International Space station commander Chris Hadfield looks down at the Earth from orbit. Photograph: NASA/REX
Youre in Saskatchewan at the moment, but by the time Observer readers see this, youll be in London and then off to various points of the UK and Ireland. Are you looking forward to it? Im really looking forward to it. And its where my familys all originally from we only came to Canada a hundred years ago.
Youll be talking about your new book, You Are Here, a collection of your photographs from the International Space Station. Was it fun to put together? It was a delight. It was a lot of work, because there are tens of thousands of pictures that you take over the month up there, most of them in a hurry you just had a few rushed minutes at the window. It wasnt until over a year later that I actually had time to filter through them all it was like looking at pictures from your childhood or from your wedding and going, oh, look at this! I hadnt even noticed that!
The pictures are amazing from the Yorkshire moors to the deserts of Iran, the Bolivian rainforest and fishing boats in the East China Sea... So many people ask: so what does it look like? And even when I was up there, there was a huge clamouring for people to see their own home town, their own part of the world, places that theyd been. And so I felt a great compunction to do my best to take everybody on one tour around the world, as if we were floating elbow to elbow there, and I was being their tour guide to the world.
One thing the book seems to say is were all connected. Were all co-existing on this planet, and that sense of our little circle and everything else being some big, nebulous them, I think is a dangerous one for us all. Im very pleased to have seen something different for myself. This is my best effort to show everybody what the world truly looks like, and let them draw their own conclusions.
Youve done something that only a tiny number of people will ever do and it started when you saw the moon landings as a child. What was that like? It was pivotal. It was probably most like an enormous door of invitation opening. The improbability of it, but the realisation that impossible things happen, was a wonderful thing to learn at nine years old.
You resolved then to become an astronaut - even though youre frightened of heights, arent you? Well, I think everybody should be! Thats self-preservation. If youre standing on the edge of a cliff, your body ought to be screaming at you to get back, because one small gust of wind or loose pebble and youre off and done. Im not afraid if I know I cant fall, and I think thats the difference. Its not an irrational fear: its just a self-protecting fear. But its what you do with fear that really matters.
You once temporarily lost your vision on a spacewalk. Surely that must have been frightening? In order to accomplish something youre dreaming about, youre probably going to have to face some sort of fear, and the difference between fear and danger is the real key. What is the actual danger? And that applies whether youre referring to crossing a busy street, or doing a spacewalk. I stopped for a moment and thought: OK, so I cant see, but theres really not any increased danger, I can still talk and think and hold on. The guy whos out here with me can help stuff me back into the air lock, and I can sort of feel my way back in.
So you conquered the fear and carried on... And the counterpoint to being blind during that spacewalk was the 10 orbits of the world that I did where I could see fine. The view is revelationary; it is stupefyingly beautiful. Youre not on the world looking up, youre in the universe, its all around you, and youre looking at the world as a separate form. Its turning so relentlessly, and it looks nothing like a globe, its not smooth and shiny, where all the countries are different colours, its this big, complex, textured, multicoloured living thing next to you, and the blackness of everything else is just on the other side. And if I had justallowed fear to dominate my life, I would never have seen any of that.
Now that youve retired from going into space, how much do you miss it? Its not over for me at all. It wasnt a singular event, it was part of the 21years that I served as an astronaut. Its not like I was sitting about twiddling my thumbs and then I was doing a spacewalk, and that was the peak and everything else was some sort of ditch or valley. It just wasnt that way. I see it as just a richness, a great experience that I count on in order to be who I am now. Just because youve eaten ambrosia or truffles or Black Forest cake once doesnt mean that youll never eat again, or that no other food is good.
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