School Daze: Chris Hadfield - I realised at a young age that teachers were fallible

WHEN I think about the kind of child I was, I would say that I was the exact same kind of person that I am as an adult. I have always been fascinated by things that I don’t quite yet understand. I recognise that I hardly understand anything and that most of the world is and always has been so beautifully complex to me.

I have always loved becoming good at things, trying to push myself to do things that I couldn’t do before. I have been a student my whole life — really the life of an astronaut is the life of a student. In order to fly a Russian spaceship, not only did I have to learn how to fly a spaceship, I also had to learn Russian and then study orbital mechanics and control theory in Russian.