Quotes from Chris Hadfield

For whatever reason, I decided: 'I'm 18, I'm a man, I'm going to grow a moustache' - and it was pathetic for years - it was awful.

To be on my very first spacewalk, to be outside, and to have contamination in my suit to the point that I couldn't see in either eye - that, I think, would cause some people to lose control.

Airline food is cooked in an oven and then kept warm. Space station food is often cooked in an oven and then thermo-stabilised, irradiated or dehydrated and then stored for a year or two before you even get to it.

My favourite city is Moscow, because of its history, which I find fascinating. As I learned to speak Russian, it made it even more interesting.

Almost everything worthwhile carries with it some sort of risk.

Almost everything worthwhile carries with it some sort of risk, whether it's starting a new business, whether it's leaving home, whether it's getting married, or whether it's flying in space.

Ever since I was nine years old and I watched Neil and Buzz walk on the moon, I have felt passionately that this is an interesting human adventure. This is one of the things we're doing that is really fundamentally important, as we leave our home planet, but also exciting.

I watched the first people walk on the moon, and to me, it was just an obvious thing - I want to somehow turn myself into that. But the real question is, how do you deal with the danger of it and the fear that comes from it? How do you deal with fear versus danger?

It is spectacular. From about five minutes in, when we knew for sure that we were going to have the weather to go, the smile on my face just got bigger and bigger, and I was just beaming through the whole launch. I mean, it is just an amazing ride.

You could look at something a hundred times from space, but the next time you come around the world, suddenly it's very different and gorgeous-looking, just because of the change of weather or the angle of the sun.

My father was an airline pilot, so we travelled more spontaneously than a lot of families. On a Thursday, we could decide to go somewhere like Barbados the next day for a long weekend.

The Soyuz craft weighs tons, and you're lying on the floor of it on your back. But the Russians do tell you, remember, before you land, stop talking so you don't bite your tongue off.

I don't want to be treated like I came from another planet or something or was somehow born with some weird birthright or super power. I don't view myself that way. I am a normal guy, picking up the crap from the dog and scraping the BBQ and having a beer and fixing the shed out back.

Our role is to develop techniques that allow us to provide emergency life-saving procedures to injured patients in an extreme, remote environment without the presence of a physician.

A lot of people live in fear because they haven't figured out how you're going to react when faced with a certain set of circumstances. I've come to terms with this by looking deeply into whatever makes me fearful - what are the key elements that get the hairs up on the back of my neck - and then figuring out what I can do about it.

So without that Canadian invention we were grounded. And so that was a really important and key part of the mission and Canadians should take real pride in it.

I've been so lucky to have done two spacewalks. If you looked at your wristwatch, I was outside about 15 hours, which is about 10 times around the world. And, you know, there's a whole time dilation, distortion thing.

You can get claustrophobia and agoraphobia - a fear of wide, open spaces - simultaneously on a spacewalk.

There are no wishy-washy astronauts. You don't get up there by being uncaring and blase. And whatever gave you the sense of tenacity and purpose to get that far in life is absolutely reaffirmed and deepened by the experience itself.

I'm a mechanical engineer, and I grew up on a farm, so I like practical hardware - somebody's elegant solution that proves itself over the long term.

We have never lost a crew member on the space station, but of course, the Columbia accident. I was - I'd already been an astronaut for a decade when the crew of Columbia was killed. And I went through test pilot school. Rick Husband and I were out at Edwards at test pilot school together. He was the commander of Columbia.

I'm really looking forward to it, if you can imagine floating weightless, watching the world pour by through the big bay window of the space station playing a guitar; just a tremendous place to think about where we are in history.

In the Soyuz, the little Russian capsule, you can actually hear the banging of the big shield, the big heat shield on the bottom, as it slowly erodes away from the heat and pieces of it fly off like sparks across your window, and it's an interesting thing to ride through, you know.

When you look out the window of a spaceship, you see entire countries, vast swaths of continents. One turn of the head covers what once took thousands of years to traverse at ground level.