Fatherhood is the unending imperfect task of turning yourself into your dad while secretly maintaining the unbridled elation of your boyhood Chris Hadfield More Quotes by Chris Hadfield More Quotes From Chris Hadfield Doing a space walk. It is one of the most rare human experiences. To leave your spaceship and go outside, so that you are alone in the universe with Earth distant and the universe around you. That is amazing. Chris Hadfield human-experience space earth Scientific literacy is one of the underpinnings of everything I do. It's why I work with schools. It's why I teach at university. I do a lot of outreach to try and improve general scientific literacy, but the core of all scientific literacy is just literacy. Chris Hadfield literacy trying school Early success is a terrible teacher. You're essentially being rewarded for a lack of preparation, so when you find yourself in a situation where you must prepare, you can't do it. You don't know how. Chris Hadfield finding-yourself preparation teacher I want to know: How does a space suit on Mars work? Show me how it is pressurized, and how it is cooled. What's the glove design? None of that stuff can be bought off the rack. It does not exist. You can't just go to SpaceMart and buy those things. Chris Hadfield design space doe Our three big emergencies are fire, loss of pressurization or contaminated atmosphere. Any of those things in a spaceship are very deadly and time critical. Everybody's trained, but I'm the commander of the ship, and it's up to me to decide. Chris Hadfield atmosphere fire loss It's good to have a fear of heights. I mean, it's kind of crazy not to because if you just lean out a little bit and there's a gust of wind or somebody bumps you or something and you fall, you're splat. Chris Hadfield crazy mean fall When you have some skills but don't fully understand your environment, there is no way you can be a plus one. At best, you can be a zero. But a zero isn't a bad thing to be. You're competent enough not to create problems or make more work for everyone else. And you have to be competent, and prove to others that you are, before you can be extraordinary. There are no short-cuts, unfortunately. Chris Hadfield cutting zero skills It is spectacular. From about five minutes in, when we knew for sure that we were going to have the weather to go, the smile on my face just got bigger and bigger, and I was just beaming through the whole launch. I mean, it is just an amazing ride. Chris Hadfield smile weather mean One Chief Astronaut used to make a point of phoning the front desk at the clinic where applicants are sent for medical testing, to find out which ones treated the staff well-and which ones stood out in a bad way. The nurses and clinic staff have seen a whole lot of astronauts over the years, and they know what the wrong stuff looks like. A person with a superiority complex might unwittingly, right there in the waiting room, quash his or her chances of ever going to space. Chris Hadfield waiting-rooms space years Preparation is not only about managing external risks, but about limiting the likelihood that you'll unwittingly add to them. When you're the author of your own fate, you don't want to write a tragedy. Aside from anything else, the possibility of a sequel is nonexistent. Chris Hadfield fate risk writing My favourite city for nightlife is Toronto, as it has such a multicultural feel, with so many different restaurants and theatres. Chris Hadfield favourite-city nightlife cities Our training pushes us to develop a new set of instincts: instead of reacting to danger with a fight-or-flight adrenaline rush, we're trained to respond unemotionally by immediately prioritizing threats and methodically seeking to defuse them. We go from wanting to bolt for the exit to wanting to engage and understand what's going wrong, then fix it. Chris Hadfield training exit fighting Most budget airlines anywhere in the world are going to leave you dissatisfied after using them. Chris Hadfield airline budgets world The Moon has given us months, tides and a destination that ever-beckons. It's time we build a rocket and go to stay. Chris Hadfield rockets epic moon The danger is different from the fear. ... [practice] what to do if things go wrong, as well as right. Chris Hadfield different practice danger For the last several years and culminating in six months in orbit next year, I've been training for my third space flight. This one is almost in a category completely different than the previous two, specifically to live in on the space station for six months, to command a space ship and to fly a new rocket ship. Chris Hadfield space-flight two years In all of the movie portrayals, a spacewalking suit seems sort of insignificant, like a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. No one thinks much about it. But it's a spaceship, not a spacesuit, an entire life-support mechanism that's incredibly complex and cumbersome. It's very difficult to put on and off. You have to run it the whole time you are wearing it, and it redefines how you move. It's like if you put on a wetsuit and a snowmobile suit and froze yourself solid and then tried to go and do work. Chris Hadfield running moving thinking If you haven't learned to ride a bike by the time your peer group has, then suddenly it's an embarrassment and you'll avoid opportunities where you're expected to ride a bike. And then it starts shaping your behaviour. Reading is much subtler, but much more destructive if you have not - for whatever reason - learned to read by the time you should. Chris Hadfield reading reason opportunity From space, the Bahamas is the most beautiful place on Earth. Chris Hadfield bahamas space beautiful My favourite city is Moscow, because of its history, which I find fascinating. As I learned to speak Russian, it made it even more interesting. Chris Hadfield favourite-city cities interesting
