Before he went to space, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield ventured to another mysterious frontier: Russia.
On July 17, 1995, Hadfield was in Moscow preparing for the second-ever shuttle mission to dock with Russia’s space station, in the early days of international collaboration on space travel. The training mission was a far cry from Hadfield's old line of work, as a fighter pilot who once intercepted Soviet aircraft for NORAD.
Archival CTV News footage offers an inside look at Hadfield’s training mission in Moscow, where the now-famous astronaut learned how to install a new docking module on the Russian space station, ahead of his very first journey into orbit.
That journey launched on Nov. 12, 1995, with Hadfield joining four Americans on board the space shuttle Atlantis as the first-ever NASA mission specialist from Canada. The shuttle carried supplies and a new docking module up to Russia's Mir space station, the predecessor of the International Space Station.
Hadfield achieved a number of historic firsts for the Canadian space program on that mission to Mir. He became the first and only Canadian ever to board the Russian space station, as well as the first Canadian to operate the Canadarm in orbit.
During his first visit to Mir, Hadfield shared his guitar skills with the Russian crew, strumming out a few notes with maple leaves floating around him in zero-gravity. Call it an early prelude to Hadfield's now-famous performance of "Space Oddity" 18 years later.
But before he could go into space, Hadfield had to work closely with Russian cosmonauts to learn his role for the tricky docking procedure in the summer of 1995. His job was to use the Canadarm to install the docking module on Mir, so NASA’s space shuttle could safely link up with the Russian space station.
“I’ll be building the mechanism into the shuttle so that it’s… in place for our docking,” Hadfield told CTV News on July 17, 1995. “And then during the docking, I’ll be running the cameras and the TV and everything so we end up with the right target.”
A shuttle had docked with Mir only once before, and that process had been jerry-rigged and dangerous, Hadfield said in his book, “An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth.”
Hadfield, who was 35 at the time, said he was well aware of the symbolic nature of the task, as the docking module he put in place would allow Russian and American technologies to work together in space.
“I’m going to be physically bridging the gap between the American space program and the Russian space program,” he said.
In his book, Hadfield praised his trainers in Russia for preparing him to handle a sensor malfunction that occurred during the docking procedure. “We had no choice but to try to dock by eyeballing it, via the camera view,” he wrote in his book. “Fortunately, we had a good idea how to do that, because our instructors had insisted that we memorize every sensor reading from rendezvous to docking.”
At the time, the world was still getting used to co-operating on space travel. Gone were the days of the Cold War space race, as the relatively new, democratic Russia sought to collaborate with its former rivals to establish a shared successor to Mir.
That successor would be the International Space Station, launched in 1998 after five years of collaboration between Russia, Canada, the United States and nine European countries represented by the European Space Agency. But before the ISS launched, Russia was busy bringing its new allies up to speed on everything its astronauts had learned about life on board a space station.
Hadfield said he was excited to be part of the collaboration between Eastern and Western space programs. “It is a real precursor, and a hint forward at what the International Space Station, International Space co-operation is going to be like,” he said.
Hadfield returned to space two more times after that first visit. In 2001, he visited the ISS and became the first-ever Canadian to leave a spacecraft and free-float in space. A little over a decade later, Hadfield went back to the ISS in December of 2012. He assumed command of the space station on March 13, 2013, before heading back to Earth in May of that year.
