Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Astronaut, elite test pilot, aeronautical engineer, first Canadian ISS commander, spacewalker, known as the singing spaceman.
On the island
Eight records
the song that I chose to play was one about exploration and how you're there for good reasons, but you're also looking forward to the day that you return.
I've always thought this song was unique in how it made me think about music.
amazed at the creativity of it and sort of, in effect, opening my eyes to the possibilities of what music could be.
this song puts a slight panic into me when I hear it, because it harkens back to my 18-year-old rush to be turned out properly.
Choir and congregation of St Paul's Cathedral (conducted by Barry Rose, organ Christopher Dernley)
for me a really good song is where the melody stays in your head when it's done. … it sends something warm up your back. And when you read the words, they mean something to me.
it evokes emotion in me, which is, Kathy, I'm lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping. The desperation that he felt with which to say that, but it says so much.
The StoryFavourite
this song to me is the absolute expression of passion, of the highs and lows of it, of the waves of it, of how it makes you think and, more importantly, how it makes you feel.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:40Can you try to explain to us what it's like to be immersed in the spectacle of the universe?
It's magnificent being inside the spaceship and looking out and wonder through the windows. But to go outside on a spacewalk, to actually physically, with just your two gloved hands, pull yourself out of the ship and out into the universe. And to now be able to look under your feet and have the universe go endlessly in all directions around you is a brand new perspective, and it's a wondrous one.
Presenter asks
6:10Why is it important for you to popularize space in that way?
I think I feel it as a responsibility. I count myself so enormously lucky to have been one of the few people to leave Earth so far. And I run into people all the time, everywhere, every day. Who would love to have had a chance just to glimpse the stuff that I've had a chance to see, and they tell me about it all the time. How could you not want to share that brand new, extremely hard-earned perception and understanding of the world?
Presenter asks
7:02Will you share with us some of the pre-flight rituals in the last couple of hours before you prepare to take off? What must you do personally?
Some of them are less desirable than others. You, of course, you don't want to bring anything unhealthy up to the spaceship. So, just prior to putting on your spacesuit on my third flight in Russia, they rub your entire body down with rubbing alcohol, which in Russia in the winter is not that pleasant an experience, especially someone you hardly know. And you have to give yourself two enemas before you go, which doesn't seem like the glorious send-off you'd been picturing since childhood of what the flight was going to be like. And the very first person to leave Earth, Yuri Gagarin, got on the bus, drove out, and realized partway out that no one had reminded him he should go to the bathroom before he launches. So he had the bus stop as soon as they got to a fairly private place on the way out to the rocket. And he undid his spacesuit, which had all been carefully sealed up by the technicians, undid the whole thing, ran around, and weed on the right rear tire of the bus, which then, of course, became tradition and luck. And so every single crew that has ever flown into space since at that spot has run around. And we actually bring suit technicians on the bus now to redo up our suits again. And for some of the women astronauts, because the geometry and plumbing isn't quite the same, they actually bring a small vial of urine with them to squirt on the tire just to be part of the process and for luck.
The keepsakes
The book
Eugene A. Avallone et al.
I'm a mechanical engineer, and I grew up on a farm fixing tractors. And there's a book called Mark's Engineering Handbook that is the Bible of how to make and build and fix things and make things actually work.
Presenter asks
17:27Did you always feel that your risks were calculated as you were doing that rather terrifying sounding job?
The quick and the dead. Absolutely. And we watched a good friend die every year, I think, for fifteen years from starting into jet flying until we'd settle into the astronaut office. It's a dangerous profession. We expect our test pilots to die.
Presenter asks
17:49What was the most dangerous position you ever found yourself in during that period?
I did an out-of-control program in the F-18 where we would tumble them out of control. I did flutter testing where you get the airplane up to the point where the wings start going uncontrollably flexible. But the most dangerous was testing the air pressure and airspeed measuring system. You have to fly very close to the ground and go by this little engineer sitting there with a sighting tower who's looking at your exact altitude. You're only 50 feet above the ground. And I was over Chesapeake Bay where there were a lot of birds. And I was doing the last test point, which was 550 knots, very fast, you know, nine miles a minute. And just as I was coming by the flight test engineer, sitting there with his theodolite tower, I saw a seagull right where I was about to fly. But he was slightly above me, so my hand instinctively started to push forward on the stick. But then I thought, pushing down would be a bad idea. I'm 50 feet above the Chesapeake Bay. So all I could do was roll the airplane slightly, and bang, he hit my airplane, just missed the canopy, which would have killed us both. And at least from my perspective, it only killed him. And I thought he'd gone down an engine, and I shut that engine down, or at least pulled it to idle and came back and landed and survived it. But that was a matter of an inch.
Presenter asks
19:04Were you ever put off? Did you ever think, 'I have been incredibly strategic. My wife is with me on this journey – actually enough now'?
In nineteen eighty six, when our kids were very small, my best friend crashed an F eighteen. He pulled up hard into cloud in Prince Edward Island and just a minute later came vertically out of the cloud at six hundred miles an hour straight into the bay. And his little girls were the same age as our little boys. And I had to go to his memorial service and his wife gave me his twelve string guitar to play a song for him at his memorial service, which I probably played a hundred times and broke down every time before I could finally find a way to get through it. There was only one way for me to deal with that, and that was to figure out why and how did this kill him? He was a good pilot. And I was fanatical about it, I guess, relentless in digging into what were the problems with the machines at the time? How were they lying to us? How could this have happened? What did he see? Until I eventually arrived at a comfort for me of this is how the airplane killed him. And now I need to learn from that myself, but then I need to teach as many other pilots as I possibly can of this is what killed Tristan. And this is something you need to look out for. And we can't let anybody else die the same way on this thing that tricked Tristan that day into plummeting into the bay.
“It's magnificent being inside the spaceship and looking out and wonder through the windows. But to go outside on a spacewalk, to actually physically, with just your two gloved hands, pull yourself out of the ship and out into the universe. And to now be able to look under your feet and have the universe go endlessly in all directions around you is a brand new perspective, and it's a wondrous one.”
“How could you not want to share that brand new, extremely hard-earned perception and understanding of the world?”
“The quick and the dead. Absolutely. And we watched a good friend die every year, I think, for fifteen years from starting into jet flying until we'd settle into the astronaut office. It's a dangerous profession. We expect our test pilots to die.”
“There was only one way for me to deal with that, and that was to figure out why and how did this kill him? He was a good pilot. … I was fanatical about it, I guess, relentless in digging into what were the problems with the machines at the time? How were they lying to us? How could this have happened? What did he see? Until I eventually arrived at a comfort for me of this is how the airplane killed him. And now I need to learn from that myself, but then I need to teach as many other pilots as I possibly can of this is what killed Tristan.”
“I wish everybody could see our Earth for what it actually is. … to go around it enough times until the patience of it starts to seep into you and the eternity of it. … I don't know of anybody now that it's changed their faith, but it deepens it.”
“Trust yourself. You didn't get to this stage of life by accident. You have worked hard, and you're going to be asked in the next six months as a crew member and as the commander of this spaceship to make decisions on your own and trust yourself.”