Chris Hadfield, how long did it take you to do this video?

A couple of hours. I was- Saturday afternoon on a space station. I had already done the audio a few months prior, but one Saturday afternoon, my son had been insistent, saying, "Dad, you've got to film some video to go with that audio."

So I grabbed the camera and floated around inside the space station and just sang the song a couple of times thinking what would make an interesting backdrop. And then my son edited it on the ground, and it's amazing to see- to see the results of that, how it's let people see life on a space station, and therefore space travel, in a different way.

How many people have seen this on YouTube?

Just on the site where my son posted it, it's been seen over 25 million times, but I don't know how to measure it beyond that.

So what happened after this was out there in the ether?

You know, probably the interesting measure of it is I- he released it, my son did, on a Sunday night. We were coming home to land on Earth on Monday, and I really had no idea. I was getting ready. I was helping fly the Russian spaceship home. Busy. I knew that was out there somewhere. Came back.

Big, fiery re-entry, landed on the plains of Kazakhstan. Our vehicle thumped into the Earth and rolled to a stop. Russian technicians come up, open up the hatch, they drag the commander out, which is Commander Romanenko, they grabbed NASA Astronaut Tom Marshburn out, and then he saw me, and he said, "Chris привет, я видел твой клип, прекрасно мальчик!" which means, "Chris, hey. I saw your video. It was great! Outstanding, guy." And that was my welcome back to earth, not even 24 hours later, that I had the idea that just a small father/son music project had reached all the way to the plains of Kazakhstan in under a day. It's pretty amazing.

What year did you do it?

It was the last few days that it was released while I was on the spaceship, so it was a couple of years ago, 2013.

Let's do a lot of the little things before we go onto some of the bigger things. Did- actually, they're not little. It's about you. Where were you born?

I was born in a town called Sarnia, which is where Lake Huron joins the river to Lake Erie, just upstream of Detroit, right on- just on the Canadian side of the Canadian/U.S. border, a town called, Sarnia, you know, Ontario.

What service did you go into?

I joined the Canadian Armed Forces, which is now the Royal Canadian Air Force, and served a tour with the U.S. Air Force out at Edwards, tour with the U.S. Navy at Pax River, and then, gosh, 21 years with NASA.

And how many different times did you go into space?

I flew in space three times. The first was 20 years ago, going to help build the Russian space station, Mir, flying space shuttle Atlantis. The second was to go help build the International Space Station on Endeavor and doing a couple of space walks.

Then the third was to go live on the International Space Station, this time up and down on a Russian rocket, on the Soyuz. And then living onboard the space station for five months.

What's the difference between a Russian astronaut and a Canadian astronaut or an American astronaut?

Very little. You take all 7 billion of us and you set some really tight requirements and constrictions, and then you filter a whole bunch of people that apply, and then you choose a tiny, tiny representative sample of humanity, and that filter, whether it's the Japanese or Chinese, Russian, European, Canadian, American, it tends to spit out sort of the same sort of person.

The language is different, you know. If you're Russian, it's a cosmonaut. If you're French, it's a spacionaut. But the- once you get all of us in a room, we have a lot more to talk about then you might think.

How different is the Russian space program from the American space program? And of course, the Canadians are involved in what we do too.

Well, the American program and the Russian program are the ones that really set the standard for the world right from the very beginning, with Sputnik in '57 and the early American unmanned, and then, of course, the race to the moon.

It set the whole tone of it and what space agencies should look like. And they have a lot of similarities. It's a complex thing. It requires a huge amount of infrastructure that the time it takes is longer than any political cycle.

So it's got its own sort of environment, a great sense of technological pride and pride of accomplishment of something that's new for humanity. So there's a lot of similarities between the two.

The Russians have really put a lot of effort into long-term human habitation of space. NASA put a huge amount of effort into getting people to the moon and then the shuttle program. The two are very closely linked now on the International Station, so it's kind of a nice balance of expertise.

But having worked in both-I was NASA's Director of Ops in Russia for a couple of years-there are a lot more similarities than there are differences.

How many videos have you made about space?

I don't know. Someone told me it was about a hundred, but I served as an astronaut for 21 years. I'm not sure how that sounds to people, 21 years. Neil Armstrong was an astronaut for 8 years, you know, in that accelerated pace of the race to the moon.

So 21's a pretty long time to serve in the NASA astronaut corps, especially as a Canadian. And in that time, I spoke- I couldn't count the number of schools and businesses and the U.N. and everywhere I spoke, and I thought, if I ever do get to orbit for a while, if I get to go live on a space station, if I have spare time, I'm going to make a little video to answer the questions that everybody's been asking me for two decades.

And so I crammed a lot in. The people at the Canadian Space Agency churned them out into little YouTube videos, and gosh, hundreds of millions of people have watched all those videos. It was a great way to share the experience.

You've got a book, "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth." The paperback version is out...

Yes.

... here in 2015. We're going to go to another video. It'll be self-explanatory...

All right.

... and then I'll get you to fill in the blanks.

Great.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

We'll take our asparagus, and we'll take it and go and rehydrate it, and then you can see what it's like to eat asparagus in space.

So this is where we're going to rehydrate the asparagus, right here on the ceiling.

You don't want to load your spoon up too much or the food will fly everywhere. So imagine trying to mix other food in with this when the package is already this full. It really just- it's not possible.

And you can't really hold two of these or three of these at once, so you kind of just need to eat one and then eat another.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

What's an asparagus taste like up there?

I haven't seen that video- I even forgot I did that video. I haven't seen that since I made it, the day I made it. Most of our food, you saw, it went through a water dispenser, so the food's dehydrated because it saves weight taking it up to space.

So you'd think dehydrated, rehydrated asparagus would be a little disappointing to eat, especially when you're just squirting hot water into it, but actually it holds- some vegetables and the fruits don't, but it holds its texture pretty well.

It's got sort of that fibrous but chewable texture that asparagus has, and it's got quite a strong flavor as well. So actually, asparagus weathers space travel pretty well, and it tastes about as it looks.

How did you do the actual recording?

It's really busy on a space ship. I think by the fact that I made a bunch of videos, maybe it gives the impression that all you do is make videos up there, but you'll notice almost every single video is just by myself, because all other five crew members are busy off running everything.

And I just thought, okay, I'm going to east some asparagus. Let's set up a camera, take the extra 30 seconds to film it, then set the camera here, float over here, set the camera here, do the- and I just- I had been the subject of many documentaries in my life up to that point, so I'd sort of watched how professionals do it.

You know, you need the shot that shows the scene and does the introduction, and then the action, and then a close-up, and then a two-shot, and then when you're finished, and then try and bring it all together at the end. It's not that complicated, and so I would just make 15 little short 10, 15-second clips, and then overnight, when the communication with the station was quiet, we could send all that video to the ground. And then a very talented lady at the Canadian Space Agency turned all those into a minute and a half or two-minute YouTube video and fired it off to the world within a day.

And you would not believe the letters and emails and school teachers and kids and everybody that they watched those as part of science class. They watch them as part of environment classes.

They use it for so many different purposes, as well as just straight insight and entertainment. I'm really pleased that I recorded the daily life on a spaceship.

What are you doing today? Not this very day, but I mean, are you- if you're retired? And how big is your family and where do you live?

My wife and I have been together 40 years this year. We have three kids all around 30-ish. And- but they're- they've all moved away, of course. One lives in China, one lives in Chicago, one lives in Toronto.

And my wife and I lived in California, Maryland, Houston, and Russia for the last 26 years, but we recently moved back to Toronto. So now we're in Toronto, and I split my time between a bunch of things.

I teach at university. I work with schools electronically. I tie in using Skype. I've written a couple of books, and so there's book tours. I give a lot of lectures. I'm on the Space Advisory Board for Canada to help the government decide what to do.

Wrote and played a lot of music, and I perform it with symphonies now. I'm coming up with the Vancouver Symphony next. The first book's being made into a TV show down in Hollywood, and there's a series of YouTube science videos we're doing and some documentaries in the works. Lots of different things.

What kind of questions do you always get from kids?

There's a fundamental difference between what a young person asks and what an adult asks, and at first I was- I was just sort of bemused by it, but then I thought about it.

An adult will often ask me, "What's it like in space?" which is sort of an aimless question. It's like saying, "What's it like on Earth?" you know, I mean, well that's kind of a big question really.

And I realized, a kid will ask, "So when you exhale in space, and if heat doesn't rise, then why doesn't your breath just collect in front of you and slowly suffocate you with carbon dioxide?" whereas an adult will say, "So, what's it like in space?" and I think the difference is, by the time you've reached some level of adulthood, you have put limitations on your life.

You have decided, these are things that are never going to happen in my life. And so those become external to you, and so your level of engaged curiosity drops way off. Whereas if you are nine years old and you're watching a video of someone explain weightlessness and what that actually means to fundamental physical properties, then they're- they see themselves as part of that process, and it's one of the many things that may still happen in their life.

And so they become very mentally engaged, and to me that's delightful, because if they're engaged mentally, then they are challenging themselves to think of new things and perhaps make decisions with their lives that will- that will expand who they are.

How big is the Canadian space program?

It's tiny. Well, depending on what you compare it to. But the Canadian space program, the budget of the entire Canadian space program I think is less than the communications budget of NASA. Like, it's a little organization. It's just a few hundred people, but it has a lot of bang for the- for the Canadian buck.

We were the third nation in space after Soviet Union, then the U.S. We've had eight astronauts fly in space, and we have two astronauts living and working with NASA right now.

We have a lot of satellites orbiting the world. We lead the world in robotics and do a tremendous job of remote sensing and telecommunications. So it's little, but it's very purposeful, and we do a good job.

Another video. This one has to do with liquids …

They don't behave the way you'd expect.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

Did you know that the average person on Earth uses 350 liters of water a day? That's over 1,400 cups of water. Water consumption is critical on Earth, but even more so here on the International Space Station, where we have a closed environment.

From washing ourselves to making our coffee, or even when we sweat, the water that gets expelled is collected into a purification system, and we reclaim about 93 percent of all the water onboard. We even recycle our urine. But before you cringe at the thought of drinking your leftover wash water and your leftover urine, keep in mind that the water that we end up with is purer than most of the water that you drink on a daily basis at home.

That makes the International Space Station its own self-contained environment. That's a critical step towards living for long periods off of planet Earth.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Now, can you- I mean, how long does it take you to get used to drinking the urine?

You know, we all drink reprocessed urine every single day. Dinosaurs were here for tens of millions of years, and they were big, you know? All the water on earth passed through a dinosaur's kidneys at some point.

The real question is, do you have- assuming dinosaurs had kidneys; I assume they did. But the real question is, do you have a good purification system? Because by the time you drink it, you just want to have all of the impurities removed.

And whenever you flush a toilet on earth, or whatever, obviously that doesn't magically disappear. It goes into some start of a process to purify it. Maybe it'll eventually evaporate and be turned into pure rain water.

The difference on a spaceship is you know whose urine it was, and that's different. It's a little more personal, and the process is much closer and closed. But to leave earth-right now we're just orbiting the world-but to turn our tail to the world and leave, we have to go from a 93 percent water recycling system to pretty much 100 percent water recycling system.

We don't have an infinite supply of water on a spaceship if it's a long voyage. And so we're going to have to find a way to even improve that, and it's one of the things we're doing on the space station is proving the technology and the devices and the inventions that have to work in weightlessness without breaking down basically forever if we are ever going to make the ability to not just orbit the world.

How long has the International Space Station been up there?

The first piece was launched in 1998, and we have had people living permanently in space, which is a pretty significant thing to say actually. We, as a species, 15 leading nations of the world, have had people permanently living in space since November of 2000. So coming up on 15 years.

When we look back a hundred years from now and we look back and say, when was it we left Earth? It was November of 2000. That was our- that was our first permanent step away from home.

How big is it?

The station's- well, if you were in it, you'd be amazed how huge it is. But part of the beauty of it is that you're weightless. So even though, you know, the square footage doesn't mean anything, because it's a three-dimensional environment. In this studio, you and I could both, you know, be up in that corner or that corner.

So you can take advantage of volume a lot better. Maybe as a scale, it's like a couple of big airliners with a- with a door in-between them. So for- and there's only six people onboard.

So if you think of a couple of big airliners and only six people and you can use the whole internal volume, it's- you can go half a day and not see another person. I mean, it's relatively large.

When you sleep, how long do you sleep?

That's up to the astronaut. NASA pumps out a schedule of intricate, directive detail like you wouldn't believe. There's actually this electronic screen with a red line going across it that tells you what you're supposed to be doing every five minutes for the whole six months you're up there.

Imagine if your life was directed to that degree. And it tells you when you're supposed to go to sleep and it tells you when you've got to wake up, but of course, if you want to get something personal done, if you want to make a music video, for example, or make some videos, you often do that in the time where you're supposed to be asleep.

So NASA gives us seven or eight hours a night, but I got about five hours a night. And then once in a while I'd need a little cat nap during the day just to catch up.

Do you take medicine in space?

We have a full pharmacy onboard. We get trained as emergency medical technicians. In fact, maybe even beyond that, trained for basic dental work, basic surgery just in case, burn work, eyeball, what- you know, just in case somebody got badly hurt.

And so our medical team has stocked the space station with all of the supplies you need just in case someone got hurt, but we launch healthy people. We hire healthy people, and then we make sure they're extremely healthy before we launch them, and they're monitored carefully from the ground.

So even though we have medicine onboard, maybe you take some headache pills, but normally- you can't catch a cold up there. It's- there's nowhere to catch it from, and it's a pretty careful environment.

So you stay healthy for the whole time.

We have some video of somebody you may know by the name of Sunny Williams.

Sunny's a terrific human being.

And she did a bunch of videos herself?

Yes.

And you can see her on the screen right there, and she's- let's listen in to see what she's talking about.

Right.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

… doesn't matter. You don't really have the sensation of lying down. You just sit in your sleeping bag. So here's one sleep station right here. I'm going in right now. You can follow me if you want.

So I'm inside. It's sort of like a little phone booth, but it's pretty comfy. I've got a sleeping bag right here that we sleep in so we don't have a- it's sort of like a little bit of a cover, we don't fly all over the place. But, you know, you can sleep in any orientation.

I have it sleeping feeling like I'm standing up right now, but like you saw, I'm on the floor. But it doesn't matter if I turn over and I sleep upside down. I can't have it- I don't have any sensation in my head that tells me that I'm upside down. So it really doesn't matter.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

How much privacy do you have when you sleep?

It was one of the concerns when NASA and all the international partners were designing the International Space Station. What does a person actually need for privacy, especially if it's a very tight-knit crew that has trained together for a long time?

And one of the things we learned when we did it wrong by expediency, say, on Apollo or the shuttle, where there's basically no privacy, was that a little bit of privacy's a good thing, and Skylab we learned from it.

And so what Sunny was showing us there with one of the Japanese astronauts, Aki Hoshide, filming her, we have these tiny little sleep pods. They're maybe half the size of a phone booth. Just a little taller than I am, just slightly wider than my shoulders, just big enough, but when you're in there, it has, like, little saloon doors that swing together closed and have a little magnet holding them.

There's a nice fan running so you don't suffocate during the night, and then you just have a computer and the light on and off. It just gives you a little place that is your own, and it doesn't need to be much, but I think for the long-term psychological health of the crew, it's nice to have just a little introspective location.

Who owns the space lab?

The space station is 15 different nations, and it's- I mean, ownership is a complex issue internationally, of course, but the way we've determined who has access to it, who has authority over it, is basically proportionate to how much you put into it, whether you built one of the modules of it or whether you paid for some part of it.

And so it is divided across the 15 partners proportionate to the amount of their GDP or whatever that they put in to building it.

Who's put the most in it?

The U.S. and Russia are the two dominant partners. So they either built or paid for the building of most of it. The two big mission controls: there's one in- just on the outskirts of Moscow, one on the outskirts of Houston. There's a mission control in Montreal, one in Germany, one in Japan, but the predominant overall- I don't know what the right word would be. The main control is with NASA in Houston, but the Russians, because they built one whole segment of it, they, of course, have a very active program.

And when we have a serious software or hardware problem, the Russians can take over and control things. And when they have one of their serious problems, then we can do the same favor for them, and that has saved our bacon countless times over the last 20 years.

How many different sections are there to the- to the International Space Station?

There are more than you think. Each piece had to come up either discreetly in a rocket or in the back of the space shuttle, and each rocket and each space shuttle limits the size of that particular piece, naturally.

The Russian pieces are built in Moscow and shipped to Kazakhstan. So what actually limits the size of their pieces, are the height of the railway overpasses in between Moscow and Kazakhstan and the length of the rail cars.

And they have several modules. NASA has several modules. The Europeans have one big module. Japanese have a couple of modules. Canada has the big robot arm on top, but I- you know, if you looked at it, it would feel like you were in a 12-bedroom house is sort of what it feels like in- not 12-bedroom, 12-room building sort of, maybe barns or ATCO trailers bolted together.

Do you stay in your own area?

No, the station is an International Space Station. You stay in the area where your work is, but your work could take you anywhere in the station on any given day, and often you'll be working a suite of experiments this week, so you might spend 80 percent of the week in the Japanese laboratory because that's where your experiments are, but you could just as easily be anywhere else.

Here is Chris Hadfield's crying or trying to cry in space.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

So here's a common question: Can you cry in space? Do tears work? Well, let's try it out. I can't cry on command, but I'm going to take some water, drinking water, put it in my eye just as if I was crying, and let's see what happens. Get myself nice and stable for you here. Here we go.

So just as if I started crying, my eye is full of tears, but you can see it just forms a ball on my eye. In fact, I can put more water in. And so if you keep crying, you just end up with a bigger and bigger ball of water in your eye until eventually it crosses across your nose and gets into your other eye or evaporates or maybe spreads over your cheek, or you grab a towel and dry it up.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

What's your relationship with water in space when it's- it does what it just did in that video?

You have a great respect for water onboard, number one, because it's a really limited resource and you recognize how precious it is. And so you try and never do anything where the water is going to end up in the trash that we send back to Earth.

We want to wring all the water out of everything so it can get back into our evaporators and condensers and get recycled. But it's also a huge threat to us, because on earth, water always falls to the ground.

If you have electrical wires in the wall of your house, they're not liable to be submerged in water. But if water can float as a ball anywhere, think of how you would have to change the electrical panel in your house or even a simple light switch if you knew that at any given moment that light switch could be under water because a ball of water could float across the room and spread and water conducts electricity.

So we're extremely careful with stray water because the space station is solar-powered, big electrical current, enough current to kill us, and you do not want to have an inadvertent short of electricity because of stray water.

So we are very respectful of where our water goes.

When you first thought you wanted to be an astronaut to the time they designated you one, what did you have to go through? Not- I don't mean when you were a kid, but I mean, as an adult, what were you up against?

In other words, you say in the book that astronauts are competitive.

It's an extremely rare job. It's an extremely heavily sought or pursued job by a lot of people. If you stop many people in the street, they'd tell you, "yes, I'd love to be an astronaut," but how do you do it?

And the people that decide that's what they're going to do, they get advanced university degrees, they gain operational experience, they keep their body in shape, they learn to fly, they learn to scuba dive, they learn to speak other languages, they try and get this astronaut-friendly resume or C.V., and then one of the space agencies puts out an ad, used to be just in the newspapers in the want ads, now it's on the internet, you know, "Wanted: astronauts," and thousands and thousands and thousands of people apply.

And then it's this agonizingly iterative process, where you're hoping that they're at least going to respond and say, "Okay, send us more information." We want- they'll take you through psychiatric tests, psychological tests, they'll ask for more information, ask for references, but then take it down- maybe you'll actually get to come to an interview, and an interview lasts a week. And it's aptitude testing, robotic aptitude, mental acuity. You have to sit in front of a huge number of aerospace experts and experienced astronauts and run an hour-long panel interview.

And the medical is the biggest discriminator. Most people that get disqualified at that level, they get disqualified medically, just because we want as physically healthy a body as we can get.

And so in my case, when they stuck that want ad out, 5,330 people applied, and they chose 4 of us, and one of us went immediately to go start training with NASA, which was myself. So it was- it was the most unnerving five months of my life, because I'd done my best, I had laid everything out, but now I had no more control at all of whether someone thought what I'd done was going to- was going to have the right stuff.

This probably isn't easy, but what did they tell you was the reason or the reasons that they picked you out of 5,300? What did you do that the others didn't?

I've never gotten a clear answer as to why I was chosen out of those, and I've now subsequently, being an old, experienced astronaut, I have helped choose other astronauts as well.

The easy stuff you can say is do they have an advanced university technical degree, a proven ability to learn? Do they have good decision-making ability, and have they done things that show that? What else have they done? Are they interesting? Are they well-spoken? Are they coordinated? Are they healthy and fit? Is this a person that you would want to spend six months away from earth with?

You know, is this an interesting person? Is this a person who has a sense of reserve? There's a lot of straight black-and-white obvious technological, academic, and accomplishment measures, but a lot of it is a little bit ephemeral of just what is this person like.

And astronaut applicants are just guessing, you know? They're hoping they have the thing that Tom Wolff called, "the right stuff," but you never really know. But we do a good job, and only very, very rarely does a space agency hire someone and then later on discover that it just didn't suit them, or maybe after one flight they didn't enjoy it and they left.

What was your job in the space station? What were you- what was your responsibility?

I flew in space three times and went to space stations each time, so my jobs were different every time. But on my third flight, the long one, for the first half of the time I was there, I was a crew member responsible for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of things, but I was just one of the regular crew.

I was "bort injenier" (flight engineer) number- I don't remember, four, I think. But then after that, halfway through, Kevin Ford, who was the commander at the time, his ship of three was leaving, and so he handed over command from- to me.

And so for my last half of my time on the spaceship, around two months or a little more, I was commander of the International Space Station.

In all of your experience in space, when were you the most nervous or concerned or frightened?

Nobody wants a frightened astronaut, and it sounds trite, but frightened often means you're liable to make a bad decision because fear and animal reaction are what you're counting on.

And so we try and never let ourselves be in a position where we don't know what we're doing. It sounds maybe cocky too, but it's not. And that defines the life of an astronaut. It is an entire lifetime of visualizing failure, of visualizing things that are liable to fail.

What is the next likely thing to fail? We actually say, "What's the next thing that's going to kill us?" all the time. What's the next thing that's going to kill us? Okay. How can we be ready for that?

And so as a result, you spend decades, in my case, 20 years, visualizing failure and gaining all the skills so that when you fly in space, nothing gives you an unexpected fear. Everything- you're- you have a heightened sense of awareness. You have an urgency to thought. You have a real close attention to detail, but it's not- it's not a feeling of fear. It's much more of a feeling of am I- how can I make myself as keenly aware right now as possible, just to make sure that I can deal with all those things I've looked at?

The only time I actually felt a shiver of fear go up my back though was on the dark side of the earth looking at the one side of Australia, of eastern Australia in the darkness, and watching a shooting star come in between me and the earth.

And at first, I had the standard reaction of wishing upon a star, but then I had the sobering realization that that was, in fact, just a huge, dumb rock from the universe going, who knows, 20 miles a second, that missed us and made it down to the atmosphere.

And if it had hit us- it was a big enough one that you could see it. If it had hit us, we would've been dead in an instant, and that randomness and lack of ability, no matter how hard I prepared, to ever deal with anything that suddenly, what felt like a big armored ship to me, suddenly I felt like I was riding inside the Wizard of Oz's, you know, Glenda's delicate little bubble, a little aluminum bubble of air in the universe. And it just kind of reminded me of the fragility of where I was.

You said earlier you were 21 years as an astronaut and that Neil Armstrong was eight years. There's a great deal of difference between the two of you, and I want to ask you about your ability to communicate.

Neil Armstrong basically hid all the time. He didn't come- you know, he didn't spend much time in public. You've spent a lot of time in public. When did you know that you were- you had a public persona?

I think actually Neil and Buzz and Mike, the three of them, Neil and Buzz walked on the- on the moon, and Mike was orbiting, Mike Collins. Mike wrote a terrific book about it, and that really made me think. Mike was sort of the unknown member of the trio, and yet he wrote the definitive book of what the experience was like.

And NASA, to their credit, landing on the moon, they could have been forgiven for not broadcasting it live, you know? They- because the opportunity to mess up was enormous. They might've crashed. Someone might've sworn a blue streak. They might've messed up their procedures. But NASA said, "This is too important to keep to ourselves. We're going to broadcast it live for the world."

And I think that combination convinced me that if I ever get to do something like that, I'm not going to keep it to myself. I'm going to do my best to share it. I'm- I am literally and constantly reminded of the fact that I'm there on behalf of everybody else.

People are spending a lot of money for us to start to explore and live in the rest of the universe and person, and I am literally the vanguard of that. So I'm not going to just keep the magnificence or the complexity or the lessons learned from this to myself. I'm going to share them, and I think it's an important part of the job.

I think people make more informed decisions. Young people look at this as something that may be open to them, or at least to influence their thinking. And not everybody's interested in space flight, but the people who design your cars, the people who design medical research equipment, they're interested.

They're inspired. They're somewhat motivated to do what they do because of the fascinating lure of exploration and space flight.

So to me, it is self-perpetuating, and I think it's an important part of the job.

Here is another public appearance of yours on the Conan O'Brien show.

Yes.

Let's watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

It takes a lot of water, of course, a washing machine and a dryer. We don't have anything like that. So we just- we just wear our clothes until they wear out, and then you throw them in the trash, and the trash is like a little unmanned resupply ship.

And when it gets full of trash, then we close the hatch and it undocks and backs away and falls down into the atmosphere. So your dirty laundry actually gets incinerated in the atmosphere.

And so...

Wait a minute. You're kidding- you guys on the space station are throwing your underwear out- your dirty underwear out the window, and it's raining down on us?

So you know how when you're sitting in a corner of a room and there's that really sharp sunbeam coming across, and you can see those lovely little motes of dust that are falling down delicately through the sunbeam?

Yes.

Yes, that's my underwear.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

So how long did you wear underwear or the clothes that you had on you?

It's intriguing. It's an interesting thing to think about. When you and I are sitting here right now, our clothes, because of gravity, are pushed into our body. Our shirts are pushed onto our skin, and we're actually sitting on our pants and our underwear and grinding them into our body. It's just how it is under gravity.

And so naturally, the oils and everything else, the things that aren't clean on your body, get ground into your clothes.

So especially your underclothes get soiled pretty quickly. It's just normal. That's why we change them on a regular basis. When you're weightless, they are basically just hanging next to you all the time.

They're- they seldom even touch your skin. So imagine if you took your underwear and you just sort of hung them next to you for a day. How dirty would they be after a day? And on- to be personal, on the space station, I wore white underwear, and it was amazing to me that after two days, I could look and my underwear still were pristine and white.

And so we don't have a washing machine, as I told Conan there, so I would wear the clothes until they were becoming, you know, a little bit rank, and then- and then we would throw them away, because everything that comes up the station has a cost.

And so you want to wring everything you can out of it, and it was surprising to see how long clothes would last.

This is an easy thing to quantify.

All right.

How many pairs of underwear did you take into space? And you were up there for how many days?

We decided several years ago not to do it like that, because otherwise, every astronaut would have their own block of underwear, and then they would be different sizes. So we run it just as a stock up there.

There's a little place that's actually in the little throat of the station that's between one of the American modules and one of the Russian modules, and it's lined with small fabric bags, and in there there's small, medium, and large underwear and white socks and black socks, and you just treat it as a communal larder, and you just go in and choose whatever fits you.

You ever run out?

And we keep track. We do inventory every so often, and we send down to the ground, and they make sure there's enough of all sizes. It's more efficient that way.

How often does a spaceship come to the station?

There are ships that come from Russia, Japan, Europe, and the United States coming up and down on a regular basis, and they dock at all the different ports on the station.

And there's an unmanned resupply ship coming up every few weeks from one of those locations over time. So it's quite busy, because we have to move them around like a shell game sometimes to free up a port, and there's four in the Russian segment, some in the American segment.

So you can have, you know, a week where you do nothing, but you're moving spaceships around. So you get fresh fruit almost every time one of those comes up. They're the last thing they put in the ship before it leaves Earth. There's maybe a little container of oranges or apples or something, and- something that will spoil quickly.

And it docks, and you equalize pressure, and you open up the hatch to the resupply ship, and suddenly, the space station smells like oranges, which is- which is a rare and lovely smell.

Back to Sunny Williams. And she's going to deal in this video with, I assume, one of the more often asked questions. Let's just let her explain all this and get your take on it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

Here we are at the throne. This is awesome. You might see the little- you might've noticed the little moon on the outside. This is our orbital outhouse right here. And of course, it serves for two functions: Number two right here. I'll show you. But you see it's pretty small, so you have to have pretty good aim, and you'd be ready to make sure things get let go the right direction.

And it smells a little bit, so I'm closing it up. And that's of course for number two. And this guy right here is for number one. The number one stuff can sort of go all over the place if you don't aim correctly.

And did I mention both of these have a little bit of suction, so they should keep things going in the right direction, but like I said, sometimes things get a little out of control if you are out of control yourself flying around.

So we have lots of protective stuff. And, of course, you do have your privacy. There's a little door.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Does that remind you of anything?

It's the loudest thing on the spaceship when you turn on the toilet. There's a great big- great big winding noise, because of course, as Sunny said, you need the suction to pull stuff, the liquid going into the sewage treatment system, and the solids going down into that basically like a milk can, and we recycle the liquid. The solid we don't recycle.

How often do kids ask you about this?

It is the most popular- and not just kids. That is the most popular question asked is how do you go to the bathroom in space? And if people don't ask you that question, it's just because they felt a sense of decorum that they thought they shouldn't ask that question. But it's the number one question.

And how long do you train to do exactly what we're seeing her do or you do?

Astronauts train forever. You get hired and you start training. You train right up until launch, and then you continue to train while you're on the spaceship, because you- the hardest thing about being an astronaut is the memory task. How do you remember everything everybody taught you? Because a lot of it is life or death.

How do you keep something some safety technician told you six years ago when you were doing survival, how do you keep that in the front of your brain with everything else?

So we train constantly, and for something like the toilet, it sounds simple, you know? Sunny just showed you how do to the toilet, but the toilet breaks on a relatively regular basis. And that panel that had the little picture of the outhouse on it, if you popped the four corners of that and pull it out, then you're into the full guts of the filtration, and there's an acidic treatment that goes into it in order to help neutralize the liquids that come out, and then there's the centrifuges and everything in there.

And you not only have to know how to just use a toilet, but you know, have to know how to take the whole thing apart, troubleshoot it, and then rebuild it. And I think during my five months up there, I think I rebuilt the toilet three times, and other guys on the crew did as well.

It's the complexity not only of learning to use things, but of how everything works and how to rebuild every single thing onboard a whole spaceship.

How did you do this book, "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth"? Did you take notes while you were in space?

I recently found in an old email from 15 years ago my first conversation about writing that book with a Canadian journalist named Bob McDonald, and he- and at that time, I told him, "This is how I want this book to go." I had forgotten that it was that long ago.

I didn't keep specific notes, but I started working on the book sort of in my spare time, making notes in other places, "Hey, this is- I need to remember to include this," and started working on the book in earnest about two and a half years before it was published and just did it in fits and starts and then had a lot of events during my third space flight that made it into the book.

So it was a big effort, and of course, it wasn't just me, you know. It's a team of people working with an agent and advice from writers and editors and family and, you know, and a lot of effort externally. But the book is now in 20 languages, and it's used- there are ministers that use it as the basis of their sermon. It's used by businesses. And my whole purpose of writing that book, "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth," was to try and be useful.

What out of this experience is useful at the personal level? It's entertaining, you know, the funny stories, but so what? What is useful out of it? And I think that's why it's been successful around the world.

How much of it did you actually write?

I wrote the majority of it, but I worked with a professional writer to make sure, just like everything else I've done in my life. I don't feel that I should make all the mistakes myself. I want to get advice from other people.

And how many copies of this book have sold?

I don't know. Hundreds of thousands. It was a New York Times Best Seller. It's- it's still- actually, this week it's on the best seller list in Canada, has been for a long time. It's all over the world.

And now it's in paperback, and so it's less expensive and...

Yes. And so actually elementary schools are now- are now using it in grade eight as a study series through the library because it's available in paperback. It's cheap enough at that level. So I'm delighted.

Why is it that if you want to go- and I guess you're finished with space, but if you wanted to go back or anybody wants to go back to this space station, they have to fly a Soyuz Russian craft to get up there?

People that have lived on the space station have always gone to the station and back on the Soyuz since Expedition 1, because the best the shuttle could do was visit, and when the shuttle wasn't there- the shuttle could only fly for a couple of weeks. When the shuttle wasn't there, if we had a fire or if the space station had a leak, if it got hit by a meteorite or something, we would have to get into the Soyuz, which was permanently there, and fly it home. It's our lifeboat, and it doesn't fly itself home. You would have to fly it home.

And so you have to be qualified as a Soyuz crew member to live on the space station, always. The shuttle was a huge delivery vehicle, and it built the station. Magnificent vehicle. Most capable flying machine ever built. But we've always used the Soyuz to take people to the station and back.

But that's about to change, because NASA has two companies, a consortium led by Boeing, and SpaceX, and both of them are building vehicles right now to take people to the station and back.

So we're not just reliant on Soyuz, and that'll be a big improvement. And they should be flying, the plan is in 2017, so coming pretty quick.

Who's up there now?

There are six people on the space station right now, a mixture of people from different countries, as always. There's always been at least one American and one Russian on the station since the first crew went up there in 2000.

Maybe the most significant up there right now- I don't know how you measure significance, but there is an American and a Russian that are up there for a year right now, a guy named Mikhail Kornienko, and Scott Kelly, and that's the longest any American will have flown in space continuously.

There's also a Russian named Gennady Padalka who'll have been up there for 850 days. He'll- this will be- this is his fifth turn on station. There's an Italian woman named Samantha Cristoforetti who is brilliant, speaks five languages, and is a test pilot and a, and a military pilot, and there's a wonderful little microcosm of earth that is up there exploring the rest of the universe.

How good is your Russian?

My Russian's good enough to fly a Russian spaceship.

Where did you learn it?

I studied Russian for 20 years, and I was NASA's Director of Operations in Russia for a couple of years. But I was the pilot, well, they call it "bort injenier odin," I mean, like, "flight engineer one." The commander of a Soyuz, the Russian spaceship, sits in the middle, and the co-pilot, or pilot, you know, commander pilot is what we'd call it on the shuttle, sits on the left.

I was the pilot, essentially, of the Soyuz, which means if the commander got appendicitis or burnt or something, I would have to fly the Soyuz completely by myself. So I had to qualify to be a Russian spaceship commander, essentially, and none of the training's in English.

None of the professors that teach you orbital mechanics and control theory speak any English. So I speak Soyuz really, really well, and my Russian is good enough to handle everything I need to do.

How much education do you have?

I went through the military academies in Canada for an undergraduate degree. I did post-graduate work at the University of Waterloo. I did a master's degree at the University of Tennessee. I went through the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School. But really, I've been studying my whole life.

But formally, I have a master's in aerospace systems science.

What American planes have you been qualified to fly?

I've flown about a hundred different types of airplanes, so it's a big list. Most of them are American-built. So lots and lots. Everything from little one-person gliders through to C141, C5, 747, space shuttle, you know, although I don't fly it by myself.

But my- the airplane that I flew the most was the F18. I was a fighter pilot working for NORAD, ironically enough, intercepting Soviet bombers in North American airspace as an F18 pilot, but I've flown a lot of other airplanes also.

Here you are, and I'll ask you after we watch a little bit of it, why you were able to talk to somebody like William Shatner and how you communicated with Earth. Let's watch the video.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

Mr. Shatner, this is Mission Control Houston. Please call station for a voice check.

I'm calling. This is Shatner. Do you hear me?

Mr. Shatner, this is the space research vessel, ISS, in earth orbit, and yes, I hear you loud and clear. How do you hear me? This is Chris Hadfield.

Chris, I hear you loud and clear. It's such a pleasure to talk to you. Do you find yourself in the space station observing as a scientist a part of it, removed from it, or are you able to be- to see the unifying parts of it so to become at one with the universe?

You never saw it on stage while you were filming, but the view that they used to put in for us watching Star Trek of how the world looks out of Sulu and Chekov's windows there, that's how the world looks. It is an enormous, wonderful, rolling earth below us. But all you have to do is flip yourself upside down, and suddenly the rest of the universe is right there at your feet below you.

And that's where the engineer in me, of course…

(END VIDEO CLIP)

What does that- when you turn upside down like that, what's that feel like?

You can't tell which way up is. It's completely random. There is no difference. You know, I do it deliberately when I'm on-camera because it looks so different. It completely defies the laws of gravity that we're so used to on Earth, but on a spaceship, there- you rapidly get used to the idea that there is no defined up and down.

And your inner ear becomes completely driven by what it sees, not by what it senses, and so it doesn't care. You- there is no up or down. You can just float any way. It's kind of magic.

How fast are you going on the space station, and how many times do you loop the earth?

You're going five miles a second. You have to decide relative to what, but essentially, five miles a second around the world. So that's 17 and a half thousand miles an hour, which is such a big number. You need to- you need to measure it different, right?

And so one way to say it is you go from L.A. to New York in nine minutes, that's how fast you're going, which means you go around the whole world in an hour and a half. And so 24 hours, that means you go around the world 16 times a day.

And the beauty of that is our orbit isn't with the equator. Our orbit is tipped like a hula hoop 52 degrees up from the equator, so we go north and south and north and south, and the world turns underneath you as you're going around.

So every time you cross the equator, of course, it's a new part. And so you see the entire world every day. You see all seven and a half billion people every day, and with a clarity and a three-dimensional perspective that is entirely different than you would expect. It looks nothing like a globe or Google Maps or any sort of chart where north is always up and different countries are a different color.

It is nuanced and beautiful and textured and real and just mesmerizing to look at.

We're going to close the program with a little more from the song you recorded up here "Space Oddity." What is that song? Why did you pick that?

I- my brother and I wrote a Christmas carol, and I launched just before Christmas. So I recorded it quick up there and released it. As soon as people heard that there was a musician recording on space station, there started being this internet clamor to do a cover of "Space Oddity," David Bowie's tune. I had never covered Bowie in my life, but my son was insistent who was taking care of a lot of the social media for me.

He insisted I make it. I did a version of it. Friends put in the piano and instruments- instrumentals underneath, and we had a really lovely instrumental track. And then my son was again insistent, saying, "Dad, it's got to be video. You're in space!" And I was like, "I'm busy up here," but that- as I said, that Saturday, I went around and made a video and put the whole thing together.

But really, it was- it was not a plan. It was a father/son project, and it was done just sort of in response to requests from all around the world.

And he edited it back on earth?

He and a friend of his named Andrew Tidby. My son, Evan, and a guy named Andrew Tidby took all that raw video. The Canadian Space Agency processed it and gave it to them, you know, just to make sure there was nothing, you know, nobody floating by in the background wearing their underwear or something, and then- and then they put together that video, and it- there was no master plan to it, but it just got done in time so that we released it the day before I came home.

Our guest has been the author of the book, "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth," Colonel Chris Hadfield. Let's close by watching more of "Space Oddity."

Happily.