A Toastmasters club meeting features an impromptu speaking section (called Table Topics) that involves answering a question via a speech with a length of one to two minutes. At Wired on March 13, 2020 there is a forty-minute YouTube video titled Astronaut Chris Hadfield answers the web’s most searched questions. Some of his replies are very brief, but others are wonderful Table Topics answers.
At 3:50 he was asked: When did Chris Hadfield first walk in space? His reply was:
“I first walked in space during my second space flight. We were onboard Space Shuttle Endeavor. We were building the International Space Station. Imagine you’re wearing the most uncomfortable clothes you’ve ever worn, like a big snowsuit or something, and gloves, and a hat, and big boots. So, you can hardly move. You grab onto both sides of the hatch and you sort of, like maybe a chick coming out of an egg. You know, you have to sort of fight your way out.
But then you pull yourself out, and you’re weightless. Let go with one hand, and you float around gently the other way. And suddenly you’ve gone from this claustrophobic little dark place to now being surrounded by eternity, where the whole world is silent next to you. Like this big magic globe, but it’s separate from you. But all around you is the three dimensions of everything. And it’s perfectly black, it’s unbelievable. Like you’ve given birth to yourself into a whole new place. If you get a chance, go on a space walk.”
And at 10:40 he was asked: How to eat in space? He replied:
“Well, your food floats, for one thing, so you don’t need a plate. Like, a plate would be useless. So what you do is you get your package. You either make it cold or hot. And there’s like this little easy-bake oven where you can warm up your package, you can’t really cook. But it might be dehydrated food, and then you slide it over a needle and you dial and you push a button, and it fills up the package with the right amount of water. Now you’ve got your package and you mix it up and you Velcro it to the wall, let it sit, soak up the water.
And then you carefully slit it open, cause if you open it quick, you’ll get like little spoogy stuff all over the room. So, you don’t want that. So, you carefully open, so nothing comes flying out, cause nothing’s going to fall to the floor. And then you get a spoon. Spoon is a great utensil. And you want a long spoon so it can go all the way to the back of a package. And then you eat everything out of one package. You don’t like have peas and meat and potatoes and corn. You just eat all of your peas first. And they have to be cream peas so they don’t float all over. Then you ball it up super tight, cause you got to get rid of your garbage, put it in the garbage. And then you open your next thing, which might be, I don’t know, a tortilla.
So, that’s how we eat in space. One thing at a time, in its package. It’s sort of like, I don’t know, eating on the bus or eating on a camping trip, or something. Here’s a funny thing about being in space. And that is, because there’s no gravity, that means that the stuff in your nose and your sinuses never drains. So, it’s sort of like you always had a head cold. You can’t really taste your food as much, you know, when you’re like this. Your food all sort of tastes bland. Cause you’re not smelling it. You’re not getting it into all of your sensors. So, food in space tastes sort of bland.
And the food that has the strongest spice naturally in it is a shrimp cocktail, cause we put cocktail sauce on, which is, you know, a lot of horseradish. You wouldn’t think you would have shrimp cocktail on a space ship, so with the nice red hot sauce on it. You bite into it, it’s got that nice crunch, and then you get that surge of eye watering horseradish cocktail sauce, and for a moment or two it clears your sinuses. So, my favorite space food was shrimp cocktail.”
Earlier at Wired on February 27, 2019 there is another 17-minute video titled Astronaut Chris Hadfield on 13 moments that changed his life. At 7:14 it mentions that his experiences had included being the capsule communicator (CapCom) for 25 flights of the Space Shuttle.
There also is a 23-minute video on January 30, 2013 titled Chris Hadfield answers [15] questions live from space with the Governor General of Canada. Eight of his answers are longer than the one minute minimum for Table Topics (and two even are in French).
There is a 43 minute Clear and Vivid podcast by Alan Alda on March 28, 2022 titled Chris Hadfield: Song of an Astronaut. It ends (35:48) with Alan asking the following seven questions:
What do you wish you really understood?
How do you tell someone they have their facts wrong?
What’s the strangest question anyone has ever asked you?
How do you stop a compulsive talker?
How do you start a genuine conversation?
What gives you confidence?
What book changed your life?
A cartoon of a delighted male speaker came from Wikimedia Commons.
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