‘What,” asks Chris Hadfield’s Saanich mother-in-law, “are we going to do now with no tweets?”
Good question.
After five months aboard the International Space Station, Canada’s wildly popular astronaut/social media star returned to Earth on Monday, landing in Kazakhstan at 7:31 p.m. Victoria time. No more vicarious living for the millions of enthralled fans for whom he documented daily life in orbit.
“Like they say, ‘What are you going to do next for an encore?’ ” asked Gwen Walter. It’s a question that could be asked of Canada’s space program, too.
This is the third time Walter has seen Hadfield, the husband of her daughter Helene, go into space. He flew shuttle missions in 1995 and 2001, but nothing matched the Internet-driven reaction he has earned since blasting off Dec. 19.
His @Cmdr_Hadfield account was closing in on 900,000 Twitter followers by the time he landed.
“Obviously, I am a very proud mother-in-law,” Walter said Monday.
Hadfield is now a rock star, not just figuratively but literally, on the weekend releasing a sung-in-space reworking of David Bowie’s Space Oddity that went viral on YouTube. That’s no surprise to Walter, who has danced to Max Q, the all-astronaut band with which Hadfield sings and plays bass in Houston, Texas. More regularly, he plays guitar with a group called Bandella. “He is gregarious, and not afraid to put himself out there,” Walter says.
Keeping with the Bowie theme, he is also The Man Who Fell To Earth. The irony, now that Hadfield has rekindled Canadian interest in astronomy, is that the nation’s space program has hit a rough patch.
“We’re in a period of uncertainty,” says Victoria historian Chris Gainor, the author of several books on space exploration. Stephen Harper might have been happy to do a Q&A with Hadfield and some Ottawa schoolchildren in March, but that didn’t exempt the Canadian Space Agency from the Conservatives’ spending cuts. Former cabinet minister David Emerson, in a review of the aerospace industry, reported last year that our space program had “floundered” over the past decade.
Canada is also affected by political wrangling in the U.S., where there’s a tug-of-war over how to replace the now-defunct space-shuttle program. President Barack Obama is pushing for a greater private-sector role in manned space flight, while — in a bit of a role reversal — Republicans in Congress want to preserve the government-run NASA model. The standoff has left the Russian Soyuz rockets as the only alternative for moving cargo and people to and from the space station.
The Canadian space program’s familiar faces are disappearing, too. Former astronaut Steve MacLean abruptly resigned as the space agency’s president Feb. 1, a few months ahead of schedule. This will be the last flight for Hadfield, 53. Julie Payette is off to head Canada’s new science museum.
Bob Thirsk, son of Cobble Hill’s Eva Thirsk, has retired as an astronaut. It will be years before Canada’s two newest astronauts, David Saint-Jacques and Jeremy Hansen, go to space. “They’re going to have to wait a while before they get some flight time,” Gainor says.
So, Canadians will have to savour this one. Hadfield did a lot of serious science on the space station, but it was his way of communicating with the public that won him accolades. The hundreds of photos he snapped from the space station included a couple of southern Vancouver Island. Hadfield, who spent two years at Colwood’s Royal Roads Military College, also tweeted a photo of Mount St. Helens, remarking that he heard it erupt while living in Victoria in 1980.
Busy as he was, he also proved a good son-in-law, phoning Walter from space on New Year’s Day and again on her birthday in mid-March. They wrote back and forth regularly on a private email.
Walter expects Hadfield to be reunited with Helene in Houston on Wednesday. Recovering from weightlessness will be tough.
Neither Walter nor Gainor expects him to stay down, though.
“I don’t know what he’s going to do when he finishes up his astronaut career, but he’s going places,” Gainor said.
Walter concurs: “A guy like that doesn’t just walk off into the sunset.”
