It took decades for Chris Hadfield to become an overnight sensation.
Not that Hadfield was complacent during those pre-sensation decades. He was a Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot; he flew two space shuttle missions; he was the first Canadian to walk in space; he was the voice of mission control to astronauts in orbit.
Decorated: sure. Respected: you bet. But a global sensation? Not quite.
This was to change in December 2012, when Hadfield assumed command of the International Space Station (ISS). There, armed with social media tools that would have been unfathomable in the era of Armstrong and Aldrin, Hadfield began sharing his experiences with the people of Earth.
His steady stream of tweets and postings — real-time images of storm systems and cloud formations, and candid observations about life aboard the ISS — catapulted the Ontario native to rock star status (a title cemented when his performance of David Bowie's Space Oddity went viral).
"It's not like I was attempting to be any type of sensation at all," the now retired astronaut told WE during a phone interview as he was driven between Vancouver engagements. "I was just saying, 'Come on board and look at the amazing things that are going on and what you can see.'"
Today, Hadfield is the face of space. Now that face (and its famous mustache) is in constant motion as Hadfield promotes his New York Times bestselling book, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth.
The book — which chronicles Hadfield's extraordinary and sometimes harrowing experiences in space — has afforded Hadfield the opportunity to do something he's never done before: to reflect on his life. "There are so many things over the last 21 years as an astronaut that are just a blur, and you lose the significance of them, and you don't see the gradual changes within yourself," said Hadfield, who decided he wanted to be an astronaut when he was nine-years-old. "The introspective process of trying to write them down and clarify them was really instructive for me."
And instructive for countless others, too, including the hundreds of Hadfield fans who lined an entire block of West Broadway on Monday night to meet their hero at Kidsbooks.
In conversation, the straight-talking Canadian — who'll begin a three-year professorial term at the University of Waterloo in Fall 2014 — moves deftly from topic to topic. He speaks as eloquently about cultivating facial hair ("Trim it so that it's nice and even, and do what suits your face") and his first meal back on Earth ("The first place [our plane] stopped was Prestwick, Scotland, and at our request, they had the local pizzeria make us some good Scottish pizza") as he does the best piece of advice he ever received ("Trust in myself, from my father") and how time in space has altered his views on life ("The sense of them has diminished to practically nothing and become pretty much a collective sense of us").
This conversational agility is perhaps an example of Hadfield's commitment to living in the present moment — a point of view he cultivated long before he was an overnight sensation. "I don't spend time looking backwards and reminiscing about things that have happened in the past," he said. "I think it's far more important to look forward to the things that are happening then miss the things that are past."
