Hanging out with Chris Hadfield

Commander Chris Hadfield, along with American astronauts Kevin Ford and Tom Marshburn, participated in a Google+ Hangout hosted by NASA on Thursday afternoon.

The three astronauts answered questions from Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

Hadfield spent 5 months aboard the International Space Station and become an international sensation known for using social media to share photos of Earth and life aboard the station.

Asked about food on the space station, Hadfield said, “Living on the space station, the food is really good, but there’s no way to preserve the texture. It’s like eating the world’s best baby food.”

Before leaving for the space station in December, Hadfield consulted with the hosts of the American television show Mythbusters, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman. The hosts were interested in doing some experiments with Hadfield.

“I worked with the guys from Mythbusters,” said Hadfield. “It’s not a very good place to mix foods…but they did come up with a practical way of just squeezing and layering a few stuff into one burrito and it was good enough that I talked to Chris Cassidy who’s up there right now into trying it…and he really liked it as well.”

The “space burrito” creation that Hadfield came up with was shared on YouTube and became an international hit.

Read: The best of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield

Asked about the renowned affects of eating asparagus, Hadfield laughed and replied, “There’s no way to tell. It’s an extremely well ventilated environment up there.”

When asked by a viewer about experiments that were conducted aboard the space station that would be beneficial on Earth, astronaut Tom Marshburn praised the Canadian experiment ‘Microflow.’ The device measures samples of blood and provides results within 10 minutes. The Canadian Space Agency is hoping to use the device in remote communities back on Earth.

Hadfield was quick to praise the truly international co-operation of the space station.

“I think what we’re doing in space, the co-operative nature of the agreement is unprecedented,” Hadfield said. “It’s not easy to do it this way. It is hard to do the International Space Station the way we’re doing it…but we are doing it.

“Everybody on Earth, no matter where you’re watching your particular dawn or your sunset, you can watch the space station go over your head as a shining, tangible example of what people can do when they work together.”

When asked about the physical difficulties making the transition back to the gravity of Earth, Hadfield replied, “It’s amazing how adaptable the human body is. After 40 or 50 years here of living in gravity, suddenly, when we get to space your body immediately starts to adapt to weightlessness.”

But, he said, coming home was definitely an adjustment.

“When you come home…gravity just feels so unfair,” Hadfield said. “It’s bizarre… You’re just so unused to the weight of your own body.”

Even mentally, adjusting to space is difficult. Ford recalled how one day, when he was looking out the cupola window aboard the ISS, he thought he saw a bird land on one of the solar arrays.

“I thought, ‘I wonder what kind of bird that is’…I thought about it…I realized it’s probably not a bird 250 miles high doing 17,000 miles per hour…it was probably a piece of debris.”

Hadfield later reflected on how he was able to share his experience with the world in real-time through various social media sites.

“With the technology that NASA has put on board…has really helped show why we do this…why we explore.”

“There’s so much beauty and wonder in the world.”