Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield spent a few hours on Sunday, Feb. 17, fielding questions from the nerds gallery on Reddit.
Many questions covered the day-to-day life of living in orbit around the Earth, getting responses including a description of his "Sleep Station, a small padded room with a door, completely private, like a bedroom without the bed, and phone-booth sized."
Hadfield told the digital crowd about some of the embarrassing moments in the life of an astronaut, such as the time he forgot his commander's name on a live national TV broadcast, and his occasional difficulty with zero-gravity movement.
"I hit my head about once per day," Hadfield commented.
Some of the readers were interested in Hadfield's thoughts, as a publicly funded space explorer, on the growing trend of privatization of space travel. The missions that supply the International Space Station, where Hadfield currently lives and was writing from, were recently taken over by Space X, the private rocket corporation founded and run by Internet mogul Elon Musk, after NASA shutdown the space shuttle program.
"Privatization is the right and natural way to go, and we are on the cusp of it now," Hadfield said. "We have a Space X Dragon coming to ISS in 2 weeks, we'll grab it with Canadarm2."
Many of the questions Hadfield answered over the weekend came from young children, for whom he had some encouraging and inspiring advice.
"We have robot ships at the Moon, on Mars, and by every planet in the Solar System," Hadfield said, when a seven-year-old girl asked the astronaut when humans would return to the moon. "We'll go to the Moon in person again as soon as we've learned all we can on ISS, and have solid, reliable engines to take us there and back."
"Can you invent those engines? You have an entire life to do it in. Then you could ride them, and stand on another world."
Hadfield has been the Internet's ambassador to outer space for a while now, with a very popular Twitter account, which he uses to post thoughts and photos from the ISS.
Also a musician, Hadfield recorded a song with some of his fellow Canadians from the band Bare Naked Ladies, after the success of some of his solo compositions on his Soundcloud page.
