Dad’s space oddity an eye-opener

As her father became famous, Kristin Hadfield was knuckling down to her studies

At the start of 2013, I was with my family after celebrating Christmas together — all except for dad, who was in space. I’ve spent nearly my whole life as the daughter of an astronaut, but he hadn’t been to space for over 10 years and never for more than a few weeks at a time, so I didn’t know what this mission would be like for myself or for the family.

For one thing, I was extremely nervous at his launch — seeing the Russian Soyuz rocket get absorbed in flames while watching helplessly in the Kazakh cold, just hoping that everything would go ok. For his other launches, I was young; I didn’t understand that spaceflight was dangerous and that my dad was anything less than invincible.

I was scared this time, and so when I saw the Soyuz lift-off the launch pad and carry my dad, Tom Marshburn, and Roman Romanenko safely to space, I felt so relieved and happy and proud.

Another difference revealed itself. Dad’s previous missions were so short that they didn’t have much time to affect our family life, but this time he was living off the Earth for five months. Although my brothers and I live on different continents and don’t get to spend much time with our parents we’re a very close family and are used to somewhat constant communication.

My dad and I normally play Scrabble online, but he wasn’t able to play from the space station. My family has an ongoing Skype conversation where we chat about what’s new with us whenever we have a free minute, but there’s no Skyping from the International Space Station.

He was able to call me sometimes, which led him to occasionally call while I was teaching or in a noisy pub — you feel pretty guilty when you miss a call from space.

When Irish people used to ask me what my dad does, they would be surprised and interested, but they normally hadn’t heard of him.

On this mission though, his videos and pictures from space changed all that. People from around the world began to follow him on Twitter and Facebook and realised that the stuff happening on the space station was actually pretty cool.

Suddenly, people in Ireland knew who my dad was! And if they didn’t by St. Patrick’s Day, they sure did when he tweeted “Tá Éire fíorálainn” — probably the first Irish communication from space.

It was wonderful that people were interested, but I’m pretty shy and so it was also a little overwhelming. !

One thing that is back to normal is that my dad and I are back to playing Scrabble and he has re-joined the family Skype conversation.