 Hi, I'm Commander Chris Hadfield. I flew in space three times as a Canadian astronaut. I was commander of the International Space Station. I even had a chance to play guitar and cover a bowie tune on the spaceship. I'm here to talk about that, but also here to talk to MTV about how I got that cool job. The road to becoming an astronaut is multi-path. You could be a medical doctor, you could be a veterinarian, you could be an astrophysicist, you could be a physical chemist. I didn't know how to be an astronaut, but I grew up on a farm, so I liked machines, so I became an engineer. And it was when I was a test pilot working with engineering that I truly was setting the path to become an astronaut. Picture yourself on a spaceship in the middle of the night. You're floating, weightless, sound asleep. You're only tethered to the wall by a shoestring. You and your sleeping bag are just floating like a feather in the wind. This watch here has a very piercing alarm, and it would start beeping at 6 a.m. You have to decide which time zone on the earth. We chose London time, Greenwich time, universal coordinated time. So when the Queen woke up, I woke up. I'd wake up quickly, wipe the sleep out of my eyes because without gravity it really collected in my eyes. They'd be sort of glued shut. I'd quickly turn on the little laptop inside my sleep pod to see if there was anything urgent going on. Quickly check the schedule for the day, grab a little bit of breakfast, and then brief with mission control. Because you're weightless, your body can be supremely lazy, so we exercise on special equipment two hours a day. So somewhere in there, you run on the treadmill with big elastics and bungees to hold you down, or you have the resistive exercise device to keep yourself strong. I want to spend an hour, you know, writing to my family or taking pictures because I know some cool part of the world is coming up. Or maybe if I have enough energy, grab the guitar and try and write some music, and then eventually float into back into that same sleeping bag, close the little doors of my sleep pod, turn the ventilation down to minimum, shut off the light, and float off to sleep. Average day. Seven days a week for half a year. School is a good place to learn, but I learned an awful lot outside of school through travel with my family, through reading books, through studying on my own. I didn't have the internet when I was a kid, but we had encyclopedia Britannica, and I treated that just like the internet. Go look stuff up, try and understand how things work. My favorite subject was English. I love the nuance of language. Probably as an English major, I wasn't going to get to be an astronaut. I was gonna have to know how spaceships work, so I tried to do well in English, but I also studied math, and I loved that math could help me solve problems that I couldn't solve any other way. I learned how to learn in school. I tried to understand the process by which I could get things in my head, so I would remember them when I needed them. I think if you were an astronaut, something that might really surprise you would be how much work it is. It's not even a job. It is who you are. It takes precedence over everything else, and it's a life of service. There's this misconception that maybe you just, you take some sort of astronaut courses, and then you fly in space, and there's lots of floating around, and then there's years of adulation afterwards. It is a lifetime of dogged, unrewarded, extremely hard work for the very rare occasional chance to fly in space, but I loved every second of it. Something else that may surprise you in space is if you sit quiet next to the wall of the spaceship for a while, you can hear meteorites ricochet off the ship. You can hear a twang of some tiny little piece of a rock, just, you know, the size of a grain of sand, but it's going 30 kilometers a second, and you can actually hear your ship being shot at by the universe, like a cosmic shooting gallery. It's a sobering reminder that you're not in Kansas anymore. I'm Commander Chris Hadfield. Thanks for watching, and I hope next time when you go outside and look up at the sky, you see it a little bit differently.