession to the bottom of the food chain. He describes the long years of ground-based work that constitute most of an astronaut's career: classroom study, simulation training, and support roles such as serving as CAPCOM (capsule communicator), the primary voice link between Mission Control and crews on orbit. He argues that astronauts should view space flight as a bonus rather than an entitlement, since factors from funding cuts to health issues can prevent a flight assignment.

His first launch came on November 12, 1995, aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis. The mission constructed a permanent docking module on the Russian space station Mir, a predecessor to the ISS, using the Canadarm, a robotic arm built by Canada. All distance sensors malfunctioned during docking, but the crew improvised, relying on a single camera and memorized readings to dock manually, then broke into Mir with a Swiss Army knife when the hatch proved sealed too tightly.

A central theme of the book is the power of negative thinking, Hadfield's term for exhaustive preparation for worst-case scenarios. He explains how NASA replaces natural fight-or-flight instincts with methodical protocols through years of simulation, and describes "death sims," tabletop exercises where astronauts, administrators, and family members work through the practical aftermath of an astronaut's death. This philosophy was shaped in part by personal loss: in 1986, Hadfield's best friend, Tristan de Koninck, died in a CF-18 crash, reinforcing his determination to understand how aircraft fail. The core question he carried through his career was simple: "What's the next thing that could kill me?"

Hadfield returned to space in April 2001 on STS-100 to install Canadarm2, a robotic arm critical to assembling the ISS. As lead spacewalker, he was temporarily blinded when droplets from a leaking water bag mixed with anti-fog solution on his visor. He waited while Mission Control worked the problem, then finished the nearly eight-hour spacewalk after his vision partially cleared. He subsequently served as NASA's Director of Operations in Russia from 2001 to 2003. The Columbia disaster on February 1, 2003, which killed all seven crew members including his test-pilot-school classmate Rick Husband, further shaped this period. Rather than leaving NASA, Hadfield became Chief of Robotics and helped make the Shuttle safer. The Shuttle flew again without losing another crew member.

The memoir's most suspenseful passage concerns the medical ordeal that nearly prevented Hadfield's third flight. In October 2011, two years into training to command Expedition 35, he was hospitalized with an intestinal obstruction caused by scar tissue from a childhood appendectomy. Laparoscopic surgeon Dr. Patrick Reardon removed the adhesion, but NASA medical administrators spent months demanding additional exploratory surgery despite the Multilateral Space Medicine Board's unanimous clearance. Hadfield and Helene researched obsessively, presenting studies showing a zero recurrence rate for cases like his. At the last moment, an ultrasound was proposed as an alternative, confirmed he was healthy, and he was cleared to fly.

In December 2012, Hadfield launched from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, aboard a Soyuz rocket with NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn and Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko. After two days of transit, the crew docked with the ISS and joined Expedition 34, commanded by American astronaut Kevin Ford. Hadfield describes daily life in detail: the absence of running water, mandatory two-hour workouts to prevent bone and muscle loss, recycled drinking water, and dehydrated food. He recounts making over 100 educational videos about mundane activities like hand-washing and haircuts, many of which went viral.

On March 14, 2013, Hadfield formally took command of the ISS, becoming the first Canadian to hold the position. He maintained crew morale through shared meals, videoconferences with musicians, and a live performance of "I.S.S. (Is Someone Singing)" from the Japanese laboratory module while nearly a million children worldwide sang along for Music Monday. The climactic crisis arrived on May 9, when cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov noticed sparks outside the Station. Mission Control identified an ammonia leak in a cooling loop for a critical power system. With Hadfield's crew scheduled to depart in four days, an emergency spacewalk was planned with just one day of preparation, unprecedented in ISS history. Hadfield experienced a private moment of disappointment that he would not perform what would have been his last spacewalk, but recognized that NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn were the right choice. Serving as intravehicular crew member, Hadfield supported the spacewalkers throughout their five-and-a-half-hour EVA. Cassidy and Marshburn swapped in a spare pump module, and the leak stopped.

On his final day aboard, the crew posted a music video of Hadfield performing David Bowie's "Space Oddity," filmed on the ISS and edited on the ground. The video received nearly a million views within hours. On May 13, 2013, the crew undocked and endured the Soyuz's violent re-entry: explosive module separations, crushing g-forces, and a brutal landing on the Kazakh steppe. Over the following months, Hadfield underwent rehabilitation and extensive debriefing. He closes with reflections on life after the astronaut corps, arguing against defining success by peak moments. Seeing Earth's environmental degradation from space instilled in him a sense of responsibility as a planetary steward. He concludes that the process of becoming an astronaut taught him that what matters is not the value someone else assigns to a task but how one personally feels while performing it, and that life is better when one counts ten small wins a day rather than waiting for one every decade.