Ground control to Major Tom…
Astronaut Chris Hadfield, commander of the International Space Station’s Expedition 35, has fully embraced social media. Not only has he tweeted some extraordinary pictures from space {you can follow him, too, at @Cmdr_Hadfield}, sung a duet with a musician on the ground, and made the reaches of space accessible to those of us on the ground in a way space has never been accessible before, now he’s created one kickass music video!
I remember when I was a kid and my family lived in Houston, we visited the NASA Space Center in Houston a great deal. I remember crawling around mock-ups of the Apollo space module, climbing into artifactual rocket boosters, and handling moon rocks with nothing less than absolute glee. I remember every music video growing up having something to do with space, rockets, or things in flight – and even if that was only symbolism at work, it was a subliminal chant in my ear: space…space…space…
Space. The final frontier.
I’ve noticed something, too, about the way we as the human species look at space. Whether you’re a historian, an engineer, or a scholar of human communication and anthropology, life is good when we’re looking up. When we’re doing well in space, people are happy. When science is leaping forward, everything else seems to be going well, too.
Commander Hadfield must know he’s making an impact with everything he’s done to communicate from the ISS, but his impact is farther reaching than just showing us pictures of cool things. He’s making space cool. He’s making us look up. He’s making us believe in the power of people to use the gift of their intellect to do some amazing things, to overcome some incredible obstacles, to let life succeed in places it could not before.
If that isn’t cool, I don’t know what is.
Look up.
KCS
