What to do when returning to Earth after three flights into space?
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield faced this question after completing his last mission.
“You kind of come out of that ship almost like a newborn,” Hadfield said in one episode of the series. Bookends with Mattea Roach.
“This is a really good time to take stock and think, 'What do I want to do now?' What excites and excites me, and what challenges me?” And perhaps more importantly: “What do I want to achieve?”
One of these activities was writing a book. And Hadfield did it—many times.
His works include non-fiction, children's books and, most recently, three fast-paced thrillers based on his adventures in space called The Apollo Murders.
Last orbit This is the final film in the collection, set in 1975 during the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a space race.
Hadfield joined Roach to discuss his transition from astronaut to writer, and the real-life stories and research that color his writing.
WATCH | Chris Hadfield on Bookends with Mattea Roach:
Mattea Roach: Why was being a writer always part of the post-astronaut life plan?
Chris Hadfield: This was my favorite subject at school. It was what I had the most intuitive ability for. I loved to read. I loved to write. I wrote poetry. I wrote short stories. I wrote a book of limericks. I just found learning a language, manipulating language and being able to share ideas through the written word really interesting. It was here that I learned most of what I knew.
I knew that if I got a degree in English, I wouldn't be allowed to command a spaceship.– Chris Hadfield
So, I always wanted to write, but I knew that if I got a degree in English literature, I wouldn't be allowed to command a spaceship. So I just put it aside.
Last orbit The action takes place in July 1975 during a real joint mission between the United States and the Soviet Union. What influenced this mission and what is its long tail?
It arose from slow, behind-the-scenes negotiations between Soviet and American senior leaders. It took five years of work, led by Glynn Lunney of NASA, who appears in the book, and a number of other people who had to figure out how to dock two ships that did not have compatible docking mechanisms.
How do you communicate if we don't use the same frequencies or languages? And how is the Mission Control Center in Moscow going to talk to the Mission Control Center in the USA?
It was challenging enough, but there was also a change in geopolitics and goals, and convincing all people and all levels that it was a worthwhile task.
In the end we just decided to just dock Soyuz and Apollo. They selected extremely experienced crews on both sides and were able to successfully dock and undock in July '75 and demonstrate that even in the dark there are rays of light.
I want to talk about this main character who appears throughout the series, Kaz Zemeckis. He works as an air traffic controller and lost an eye due to a bird strike while flying an airplane. Can you share stories that happened to you and your friend that led to this accident?
I was a test pilot. Every airplane that a person has ever flown has been tested thousands of times by a particularly qualified and trained pilot.
One of the things we tested on the plane was how it senses speed and altitude. One way to do this sounds rather strange: you fly at a precise altitude above the water. First you go at 200 knots, then 250, then 300. You pass by a small observation tower and the technicians in the observation tower watch you approach, and at that moment you record what all your instruments are showing, and they record what is happening outside, and based on that they can then calibrate your entire system. So it's old fashioned, but it works. This is called a tower flyby.
I flew past the tower at top speed, 550 knots, or nine miles per minute. As I hit the first tower, I see something on the windshield in the distance on the head-up display. Then I realized it was a seagull. I'm going at 550 knots, going through speeds you can't even imagine.
Just as I was about to hit the seagull, it made the fatal mistake of diving, which would have worked for most things, but not for an F-18 flying that fast, and it tucked its wings. Instead of it going straight through my windshield, which is what should have happened, I just jerked the plane to the right and heard it hit somewhere on the side of my plane. I thought my left engine had stalled.
So what are you doing now? I turned off the left engine and increased the speed because I had that speed. So I went up nice and high, declared an emergency, turned around, came back, landed on the runway.
A friend of mine, flying under similar circumstances, was hit by a bird. It flew through the windshield, hit him in the face and took out his left eye. He then had to close his eye and turn his head so that a gust of wind would blow the blood out of his good eye so that he could see the ground well enough to be able to land. And he managed to return his plane to the ground. From then on, his call sign was “Cyclops”.
I took his story and then I took my F-18 story and combined the two to wound Kaz and set him up for the rest of the series.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Alicia Cox Thomson with support from Sarah Cooper.
