Astronaut Chris Hadfield's Most Excellent Adventure
Chris Hadfield went from feeling truly sublime to faintly ridiculous this week.
He landed after spending 146 days in space, most as commander of the International Space Station. But, he says, as soon as his Soyuz plonked down on the soil of Kazakhstan, "I could feel the weight of my lips and tongue and had to change how I was talking. I didn't realize I had learned to talk with a weightless tongue."
Chris Hadfield said that after nearly five months of floating, his feet had lost all cushioning and calluses, so on these, his first days back, "I was walking around like I was walking on hot coals."
Mr. Hadfield is 53, a slender and mustachioed former Royal Canadian Air Force colonel, and the first Canadian to command the International Space Station. He may never be mentioned in the same sentence as Yuri Gagarin or Neil Armstrong. But Chris Hadfield has become one of the best-known astronauts of contemporary times because he's shared what he's seen and felt with a Twitter following that's grown to almost a million, and he's used the bay of the International Space Station as a kind of celestial garage to put on a show.