What can you learn from Chris Hadfield's class on how to be an astronaut?

[ad_1]

So many people long to be astronauts when they grow up, but only a few people ever actually make it to space. The ones that do are emissaries for the rest of us, their pictures and stories and data giving us a tenuous link to the burgeoning world of spaceflight.

There are books and conferences where you can learn about what being an astronaut is like, but Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield—of Space Oddity fame—just launched a program to take that learning experience one step further. This week, he announced a partnership with MasterClass, offering an in-depth course featuring 28 classes exploring what it’s really like to be an astronaut. The content is available exclusively on MasterClass’ new app for the first week, and on their website after May 1.

The course isn’t exactly cheap—it's $90 for one class, or $180 for access to all of MasterClass’ content—but the lessons are interesting, and Hadfield hopes the platform will give people a way to access his expertise beyond his books and numerous talks and lectures. “Really the idea of it is to try to share the experiences I’ve had in a way that is accessible to other people,” Hadfield says.

The classes range from discussions of engines and how spaceflight maneuvers like docking work to future research opportunities, and the general experience of being in a place beyond our planet.

“It will open doors. Some of it is fairly straightforward and some of it is fairly technical,” Hadfield says, noting that he’s tried to include other resources at the ends of his classes for students that might want an even deeper dive into the material. Check out a section of his class below.

Taking the course is no guarantee that you’ll actually head to space one day to use what you've learned, but Hadfield is optimistic that space flight might someday follow airplanes and computers as a revolutionary technology that in intimately ingrained in our lives.

“The advent of an enabling technology is revolutionizing to what we consider to be normal within life, and there’s always a moment when the technology becomes proven and safe and cost effective enough that it starts to become available for not just research and esoteric projects, but it becomes reliably integrated into common life almost seamlessly,” Hadfield says. “I think we are at that point with spaceflight.”

[ad_2]

Written By Mary Beth Griggs

Comments

Ice technicians are the secret stars of the Winter Olympics

[ad_1] The emphasis of this year's two-week-long Winter Olympic Games has been placed squarely on the Olympians themselves. After all, the stated purpose of the international competition is to bring together the world’s greatest athletes in a nail-biting competition across fifteen different winter sports. But before the curlers, skiers, and skaters even arrived in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Olympians of the ice technician world were already a few weeks deep in a competition of their own. Mark Callan of the World Curling Federation and Markus Aschauer of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation both say they’re hoping to make the best ice the Winter Olympics have ever seen. To transform the barren concrete jungle of existing tracks and arenas into an ice- and snow-covered wonderland is an enormous undertaking. And it takes a keen understanding of the physics and chemistry that keeps frozen precipitation pristine. Curling Callan has been making and maintaining ic...

Humans flourished through a supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago (so you can make it through Tuesday)

[ad_1] About 74,000 years ago, a large chunk of a Pacific island exploded. It sent ash and other debris around the world, including to the southern tip of Africa, where it would be found by a team of international scientists and entered as the latest data point in one of the hottest debates in paleoanthropology ( I know ): Did the Toba supervolcano thrust our planet into a 1,000-year volcanic winter, thus bottle-necking animals and plants alike? Or was it just a little blip on our historic radar? That’s the contentious arena into which our intrepid researchers venture, this time with a new study in Nature establishing that humans in modern-day South Africa not only survived, but flourished after the Toba eruption. Where once was (we think, maybe) a mountain, there is now a huge caldera with a lake inside, and an island inside that. Their evidence shows that debris from the explosion landed 9,000 kilometers (5592.3 miles) away, the farthest distance traveled ever recorded for the ...

These 1950s experiments showed us the trauma of parent-child separation. Now experts say they're too unethical to repeat—even on monkeys.

[ad_1] John Gluck’s excitement about studying parent-child separation quickly soured. He’d been thrilled to arrive at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the late 1960s, his spot in the lab of renowned behavioral psychologist Harry Harlow secure. Harlow had cemented his legacy more than a decade earlier when his experiments showed the devastating effects of broken parent-child bonds in rhesus monkeys. As a graduate student researcher, Gluck would use Harlow’s monkey colony to study the impact of such disruption on intellectual ability. Gluck found academic success, and stayed in touch with Harlow long after graduation. His mentor even sent Gluck monkeys to use in his own laboratory. But in the three years Gluck spent with Harlow—and the subsequent three decades he spent as a leading animal researcher in his own right—his concern for the well-being of his former test subjects overshadowed his enthusiasm for animal research. Separating parent and child,...

Awe-inspiring science reporting, technology news, and DIY projects. Skunks to space robots, primates

Search This Blog