- It's actually hard to play a guitar in space because every time you move your hand up the neck the guitar just goes, takes off, there's nothing to hold it in place. [guitar music] I shot this entire video myself. You don't want to bother anybody else on the spaceship they're all busy and this was just sort of a fun project I did with my son and a couple musician friends on earth. [gentle music] Some people wonder what took this picture. This is actually the space shuttle flying around the space station, took this picture through the overhead windows. We called it the fly-around. That's my bedroom on the spaceship right there. I would stick this sign up so people would be quiet while I was recording music. ♪ Ground Control to Major Tom. ♪ It's so hard to get the lighting right here look close to my face, you can see two lights shining on my face so that it won't be underexposed against the lightness of the earth in the background. If you float a camera in space, there's enough air moved around by the ventilators, that the camera will turn very slowly, sorta like floating in the water. So I would take the camera and mount it on just a little flexible arm or velcro it to the wall just to keep it straight. ♪ Ground Control to Major Tom ♪ It took about an hour and a half to make all these videos. Just one Saturday afternoon in the time on my schedule where it said time-off, I just took my vocal recording that I'd done and I just floated around the space station singing along with myself. I've always been a musician and I fronted bands for 25 years in Houston and I'd never played a Bowie tune before in my life before I got to orbit, to cover Bowie is arrogant, it's like, it's like, covering Bach or something, I'm just gonna play a little ELO, you know, you just don't do it. It's really hard to control the guitar and accurately play and the producer that I was working with on the ground, he actually sent me a note saying hey your guitar playing's really messy up there. I'm like, you come up here and play guitar, this is a hard place to play, the guitar just won't sit still in your hands. ♪ This is Ground Control to Major Tom ♪ ♪ You've really made the grade ♪ ♪ And the papers want to know ♪ ♪ Who's shirts you wear ♪ All around the space ship there are foot restraints there are little loops or little hand rails so that you can momentarily stabilize yourself by hooking your toes underneath. But if you very carefully pop your toes out then you'll just sort of float in the middle of the spaceship and I thought while I was making this video, people should see that I'm truly on board a spaceship, these aren't special effects. ♪ And I'm floating in ♪ a most peculiar way ♪ The internet chose this song, the internet is why I sang Space Oddity on the space station. I recorded an original tune on the space station that my brother and I wrote called, Jewel In The Night. And when people heard there was someone recording up on the space station, there was a big internet demand to do a cover of Oddity, so I did and it turned out nice. Bowie wrote Space Oddity when he was 19 turning 20. He wrote it as a result of the movie, 2001 A Space Odyssey and because Apollo 9 and Apollo 10 had gone and Apollo 11 was coming and he realized, we're gonna walk on the moon and so he was fascinated by space flight and the loneliness of it. And he guessed what space flight would be like. But we changed the words for this song, we updated it, it's been 40 years and he approved it, he loved this version of the song. He described it as the most poignant version of the song ever done and I got to know him a little bit. And the fact that Bowie loved this version of the song for me that was the best part, it was his song not mine, and it gave him a lot of pleasure in the last couple years of his life. Bowie and all of the lawyers that work with him in his organization, they gave us permission to do it and I'm glad they did. ♪ Planet earth is blue ♪ ♪ and there's nothing left to do ♪ [guitar music] NASA is tens of thousands of people. I think overall they saw that it allowed people to see space flight for what it really is. It's people exploring the rest of the universe, living in an environment we've never been in before. We're up there just experiencing things like anybody else is. We're taking the culture we were raised with to a new place and adapting it. And that I think is a healthy natural thing to do. And so, NASA to a large degree, really loved it. And there's all sorts of stuff that NASA's doing now using social media, using YouTube, using technology on board to try and help people understand space flight even better. On my first space flight there were no digital cameras, so every picture was film, there was no internet and in fact real-time communication with the ship was just by radio, it is really difficult to share a magnificent experience just by radio. Now onboard the spaceship, you can take a digital photograph and within minutes, just hit send or write a few words about it and send it out on Twitter or whatever and a billion people can see what you're doing, can maybe sense and share in the experience and to me that's great, imagine if while Michelangelo was lying on his back painting the Sistine Chapel, if he'd had a webcam next to him and if you could have asked him questions. We have no idea what Michelangelo was thinking, we only see the end result, I think seeing and understanding the process and the human side of it is a really important part of the creation of new things and the exploration of new places. I'm Commander Chris Hadfield, I really hope you enjoyed learning how I made this Space Oddity video. There's a lot more videos I made up there as well, talking about everything that happens on a spaceship, you should watch.