Three, two, one, zero, all engines running.
Liftoff! We have a liftoff!
If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Chris,
what would you tell him?
I think what might've been worthwhile to explain to myself at 20
is to recognize that every single person you meet is struggling.
I didn't know that then.
You tend to see other people as completely formed individuals.
I still do sometimes.
But to recognize that everybody you meet, every single one of them,
no matter how expensive their suit is or how serious their expression is,
they are looking for significance.
They are trying to do the best they can, and they fail regularly.
And they're within their own particular battle of their own life,
and so cut them some slack for that.
Don't don't let them off the hook,
but recognize the shared nature of being a human being
and let people be themselves,
make some allowances for them, treat people a little more kindly as a result.
And so you take these pictures,
and now, you know, you pull the little chip out of the camera
and put it in your zippered-up pocket so it doesn't float away.
And by the end of the day, you've kinda got a whole bunch of those chips.
You got like the whole world in your pocket waiting for you to truly look at it.
And there is some magnificent, unexpected,
intimate view of the world.
And now what do you do with that?
And the beauty now on the space station and social media is that I could just go
and honestly write what I was thinking and hit Send
and then just turn it loose to anybody who might
also be curious about the world.
And it was delightful to see the reaction,
to see how many people,
millions by the time we landed,
who were also delighting in what
that technological invention allows us to see about ourselves.
Hopefully, we're all students of the human condition whether we mean to be or not.
And as we get a little older, we gain a little perspective.
I think what we're truly getting at
is a collective understanding
of where we are and what it means.
And the where we are is the part that we could share the best.
What it means is an individual choice,
but the more people you meet, the more you understand what battles people are fighting,
the more you see the commonality of the human experience itself.
But then the real question, of course, is
if you do feel that maybe something has enlightened you a little bit
or if you've had a thought that most people have not,
do you just have a secret smile,
or do you try and maybe share it with someone you love
or write it down or take a picture?
And I think shared understanding is what empowers us more than anything.
To try and actually see the world in its totality, it's virtually impossible.
But maybe we can see a documentary program,
or we can read a travel book, or we can look at a coffee-table book,
or we'll get on an airplane and go somewhere and go somewhere else.
And you start to piece together some of the threads of the fabric that is our actual planet.
But I've been lucky enough to take sort of
the best of our transportation technology that we've ever invented
and to get onboard a ship and go around the world in 92 minutes,
to go around the world a hundred times and then a thousand times.
And not just going around the world, but around the world 16 times a day
where it turns underneath you
so every circumnavigation is like another voyage of discovery.
And the angle between you and the sun and the world,
because of your speed, is constantly changing.
And the seasons are changing.
I went from one side of the sun to the other, right across the solar system
while I was on the space station, right around it.
So you saw winter and summer swap ends on the world.
And so, each time around, you see the world
slightly more for what it is, more clearly.
And somewhere along the way
in one of those thousands of orbits,
I think you fundamentally, I don't know if it's shift or deepen or both,
but you start to see the world as what it actually is.
I feel hugely privileged to have,
without anybody telling me what to think and without any filters in the way,
to actually have seen the whole world
over and over and over again
until it seeped into me permanently.
And it doesn't necessarily give me any outlandish insight
or any outlandish imperative to change the world,
but I think it does give me a perspective
that I feel compelled to try and share
to try and let as many other people,
I was there on behalf of a lot of people, you know.
It took a lot of lucre to build that rocket ship
and accelerate my body to eight kilometers a second and let me stay there.
And so I feel a responsibility to do my best to let other people see what's beyond their room
based on the things that I have seen.
As you mentioned at the outset,
I flew on the space shuttle twice,
once to go help build the Russian space station Mir,
and then on my second flight to go help build the International Space Station and do spacewalks.
But on my third flight, you know, this wasn't just a week or two onboard the space shuttle
this was launch as the pilot, or the Bort engineer, of the Soyuz,
and then stay in space for almost half a year.
And it's not to belittle those initial shuttle flights,
they were magnificent and hugely instructive to me,
but I count myself hugely lucky to, at the end of all that,
to have had a chance to go live off the planet for five months,
to be asked to command the spaceship.
So that level of seriousness and responsibility,
but also just the richness of what comes along with that experience itself.
You can read about a spacewalk or watch a movie of a spacewalk,
and you sort of get a sense of it.
And then when you're on board a spaceship
and you're floating weightless by the window,
especially a way of one bulging window, the Cupola,
so you can almost freely look around in 180 degrees.
You get some sense of where you actually are.
But the day that you for real are gonna be on the other side of that window,
that you're gonna assume the danger of it,
you're gonna build this spacesuit around your body
and then go into a tiny bit of the ship
and close a hatch behind you,
you're gonna become a torpedo.
And then take all the air out of that little part you're in,
and then open up the hatch
and now actually physically pull yourself on the outside of the ship.
That's entirely different
Spent my whole life visualizing it and dreaming about it, talking to guys who'd done it
and then training and virtual reality training underwater,
but suddenly, the part of your body that's in the sun is plus 150 Celsius,
and you feel the searing heat of that.
And the part of you that's in the shade is minus 140 Celsius.
And so when your legs touch the fabric
of the inflated suit,
it's like growing up on a farm with super cold metal on a stovepipe.
And you don't want to let it touch your skin
'cause it's so searingly cold.
And you feel the environment that you're in,
and the world is silently,
you can see an entire face of the whole planet
right across a continent and it's right there beside you,
and it's silently turning, and the whole universe is right here,
and you're you're in the middle holding on with one hand.
It's extremely visceral and physical and personal and intimate
to be in the world that way.
I've been hugely lucky,
and I think we collectively are more liable to make good decisions
for ourselves and for where we live
the more clearly we can see the whole thing as one place.
[Interviewer] And you started posting these pictures on a whim, really,
taking these beautiful photographs from up in space, 'cause you see so many--
[Chris] Well, picture what it's like.
You're there with a camera, and you're going around the world,
and you float over to the window, and you say,
"I'm not even gonna take a picture today
"I just wanna look at the world."
And you're looking at something, and you go, "Holy..."
And you gotta grab the camera
because your emotions are trapped behind you, you can't keep up.
And you go, "I gotta take a picture of this so I can look at it later."
Responsibility that comes with with being trusted with being an astronaut, I think,
it's been delightful to see the effect of it.
I mean, I took, I think, 45,000 pictures over my three space flights.
Then after a year, I got back from landing,
I was like, "What are we gonna do with all those photos?"
I mean, do we just let 'em sit in a file?
I thought, why don't we take the best
and put them in a book
and then put why each picture meant something to me.
This is just a sharing of the experience.
And let people that maybe see the world for what it truly is,
or at least a slightly clearer view
or a more completer perspective-rich view of the world.
And then, just like me as a nine-year-old boy,
maybe they will then be a slightly different person with their choices.
[dramatic music]