Chris Hadfield’s Final Orbit! The Moon Landing Hoax, UAPs, China & the New Space Race

Some astronauts will tell you that optimism got them to space. But Chris Hadfield will tell you that optimism in space will get you killed. He's the first Canadian to ever command the International Space Station. Five months in orbit, leading an international crew in the most hostile environment humans have ever worked in. Before that, he was intercepting Soviet bombers in the Arctic, test flying experimental aircraft for the U.S. navy and systematically preparing for a goal that didn't even exist when he started chasing it at age 9. And then he made one of the most epic pivots in human history. He became a best selling fiction author, writing the Apollo Murders, the Defector and the subject of today's conversation, Final Orbit.

Chris draws on his 25 years in the military, not for his training on how to kill people, but how to stop wars. He uses his expert knowledge about intercepting Soviet bombers and flying into outer space to helping build the space station near with those same Soviets that he once viewed as enemies. Working cooperatively in peace, in orbit. But now, in his new thriller, Final Orbit, Hadfield tells the true story of the Chinese space program. Political witch hunt, an exile, genius battles in space, and 70 years of consequences later, we're still dealing with a new rival that's rising in the east and what the rise of conspiracy theorists and even encounters with unidentified flying objects mean for the future of humanity in space. This is Commander Chris Hadfield on how America created its worst rival but rose to the occasion. Let's go deep into the impossible.

That's a great pleasure to have back on the show. Commander Chris Hadfield, one of our most requested and favorite guests on the podcast. Welcome back to the into the Impossible podcast, Brian.

I've been looking for a reason to be talking to you again, so I'm glad a new book is it and I really enjoyed our last conversation. So thanks for having me back.

I just couldn't resist when I saw this new book coming out. I begged, borrowed, stole. I love the audiobook. Kress, the narrator, is just phenomenal. You guys did a great job on it.

Thank you. Yeah, Ray Porter's the best in the business. Andy Weir, who wrote the Martian and Project Hail Mary, is a good friend and Ray does all of his books as well. But this book, it was great because Ray was actually stopping during the recording to send me notes to say just how great and how much fun he was having recording this book. So I'm really delighted with it.

Yeah, Andy Weir is a frequent guest and he was on. And he also gives his encomia to this book which is, which is Lovely. Andy was not a graduate of ucsd. He never graduated. But he's a proud son of San San Diego. So we'll claim them. We'll claim them anyway. Anyway, happy International Space Week.

This book comes out. I don't think it's a coincidence, is it, Chris, that the book comes out on the anniversary almost of Sputnik's launch in 1957. Right.

Well, it's always Space Week for me in my life, but October sky, it shocked everybody when that little beeping ball went around the world. I launched from the same launch pad that Sputnik did, which is just bizarre to how that all links together. And the same one Yuri Gagarin launched from. So, yeah, it is indeed a small world, but also amazingly short amount of time since that first launch to what has happened now.

Yeah, I want to talk about that. Especially with the newly thawed and then frozen relationships with the former Soviet Union, with the Russians, including their space program. But before we get there, I mean, since we're on the subject of, you know, kind of Sputnik, which I believe had at least the shell of it, right, Chris was from a nuclear warhead or was a decommissioned nuclear warhead.

Gosh, you've exceeded my Sputnik knowledge. I mean, that's obviously where the rockets came from. When people asked why the Soviets won the space race, they said it's because our military biggest in the world, our microcomputers biggest in the world. And so they needed big powerful rockets in order to be able to wage war. And that gave them an advantage over the Americans so that they could launch Sputnik in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin in 1961. And it took a huge effort under Kennedy and beyond for the US to catch up. But yeah, I mean, Sputnik wasn't much. It just transmitted a beeping noise, but you could see it.

That was the amazing thing. For the first time in human history, you could walk outside pretty much anywhere on Earth and watch a man made satellite go over. And it was kind of a weird revelation of what the future was going to bring.

Incredible. And of course, the Cold War figures prominently in all three of your novels. And I always have to, you know, take a little bit extra time when I prepare for a novelist like you or when Andy's been on the few couple times he's been on, because I don't want to give away anything about the book because for one thing, it would be a crime against my audience because to deny them the pleasure of all the cliffhangers and my favorite Part of the book, which are the endnotes. Chris. I love that you guys read the endnotes. And it's science fact. I mean, it's not science fiction. Most of it is based on factual events.

Right?

Most of the stuff that's happened in all three of my books, and that includes the newest one, Final Orbit, are all real, real people, real events. To me that makes it much more engaging because you as the reader recognize all of these touchstones. Hey, that really. I know that happened. I know that name. I know that person. So what? Part of this book is actual fiction. And because I'm an engineer and a fighter pilot and a test pilot and an astronaut, the facts are all right.

And so to me, it's really important to have all of those cornerstones of history and reality and people, and then to squeeze my plot in and do things that are plausible. But really, hopefully page turning that, to me, that's the great excitement of writing and reading a book like that.

Yeah. And it's so timely. Also your books, even though they're set 50 years ago before a lot of my audience was even born, a lot of it is timely. And I see things today that echo in the headlines basically from Project Blue Book and the Cold War and the Pentagon hearings that we're having today on UFO and UAP disclosure. I wonder if we can start there. As an astronaut, you've been literally a up there and, and you're one of the most popular public, you know, faces of science and certainly astronaut and astronomy and exploration. What do you make of this? Is this sort of a recycling of the paranoia perhaps, or Cold War, you know, psychism that, that got in, you know, ingrained in the collective unconscious of, of of America in particular. I see this as a worldwide phenomena, but, but predominantly American.

So I'm going to ask you, is this, is there something to this? Is there something that's being hidden from the public? What do you make of this fascination by fellow pilots about things like UAPs?

Well, let me say at the outside, I'm convinced there's life somewhere else in the universe. The odds are overwhelming. You know, we've been looking with our greatest telescopes. We just went over 6,000 planets we've seen orbiting other stars using our telescopes. We have a probe going to Europa. We're driving around on Mars looking for life. But so far we have no concrete evidence. We've got lots of, you know, hints.

We recently saw some stuff on Mars. It's like, wow, that's kind of, you know, what biology does. But we have nothing Hard and conclusive. It's all sort of, hey, I saw a thing, or hey, what was that thing I saw in the sky? Or you get a whistleblower somewhere. I'm always a little suspicious when I hear someone's a whistleblower. I mean, well, if it's a fact, it's a fact. Why are you blowing a whistle? Why don't you just present the compelling evidence scientifically and it's irrefutable. And so far there's none of that.

So to me, I mean, it's exciting to think that there's more beyond your day to day life. That's why the Lochmann nes monsters so exciting and Bigfoot is so exciting and ghosts are so exciting because it adds more depth and breadth and story and interest to everyday life. But until there's actual compelling evidence. I've lived in space for half a year. I know all the astronauts and cosmonauts. My dad was an airline pilot. My brothers are airline pilots. I flew in the Canadian Air Force, U.S.

air Force, U.S. navy, and in NASA for my whole life. No one has ever seen anything conclusive. So it's great fun to think about. I'm sure there's life somewhere else in the universe, but I'm waiting for real hard evidence.

That's funny because you've explored the outer environs of our world, but you're known for building worlds in these three magnificent novels. I wonder as I read it, I was a kid in the early 1970s, but I grew up in the 80s and certainly the specter of the Soviet Union and now China or later China loom large. And I wonder if the lack of their claims about UFO sightings and so forth in, in Russia nowadays or in China, is that perhaps a byproduct of the secrecy that you really detail in this book? These missions that were just phenomenal and against all odds, is there something about an open society like the west, like Canada, America, et cetera, that leads itself to grand conspiracies perhaps that maybe don't exist in authoritarian parts of the world that you, that you describe here?

Yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean there's a lot in the United Kingdom as well. I think people have traditionally been far more afraid to speak out publicly in the Soviet Union, Russia and in countries like China. It's just a different culture and definitely in the harshness of the Soviet Union, not a place where you were just going to go touting off personal theories with a megaphone out in public. So I mean, we encourage original thought and we encourage people to speak their opinion, no matter how factual or not. And that's fine. That's a healthy, I think, way to be. You have to do the research yourself and nobody really understands anything.

We do our best to explain it to ourselves, but you don't have to dig very far on any topic to get to the bottom what people know. So you've got to build an understanding of the universe that works for you, and then you got to decide how you're going to share it. If you're in a very restrictive society, you might just keep it to yourself or within confines of your own walls. If you're in a, you know, a place that has Monday Night Football, then, you know, you're probably just going to go talk to everybody about it and see what other people think. It's fascinating. And also, of course, if you're the U.S. air Force or Space Force and you're trying to fly secret airplanes around or airplanes that are still under development, it's kind of handy if people think they're UFOs, because then you don't have to be quite as worried when someone spots something because you can just let you know, people have their own conspiracy theories and it kind of. There's no harm.

And it kind of serves two purposes.

I'm also a pilot, Chris, but of course, you know, it's like the guy who partnered, you know, who said after Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points back in the 50s, he said, Tonight, I'll always remember as a night I teamed up with Wilt for 102 points. So, you know, my level of piloting is, you know, Cirrus. So Cirrus has these cool features built in. Checklist, which is a checklist that's built in, is right in front of you. It's like idiot proof. You go through, you have to push, I'm safe. You have to go through all the different, you know, buttons and knobs and so forth and monitor everything. It's a brilliant system.

I wish more aircraft would do that. But there's checklists throughout this book and I just love it as a, as an aviation nerd, as a pilot. But I was thinking about different types of checklists. Obviously your co author, your fellow author, bestseller, Atul Gawande, had this famous book called the Checklist Manifesto, talking about, in his case, surgeons saving lives using checklist. You know, humanity is sort of wired since the beginning of least religious history, with the Ten Commandments, the Passover Seder, our calendars, they're all checklists. Why are Checklists sort of the ultimate survival tool. And maybe, just maybe, as you use them, a storytelling tool.

It's because we have the capacity for random thought and imagination, but the real world doesn't. The real world is just facts and things happening. And so how do you pull yourself away from your imagined version of the world? And you're daydreaming and the stuff that happened to you so far this morning and so far this week, and actually do a heart transplant or land an F18 on an aircraft carrier or dock a spaceship with a space station. I mean, you need help. You need a crutch for your brain. And so checklists. What I try and do is boil it all down after years of study and thousands of pages of information, this particular thing on one page, and then that morning I can wake up and read that one page. And it's not just the information on that page, but my brain can remember the huge pyramid of information that was underneath it.

And so one little word means a whole bunch to me. And before I land an airplane, I'm sure you do the same, but you got this Gump jet gas undercarriage mixture, props and flaps. Well, what the heck does that mean? But so long as you've studied it, it's going to keep you from making a dumb mistake and doing something wrong with your airplane. And you need to have those good publish checklists in life. And I remember asking my dad once, I said, hey, when I was driving the car, learning to drive a car at 16, I said, how come we don't have checklists for cars? And he said, well, you should, but cars are super simple. And they've refined the technology so well that you probably don't need to have a rigorous checklist, because if the car fails, you can just pull yourself over to the side and deal with it. But if you're going to do something complex like walk down the aisle to get married or go scuba diving, where there's big consequence to messing up, then it's a good idea, when you were calm beforehand, to have written down the key things and review them just before it happens. I do that all the time.

And I have this little mental checklist before takeoff. I've used it every airplane my whole life. And I even used it in spaceships. I've got my own mental checklist. And it makes sure no matter what was in my cirrus, like in your airplane or on the piece of paper in my airplane, which is a Comanche 250, I've also got this SEC secondary checklist just in Case I got distracted and missed one of the paper items. That's how astronauts stay alive. And how fighter pilots, test pilots, civilian pilots. You've got to have rigor in what you're doing.

And the only way to have that rigor is with a little bit of help.

Yeah, my favorite saying about that is checklists are written in blood. Unfortunately, we learn a lot from the past. After talking with Chris Hadfield about checklists, I've got to admit something. Astronauts may have binders full of emergency procedures. I've just got todoist. And you know what? That's all I need to keep the pod bay doors open. Now, in my world, it's more like still life versus chaos, if not life or death. Quantum mechanics.

Lesson plan, Check. Podcast guest preparation, check. Pick up the kitty litter for the new kitten, check. I gotta keep all these balls in the air, just like a SpaceX rocket. And when I'm working with my team, distributed all around the world, the stakes aren't exactly life or death, but they are quite high, at least for me. Deadlines, sponsors, production schedules, research, teaching, family obligations, all my other deliverables. And that's why I use todoist business. I've used it for years.

Todoist just works. Most project management tools are like a Soviet era rocket. Massive, complex, overbuilt, way too complicated. Todoist is the opposite. Lightweight, flexible, but powerful. Projects stay clean and sleek, assignments are clear, teammates know what to do, onboarding is a breeze, and context stays right where you need it. So whether you're managing a podcast calendar, a marketing campaign, a teaching schedule, an engineering sprint, or hardest of all, a pee wee soccer league league, Todoist is the modern checklist miracle you've been waiting for. Medical check.

Communications check. Productivity check. But only with todoist as a listener and viewer of into the impossible. You get 30 days of Todoist business for free. Click the link below and get ready for productivity that's out of this world. Now back to the episode with Chris Hadfield. I promise only one more conspiracy theory today. Chris, I know you're a busy man, but that brings up.

Yeah, the. The fact that the, you know, another thing to have handy is Hollywood next to some of your secret top secret development sites like the F117 Nighthawk that was developed in part in Burbank and then Edwards Air Force Base. You know, my question to you is the rise of another conspiracy that's so pernicious and offensive to me as a. I work for NASA at NASA Langley. As a. Working on aircraft Non destructive evaluation of aircraft skin after the Aloha Airlines disaster in the late 1980s. So I worked. I'm very proud.

I love NASA. I almost worked there as a civil servant. But I wanted to get a Ph.D. you know, because it pays so well. Not as well as a fighter pilot, I'm sure. But the other subject that really sticks in my craw, or there's probably some Canadian expression for the same thing, and that's moon landing denial. I have here a piece of the moon. One of my colleagues gave it to me and he studies the distance to the moon at 1 millimeter accuracy thanks to the lunar laser ranging mirrors that were put there.

That's just one piece of evidence. But what do you make of this now with. And I gave a piece of the moon to Joe Rogan and he's had on some of the greatest conspiracy theorists of all time. And he sort of openly bragging that the moon landing probably didn't happen because of the Hollywood connection with Stanley Kubrick and et cetera, et cetera. What do you make of this fascination with the fact that apparently the claim that we never went to the moon, which should be for these patriotic Americans, it should be the best example of American exceptionalism and yet they want to tear it down. Why do you suppose that is?

I've been on Joe Rogan and interestingly he didn't really want to grill me on that topic. He just scared it around it when he was talking to me. It's foolishness. There is overwhelming evidence from multiple different sources from all the countries that have been to the moon and have orbited the moon and taken photograph of the landing sites. With a good telescope you can see the landing sites. The tracks are there on the surface. Where do they think all of the great big Saturn V rockets went? There were millions of people watch the rockets launch. It's just foolishness, but it's fun and it's exciting and everybody wants to be in on a secret.

It's just, you know, it's like high school. You want to be in the in crowd that knows. Knows the secret thing. And it's also. It saves you from actually doing any work. It's just mentally lazy. I don't actually have to dig into the details. I can just make stuff up or just go tell people what I believe.

Belief is the easiest thing ever. If you want to understand something, that's hard work. And most people, it's much more tempting just to believe stuff because it's easier. And I don't mind at all. A bunch of my neighbors walked on the moon and risked their lives to fly those rocket ships. The crew of Apollo 13 barely made it back. I got a note from Gene Krantz this week, who loves the new book by the way, but Gene was so heavily involved in saving those guys lives on Apollo 13. And you know, I got Gene Cernan's Corvette was in my garage for a couple years when he was selling it.

And you know, I, I knew all those guys and, and so to have someone come along now and, and pretend it didn't happen, it's not only stupid on their part and intellectually lazy, it's also insulting to all the people that worked on it and, and the people, the 12 guys that walked to the moon, the 24 that went to the moon, that risked their lives. So if you want to be part of the people that are intellectually lazy and insulting to actual achievement, go ahead. But I think it's kind of a sad corner to be in, in life.

Yeah, I mean, one of the things I most respect about you is that you're such a prominent public and proud face of scientific communication. And I have a saying that I think it's a moral obligation for scientists, astronauts, et cetera, to do something for the public. It doesn't have to be a YouTube channel or a book, but to do something to spread the love, compassion and curiosity of true science. Or else we risk this proliferation of anti science misinformation. I find it deeply offensive when this comes up. The Van Allen belts, you couldn't. You know, the reason we haven't gone back to the moon, Chris, I don't know if you didn't know this, but, but is because the Van allen belts are 30,000 Kelvin and that will melt the aluminum capsule. So that's why we haven't gone back.

It's such.

Yeah, don't repeat foolishness. I mean, how do asteroids. The Earth gets hit by 40 tons of rock every day, so how do they make it on the way in through anyway? It's just silly. But that's nothing new. You know, in the late 1700s, when the Montgolfier brothers launched the very first balloon out of Paris, there were a couple future US Presidents there. It was the greatest scientific achievement of the age. They launched this balloon and it actually flew. It was the first controlled flight ever.

But it got caught by the wind and blew out of Paris and landed in the fields like 15 miles away. And the peasants out there saw this thing descending from the sky and attacked it with pitchforks and tore it up because they thought it was some alien coming or some weird, inexplicable beast. So the people that are pushing the edges of human understanding and refining science and giving us the quality of life that we all count on, there's always going to be the folks with pitchforks. That's just how life is. So I don't worry about it. I just try and be on the side of folks that are working hard to make the most of everything that I can. It's why I help run a big international technology incubator, why I write fiction and nonfiction, trying to use what. What.

What I can and what I have to help improve the quality of life for people.

Well, let's do some justice to this wonderful work of fiction, which is so hard, factual, I almost gag a little bit to call it fiction. But. But, Chris, do what you're not supposed to do. We have a segment called Judging Books by their covers, as you remember, from Apollo Murder. So take us through the title, the art, and there's no subtitle, but take us through any other aspect of the. Of the COVID that could be judged by you, the author of this wonderful book. Hey, book lovers, we're judging books by the covers. We know we're not supposed to do it better into the impossible.

There's nothing to it. Let's take a look and judge some books. So the book, if you look really closely, it has a spaceship approaching to dock. And the mechanism on the front is like the androgynous peripheral docking system. It's the same system that I used to dock with Space Station Mir on my first flight. But this was the first use of. It was designed so that the United States and the Soviet Union could dock together. And you can see that mechanism, and then you can see that the sun is right on the horizon behind it.

So it's sunrise or a sunset. And we chose Black on Red because it's a thriller and because it's life and death and a big, bold font where it's fading away a little bit into the blackness. The light in orbit, it is bizarrely harsh. We're used to the atmosphere blending the light. So the light comes from all directions when you're outside. But when you're on a spaceship, the light is coming from a point source, the sun, and there's nothing to reflect it. So even though the sun is right there, so bright it will fry you, if you just look over here, it's completely black. And so I wanted to get a feeling of that in the COVID as well, of the unbelievable velvety eternal blackness of space itself.

When your pupils are shrunk down by the brightness of a sunrise and tried to get all those things in the COVID And if you look at a cover, right, you just actually hear that sort of throbbing low, pulsing music like in Jaws or in any of the horror movies, Alfred Hitchcock kind of soundtrack.

It is magnificent. And I wonder if there's sort of a subtle callback in what you just said to what Edgar Mitchell, your fellow astronaut, called the overview effect, or he wants to take the politicians up there by the scruff of their neck. I often thought that, you know, with the advent of Blue Origin and SpaceX, maybe that you'd be able to do that more than, you know, just John Glenn and maybe a couple other politician astronauts. What do you make of the. I mean, do you get inured to the beauty to that? Incredible, you know, because he was only in space for what, two weeks, less than 10 days or something like that. You were there for a half a year. Do you get inured to it? Does it become commonplace and you kind of just, just doesn't have the same thrill or does it always have that magnificence that he spoke about?

I've been around the world 2,650 times and you might think I'd get sort of blase about it, but you get better and better at looking at the world. And every time I came around the world, it's as if, like it was saying, hey, you thought that last orbit was good. Wait till you see this this time. And you spot stuff and you see stuff and you catch the sun glint a different way or you could actually tell which ocean you're over. You to know them because they have different water temperatures and different air patterns. So you go, oh, yeah, South Atlantic. Oh, look, yeah, you can see that's, you know, towards the Antarctica or whatever. You get to know the whole world and it's a bottomless beauty.

It is a gorgeousness, as if the Earth is incredibly generous with a constantly unrolling, unmatched Christmas ornament like gorgeousness of it. And so my, my favorite orbit of them all was my last one where I was still, you know, with my nose up against the glass, recognizing what an incredible privilege I had it as a human being to be seeing our world where you can go around the, you know, in the time it takes to have dinner at a restaurant, you know, go around the whole planet. And I used to wear my watch loose on my wrist up there because it would just float all the time. Actually, my watch is Right here. It would float on my wrist all the time so that I could remind myself of where I was. Here's the watch. And I still keep the strap nice and loose because on orbit it would be like a living snake around my wrist. And there'd be times where I just sort of look down at my watch.

It would catch my eye because it was doing something a watch shouldn't do. And I keep it like that now on Earth because it's a little silent personal reminder of where I've been and what I've seen.

That's beautiful. What brand. I know people are gonna scream at me if I don't ask what kind of make and model that is.

The classic Omega. It's the chronometer. It's a special one made for astronauts. And it's actually got a thing on the back. I don't think we can see it on this little camera here, but it's certified for spaceflight by NASA. Yeah, by NASA. It's a beautiful watch. And this one has mission elapsed time.

It's got the right buttons on it so you can have mission elapsed time, multiple time zones. It's a really well, well designed watch for space flyers.

So this book takes place in the Apollo Soyuz era. And that was also true of Apollo murders. But tell me, why is that so irresistible? Why is that hinge point? That must have had a big impact on you. My amateur psychologist is like. That epoch must have had a kind of irresistible attraction to you. What about it is so compelling?

As a storyteller, when you're a storyteller and a fiction writer, you want as much plot room as possible. You know, you want. You want things to be able to happen. And so in the early mid-70s, the Vietnam War was still going on. In wying down, Nixon was. Was embarrassing himself and, and being a. I am not a crook. But still everybody knew and, and going through the whole Watergate scandal, there was huge civil rights riots in the United States.

There was a group of people called the Weather Underground going around setting off bombs in all the. Under the government institutions. There was the rise of women's rights at the time and getting that entrenched in actual law and societal norms. And the Apollo program was sort of winding down. It was the end of the big space race and the Cold War was going on where all these nuclear missiles were pointed at each other and just counting on Dayton to hold it all together. And the Yom Kippur War started in Israel. So all of that stuff was actually happening. President Ford, the successor to Nixon, he had two women try and shoot him in the summer of 1975.

One of them, she pulled the trigger and she'd muffed it. And the second one, the first one actually pulled the trigger and missed him by 4 inches. So it's a wonderful time in history when you're a thriller fiction author, because all that stuff was real, all of it was happening. And then I could weave my story and use those things as fodder in order to push what just might have happened if things had just turned out slightly different.

Do you feel like the Apollo Soyuz collaboration was a success? It seems like tensions with the Russians, the former Soviet Union, are kind of as worse as they've ever been. Do you think in the ultimate analysis, 200 years from now when as Cho enlisted, it's too soon to tell what happened, if the French Revolution was a good thing or not? Do you think in a couple hundred we'll look back on Apollo Soyuz and say it mattered?

Yeah, it did matter. It was really big at the time. We needed a good example. The Cuban Missile crisis was probably as stressed as things got. We needed some good examples that people could look up to. Sort of like what's going on in Ukraine right now, it's horrific and loss of life and war and pointlessness of it and greed and, you know, all of the worst of human behaviors. But at the same time, there's a big international consortium that, that recognized that Chernobyl was leaking a lot of radiation and in Ukraine went in and cooperatively using their own money. Not really.

Nobody did this for profit. They recapped the Chernobyl site so that the radiation would be properly contained and help people stay healthy for decades to come. So there's horrific stuff happening, but there's always great stuff happening. And does. Does it matter to chew and lie or in the big stroke of history? I think it really does. Human behavior is what history is. And if you only want to focus on the negative stuff, that's fine. But I think it's equally important to notice there's magnificent things happening.

And I used to be a combat fighter pilot in the Cold War, intercepting Soviet bombers that were practicing cruise missile launches on North America. That's what I did for a living. Racing out in the dark of night, had to be airborne in 12 minutes from south to sleep. Airborne in an F18 with radar seeking, heat seeking missiles and bullets in the nose to go intercept a bear off the coast of North America. And yet, eight years later, I was helping to build space station Mir and working cooperatively, same people, just a little different pendulum swinging of leadership. And so when the pendulum is off to one side, it's really good to find examples to remind ourselves that the pendulum can swing the other way. And we're all just people and there are reasons to cooperate. And so Apollo is, was it perfect? And it didn't solve all the world's problems, but it sure provided hope and a good example to an entire generation of people.

I want to ask you if there's a modern parallel with, say, the Chinese space program that you might envision taking place. But before I get there, I want to go back to the original Cold War that is discussed in this book. And of course, the most complicated figure in my mind, psychologically and otherwise, is Verna Brian Braun. And through Operation Paperclip, he and hundreds of German scientists came over after World War II. Undoubtedly many of them were Nazis. And on the other hand, he gave us the Saturn V, Apollo and dreams of Mars. And so I wonder, with the cancellation here, I don't know if you know that, but Lindbergh's name has been taken off the San Diego airport, which I'm a Jew and I'm against that. I think he was a complicated person.

But what do you make of Werner von Braun? With 80 years almost since his legacy first cast that long shadow over your career and many other thousands of others, what do you make of von Braun? Before we get to the Chinese version.

When I was the commander of the International Space Station, it was built by Germany, Japan, England, Canada, United States, a whole bunch of countries that within the lifetime of my parents waged the wicked bloody war against each other, where we killed. I don't know what the total number was between first and second wars. 70 million of ourselves because we couldn't find any other way to reconcile our different beliefs and our fears and our greed. And so that same group of people can either kill each other wantonly or they can start to explore the rest of the universe peacefully together. And I wasn't up on the space station angry at old history. I'm willing to accept the fact that bad things have happened in the past. I mean, that's just the way it is. One of the things that Jane Goodall discovered when she was there in the middle of Africa watching the chimpanzees, was that they wage war on each other, they commit genocide.

She was aghast to witness that. But it's a reality. And they're our closest relationship related animals in the animal kingdom. And so it's in our nature to do horrific things, but we also have the ability to recognize that time moves on, and if you don't forgive and forget, then you'll never be able to progress. And so what do you do with a tremendous, new, undeniable technological capability? What you do is you try not to squander it. Every technology is dual use for peace purposes and for war purposes, for good and for harm. A fork that you eat dinner with can do wicked damage, but it's also a tremendous tool. All of metallurgy, fire itself, nuclear power, they all have horrific downsides, but they serve us really well in society as well.

And so, yeah, I mean, the technology was developed in wartime by the other side who were committing atrocities, but that doesn't mean. Mean the technology is forever somehow not going to be able to serve humanity. You've got to hold people accountable for their actions and their choices in life. But at the same time, even criminals get out of prison if they've rehabilitated themselves. And I'm willing, so long as people are doing something that serves humanity in a positive way, to try and find a way to do it cooperatively.

Outstanding. So another figure that, you know, I don't recall. I spent three years as a postdoc at Caltech where part of the story takes place. And there's a character there who worked with Von Karman himself, whose name is Hien Huan. I wonder if you could talk about. Not him. I don't. Again, it's so hard to.

I hope you give me some credit, Chris. It's so hard to do these interviews about fictional books. I don't want to give anything away. I want everybody to buy the audio.

And the hardware because he's an amazing character and he's worth talking about, and he's really central in Final Orbit.

I wonder if you could talk about what I see. And maybe I'm being a little bit too, you know, Cassandra wannabe, et cetera. But he was exiled by the McCarthy program, you know, by basically the, you know, Senator McCarthy. And yet he then took, you know, his giant brain and massive experience and went on to found China's rocket program and became known as the father of Chinese rocketry. Ironically, as you point out, you know, there was a father 1200, you know, a thousand years before him or 800 years before him who did quite a bit of good that you portray so beautifully. But I'm going to ask you a different question. What happens, in your opinion, when a country, you know, I won't say which one, but banishes some of its brightest minds. You know, how much of today's geopolitics can potentially result in an awful outcome because of one single act, maybe one single person caught up in this McCarthy esque, you know, kind of affair.

What do you make of it coming, you know, being a Canadian but also spending so much of your time in the US and what do you think of what's going on with our scientific and future space exploration designers?

It's a really useful study in final orbit to see what happened to that character. And he's a real person and it's just sort of a little parable, but a real one for what is going on right now. And that is tremendous educational institutions in the United States and you know, tremendous opportunity both in regulation and in finance and in sort of societal attitude and culture to get amazing things done. That man came to MIT, one of the brightest guys in China, studied at MIT, went out and got his PhD between MIT and Caltech and then at Caltech, he was one of the original rocket boys who was heading up the Valley. Well, they started actually in one of the buildings on campus and then when they blew up the basement of it, said no, go up in the valley where you can't do any damage of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. That same guy, you know, he was a professor at Caltech. He was one of the people who went over to Germany with von Karman to choose which of the scientists they would bring back in Operation Paperclip to bring rocket technology back to the United States because there were so many great advances over there. He had two children born in the United States.

He and his wife had applied for American citizenship. And then in comes a glory seeking, short term loudmouth of a politician who has no sense of history but is looking for a way to make a name for himself. And he just starts calling everybody a communist. Big commie scares and red scares and that as soon as you call someone a name, then it's really easy to repeat and it casts doubt on someone even when there's been no proof. McCarthyism is that personified. It's an embarrassing and self destructive period in American history and there's a lot to learn from it. And under McCarthyism, this guy who was working hard, hugely respected, hugely accomplished, to really contribute to the United States for the rest of his life, was put under house arrest and eventually after several years sent back to China. Whereas you say he was the father of the entire Chinese space program and of their nuclear program.

Just one guy. And we, you know, or we, when I say the west, the United States, in its hubris, in its self importance, made a stupid decision to do that. And that's why when I, you know, dug into all of that, I thought it was in 1975, it was a really important piece because of what it led to in the Chinese programs and what it might have led to, as are the things that happen in Final Orbit.

So the other character, another character that takes place, is the fictional story of the kind of first Chinese astronaut. What did you learn about their hopes and dreams and kind of the Chinese psyche? I find it very fascinating how you play off kind of the American psyche and all the accoutrements thereof with the Chinese culture, which is different from the Soviet culture. How did you come to construct that? And how did you balance building an empathy with someone who turns out to be sort of a rival? I don't want to give too much away, but talk about how do you work on that as an author? How do you build balance, empathy with rivalry?

When you read the books, you'll see that every single person does things for the reasons that are personal to them. These are what those people would do. And when you say someone's a Soviet, it's not some sort of single minded monolith. It's just a bunch of people. Some people are very nuanced and some people just take it straight black and white, and it's everything in between. And so people are true to themselves. And every one of my characters in the books, they were raised in a certain culture. They have a certain set of societal norms, beliefs, objectives.

They may or may not be aligned with the political system that they were raised under. Or they might have voices in their heads like in the Apollo murders. The kid who was raised under horrific circumstances and it really caused her problems as an adult. I want every one of my characters to be completely true to themselves. Nobody's a stereotype. Everybody's just doing what they would do next. And in Final Orbit, all of the characters are that way. For the American astronauts, I got to know them.

Tom Stafford and Deke Slayton and Gene Krantz, the ground controller, Bob Crippen, who's in the book, and actually Alex Ilionov, the first spacewalker, longtime friend. And so I could really have a good shot of writing those guys the way that they were and the way that they would react to things. And so I just put myself into the mind of what it was like. Because China had an astronaut recruitment in the late 60s, they set up a full biomedical institute, they built communications relay ships, they Sent up reusable spaceships that came back and landed. They were moving well along. And so it provided all of the room that I needed. And the that is in final orbit. Fang that was their leading cosmonaut or astronaut candidate.

So all of that is real. And to me that makes it really interesting and a lot of fun and very plausible. And then it's just a matter of what would that character do? What would his motivations be, how would he deal with things going wrong, and what would his definition of success be? And then write him accordingly.

Do you see any echoes of 1975 in today's China? US relationships, our rivalry. Are we entering a new cold war in space? And if so, what lessons should policymakers, scientists and explorers and young readers take from final orbit?

We are by nature abrasive and combative and selfish species. But the reason we have society is to allow for that, but still allow for the goodness of our nature and our ability to create art and to develop science that allows people to live long, healthy lives and, and to understand as best we can the very nature of everything in the universe. None of those are going to happen if we just at our uttermost bestial of behaviors. But those behaviors are always there. And when they get to the national scale, then we could have a wicked outbreak of war like's going on in Israel right now or what's going on in Ukraine right now. But they're not permanent and there are long periods of peace. And even when we get to the level of war, world violent war like World War I or World War II or a cold War, which is just always on the hairy edge of that, there are still the opportunities for hope and for good human behavior. And right now, the rising antagonism and sort of competitive fear between what China's doing and what the United States is doing and what the rest of the world is doing, it's quite alarming.

And it's a lot of reasons for people to continue to escalate in the badness of their behaviors. But history will show that the pendulum will swing. And what we need to do, just like we've done for 300,000 years, is somehow keep holding it together, allow for the imperfection of humanity, build systems that can protect us, build systems that can handle the worst outbreaks of people doing what we know overall we shouldn't be doing. I mean, I served in the military for 25 years. It wasn't to go kill people. It was to maintain peace. It was to show that I could defend myself and my country and take it right to the edge and go intercept a Soviet bomber. If they had malicious intent, I was willing to die to stop them from causing a large loss of life.

And we're on that precipice right now of a steadily building antagonism between China and the United States. It's why I'm the chair of the Open Lunar Foundation. I am constantly looking for ways to, in amongst all of the animosity and human behavior, to find reasons to cooperate, to find reasons for optimism, to look for the inevitable goodness that exists and to make the absolute most of that. We have somehow managed to hold it together for 10,000 years of civilization and 300,000 years at least, of a species. So I'm not ready to throw up my hand hands and say we're done yet. And I'm quite confident that we will continue to muddle through just as all the previous generations have.

Ask you a final question, one that I used to pose to my late great colleague and physics professor here, Sally Ride. And that was sort of a provocative statement as I say that, you know, space is incredibly dangerous. You know, you detail losses in space on both the, you know, Russian side, the American side. Obviously, we know, we know so much about how painful that is. One of the memories seared in my mind, the first memories, is the Challenger disaster. And when I was in ninth grade, I think it was. So my question to you is space is so dangerous. And you know, as, you know, the, the spaceship that you captain, that you commanded was about 100 to 200 billion dollars.

I think by the time it's. It'll be deorbited on its final orbit someday. Right. So from a purely technical support, you know, perspective, robots and AI doesn't need kind of the support or the level of safety or even the level of chat. I mean, we don't want them to blow up. But. But what? Why is it reckless, Chris, to keep sending people, human beings with lives and wives and pets and children and so forth, to send them to space to do things that maybe machines could make the argument to do? I mean, we have a James Webb space telescope. We don't have, you know, me up there with my telescope.

So I know it's provocative and I don't mean to say it with any disrespect, but what are your perspectives on the advent of tools like AI and robotic space exploration in this new era era as compared to fighting the battles of the past and sending up more and more humans to space? What do you make of it?

Let's look at a Thermometer. Thermometer is wonderful. It'll tell you exactly what the temperature is. But a thermometer doesn't care what the temperature is. And a thermometer will never be able to have any meaning to what the temperature is. All robots, all tools, are just complex thermometers. They will really accurately relate back to us in some way, fact and information, so that then we can do something meaningful with it. And I'm all for minimizing risk to human life.

You know, we didn't launch Gagarin or Al Shepard on the very first rocket we ever built. We launched thousands and thousands of rockets and tried to make it safe enough to some point that now, okay, now it's worth the human risk. And we forgot almost every one of those launches because they were. They were just robots and who cares? They're just thermometers and elbow joints and machinery. But people matter and people's opinions matter and what does it feel like? What does it mean? Why does this matter? That's what we do. That's what we're best at. And we have been developing the technology for us to dig deeper and deeper into those questions since before civilization began. And that's just gonna continue as our tools get better.

Then we can reach further and hopefully understand further, and we can expand the human experience. It's too early to go to Mars right now because the cost benefit to me doesn't make sense. We need generations. I think it was Pete Worden who said, if we do this properly when we first land on Mars, a robot will hand us a martini. You know, that's kind of how you want it to go, but it's the human landing on Mars. We didn't celebrate with great joy and fervor when, when all the little robots started landing on the moon. It was when Neil climbed down the ladder and stepped on the surface that one third of the whole world was watching the most engaged human event in all of human history. And to me, that's a real indicator of why it matters.

We don't want to wantonly risk human life, but it is human life and perception and understanding that is the reason I write books. It's the reason millions of people read my books and. And it's the reason that we do everything. And so, yeah, I'm all for good tools and good help, but I'm also all for hearing what other people think and what other people feel. And how does this fit into history itself?

Beautifully said. I mean, the thing that comes about so resonantly in this book is the power of human agency. I mean, there's not one single scene where a robot really could have handled the different, you know, kind of failings and foibles that the characters get into. Again, I can't give away anything. I love this book. I love all your writing. Chris, thank you so much for, not only for what you've written, but for what you've done. You're really a true hero.

I told my oldest son today on the way to school, I was talking to a guy named Chris Hadfield. What do you mean, a guy named Chris Hadfield? You better be on top of your game, dad. He had made me this model. He 3D printed me this.

Oh, let me see that model. Your son made that model?

Yeah, this is a clay model of the. I think it's the Orion, the future Orion spacecraft, which might have.

That one's launching on February 5th with four of my friends up the front. Yeah.

And, yeah, Jessica Meir, who's a graduate of ucsd, a good friend of mine. I interviewed her from the ISS about four or five years ago when I started the podcast. She might be the first woman on the moon. I don't know. Maybe I'm hoping that she will be. Chris Hadfield, thank you so much for everything you've done, but most especially for the way that you communicate true science and the incredible wonder of the cosmos, which is science fact. And I just think we need more communicators like you. So thank you so much.

Much, Chris. Dr. Keating, thank you very much for making time. I appreciate it, Brian. And I look forward to speaking to you again in the future and keep on communicating. You do it so well. And to everybody who reads Final Orbit, you're going to love it. This is a good book.

It's a lot of fun.

I'm going back. I'm re listening to Defector and Apollo Murders. It's so good. Thank you, Chris. Be well. Good night.

Chris Hadfield makes a powerful case that we could be viewed as our own worst enemy. But there's still hope for humanity in space. Perhaps we can wage peace. But if you love this video, I know you're gonna love our first conversation on the into the Impossible podcast where you discussed his thrilling first book, the Apollo Murders.

Click here for that.

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