Commander Chris Hadfield, astronaut, recording artist and YouTube sensation and YouTube sensation , spoke to Radio5Live’s Afternoon Edition today from the heart of MOSI’s 1830 warehouse.
Hadfield is in the country promoting his new book of photographs taken during his months in space, You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes.
An invited crowd of 50 local year 10 school children asked questions about his time on the International Space Station and the future of space travel.
He revealed that the crews spend 2 weeks in quarantine before take-off so they don’t take any viruses into space.
As a result it’s impossible to catch a cold. He told the enthralled young audience, from Audenshaw School, Ashton on Mersey School, The Kingsway School and Ellesmere Park High from Greater Manchester, that it was possible to live on Mars but it’s so cold that you’d have to wear a space suit at all times.
He also spoke about the personal experiences of space describing space walks as making you feel ‘uniquely alone’ and how you can’t take many personal items with you, although he had taken his wife’s new wedding ring with him and gave it to her on his return to earth.
In her question, MOSI director Sally MacDonald, who today marks her 100th day at the helm asked Hadfield how his days on the space station were and if they were as varied as her own.
He replied that they were actually quite repetitive ‘apart from when you get an ammonia leak. ‘You’re living in a laboratory. I used to float past experiments on my way to the bathroom’.
One of the schoolchildren asked if Hadfield believed in life of other planets to which he stated it wasn’t really a question of belief. ‘It’s a yes or no answer and there’s no evidence to say there is at the moment’.
However, he then commented on how we are only just beginning to realise how many planets there are in the universe and how the odds that we are the only inhabitants seem slim.
He finished the broadcast in customary fashion, with guitar in hand belting out a song, Don’t by Elvis Presley.
He told us that psychologists had put a guitar on the International Space Station and that it was his son that had encouraged him to sing his now famous rendition of Bowie’s Space Oddity.
The show went out live between from the Museum of Science & Industry from 1pm and 4pm and is available on iPlayer.
