Chris Hadfield "It feels like magic”

The first Canadian to walk in space tells us about his life in Earth orbit, his music and photography and why he broke into a space station with an army knife

- Rafael Maceira Garcia

BIO - Chris Hadfield

Now a retired astronaut, Hadfield became the first Canadian to walk in space when he helped install the Canadarm2 on the International Space Station (ISS). Accepted into the Canadian astronaut program by the Canadian Space Agency in 1992, Hadfield became the commander of the ISS in 2013 and gained popularity by playing guitar in space.

Your Space Oddity cover of David Bowie’s song has over 54 million views on YouTube. Tell me a little bit about how you got into that… That’s 54 million just on YouTube. It’s got hundreds of millions of views. I’ve been a musician my whole life. I wrote and recorded a whole album on the ISS, and when people knew that there was a musician writing and recording on the ISS, a lot of people asked me to cover Space Oddity. I had never played Bowie before. He is a tremendous artist, but my son Evan, who was helping me with social media, said: “You’re not doing it for you. You’re doing it for everybody else. Just sing the song!” So I did.

When I sang his song up there it sort of soaked up the feeling of where I was somehow. It got into my voice, which I wasn’t expecting to hear. He wrote that song in 1968 before humans walked on the Moon, so he was just guessing, but he had such a vivid imagination and a huge fascination with space, and he really got it right. When I sang it up there it was much more evocative and haunting in my voice, which surprised me. We had to get permission from Bowie, of course, but he loved it. He said it was the most poignant version of the song ever done, which is pretty high praise. It had a huge response, which was great because I think it allows people to see what it’s really like to be a human up there. We’re not robots. We’re just people living in a very remote place in an entirely new set of circumstances.