“Imagine if you had just spent six months off planet Earth,” Chris Hadfield begins. “Your spaceship undocks from the space station and then comes plummeting through the atmosphere, exerting tremendous forces on your body. The parachute opens and you slam into the world. You open up the hatch, pull yourself outside and stand unsteadily on your feet... What do you do now?”
While commanding the International Space Station, Canadian former fighter pilot Hadfield became the best-known and most-loved astronaut of our age. In the post-Apollo era, much of the magic of space travel has been eroded. No longer do we have heroic figures like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin returning from the moon to ticker-tape parades (at least outside of Indiana Jones movies).
But when Hadfield sang David Bowie’s aboard the ISS in 2013, strumming those haunting chords as he was actually “sitting in a tin can far above the world”, he reignited the sheer wonder of mankind’s mission to touch the stars. Bowie himself called it “possibly the most poignant version of the song ever created”.
