Chris Hadfield

Colonel Chris Hadfield has spent decades training as an astronaut and logged nearly 4000 hours in space. The secret to Col. Hadfield’s success is an unconventional philosophy he learned at NASA: prepare for the worst — and enjoy every moment of it.

In An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, Hadfield takes readers deep into his years of training and space exploration to show how to make the impossible possible.

Through eye-opening, entertaining stories, he explains how conventional wisdom can get in the way of achievement and happiness.

This vivid and refreshing insights will teach you how to think like an astronaut, and will change, completely, the way you view life on Earth — especially your own.

The far side of the Moon, 1973. Three astronauts are trapped in a tiny Apollo module, and one of them has murder on the mind…

As Soviet and American crews sprint for a secret bounty hidden away on the Moon’s surface, old rivalries blossom and the political stakes are stretched to breaking point back on Earth. Houston flight controller Kaz Zemeckis must do all he can to keep the NASA crew together, while staying one step ahead of their Russian rivals. But not everyone on board Apollo 18 is quite who they appear to be.

Colonel Chris Hadfield loves rockets and planets and pretending he’s a brave astronaut, exploring the universe. Only one problem — at night, Hadfield doesn’t feel so brave. He’s afraid of the dark.
But when he watches the groundbreaking moon landing on TV, he realizes that space is the darkest dark there is — and the dark is beautiful and exciting, especially when you have big dreams to keep you company.

Israel, October 1973. As the Yom Kippur War flares into life, a state-of-the-art Soviet MiG fighter is racing at breakneck speed over the arid scrublands below… and promptly disappears.

NASA Flight Controller and former top US test pilot Kaz Zemeckis watches the scene from the ground — and is quickly pulled into a dizzying, high-stakes game of spies, lies and a possible high-level defection that plays out across three continents.

The prize is beyond value: the secrets of the Soviets’ mythical “Foxbat” MiG-25, the fastest, highest-flying fighter plane in the world and the key to Cold War air supremacy. But every defection is double-edged with risk, and Kaz needs to tread a careful line between trust and suspicion. Ultimately, he must invite the fox into the henhouse—bringing the defector into the heart of the United States’ most secret test site—and hope that, with skill and cunning, the game plays out his way.

For Colonel Chris Hadfield’s second heart-stopping thriller, we move from Space to another rich and exciting part of Hadfield’s CV: his time as a top test pilot in both the US Air Force and the US Navy, and as an RCAF fighter pilot intercepting armed Soviet bombers in North American airspace. Full of insider detail, excitement and political intrigue drawn from real events, The Defector brings us the nerve-shredding rush of aerial combat, as told by one of the world’s top fighter pilots.

A playful, thought-provoking and visually delightful photo tour of Earth from the astronaut who made us fall in love with our planet all over again…

The millions of us who followed Colonel Chris Hadfield’s tweets from space thought we knew what we were looking at when we first saw his photos of Earth. We definitely caught the beauty but we may have missed the full meaning. Now, with a collection of his favorite, never-before-shared images, Hadfield helps us see the big picture: why our planet looks the way it does and why we live where we do. Drawing on his in-depth knowledge of geology, geography and meteorology, he takes us on a planetary photo tour — an idealized orbit of Earth — and explains the mysteries these stunning images reveal.

You Are Here opens a singular window on our planet, using remarkable photographs to illuminate the history and the consequences of human settlement, the magnificence (and wit) of never-before-noticed landscapes, and the power of the natural forces shaping our world and the future of our species.