An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth
Colonel Chris Hadfield has spent decades training as an astronaut and has logged nearly 4000 hours in space. During this time he has broken into a Space Station with a Swiss army knife, disposed of a live snake while piloting a plane, and been temporarily blinded while clinging to the exterior of an orbiting spacecraft. The secret to Col. Hadfield’s success-and survival-is an unconventional philosophy he learned at NASA: prepare for the worst-and enjoy every moment of it.
From Dreams to First Steps
A comment on a LinkedIn post led me here. Simon Wardley shared a story about signing his son up for flight lessons.
My daughter, who’s nine, dreams of becoming an astronaut. That dream might sound impossible—but helping her take small steps, like learning to fly, suddenly felt within reach.
When I replied to the post, someone recommended a book: An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth. It’s the story of Chris Hadfield, a guy from Canada who wanted to become an astronaut—at a time when Canada didn’t even have a space program.
He made the impossible happen. Not only did he become an astronaut—he went to space three times and spent five months aboard the ISS.
My interest was immediately sparked.
Lately, I’ve been reading a few space-related books—driven by my daughter’s growing curiosity about space and space exploration. I think I’ve always been interested in the topic too, but truthfully, I don’t know much about it.
So I picked up the book—and I have to say: I really enjoyed it.
Not just because it’s well written, but because it surprisingly mirrors many aspects of my day-to-day work in software engineering.
Let me share just a bit from the book.
The Astronaut Mindset
As I mentioned, Chris wanted to become an astronaut—even when Canada didn’t even have a space program. He truly made the impossible happen.
The stories he shares—about how he got there, the personal insights, doubts, setbacks, and small victories—make it a deeply personal and human journey.
There’s really just one thing I can control: my attitude during the journey, which is what keeps me feeling steady and stable, and what keeps me headed in the right direction.
It’s not just a story about going to space. It’s a story about preparation, resilience, and finding meaning in the work, even when the goal feels impossibly far away.
At times, his confidence almost comes across as bragging. But I don’t think it is. Given everything he’s achieved, he’s earned the right to speak from experience—and he does so with clarity and purpose.
What surprised me most was how many powerful lessons I found in the book—lessons that apply far beyond space. I picked it up out of personal interest, but quickly realized how relevant it was to my own work in software engineering.
The narrative builds well, starting from his early dreams and weaving in more recent stories of space travel. It kept me hooked, wanting to know more. His reflections—on self-doubt, discipline, small wins, and personal growth—give the book a warm and relatable tone.
While reading, I found myself underlining insights that felt just as applicable to leading teams and writing software as they are to flying spacecraft.
There’s a lot to take away—especially about leadership and having an engineering mindset.
Leadership Lessons from Orbit
There are quite a few surprising parallels between the work of an astronaut and the work we do in software engineering.
Sure, space exploration is far more dangerous—the stakes are higher, the process more complex, and the consequences more severe. But that’s exactly why there’s so much to learn from how astronauts train, make decisions, and operate as a team under pressure.
So, let’s dive into some of the lessons that stood out to me—and the practices I recognized from my own day-to-day work.
Chaos Engineering
Anticipating problems and figuring out how to solve them is actually the opposite of worrying: it’s productive. Likewise, coming up with a plan of action isn’t a waste of time if it gives you peace of mind. While it’s true that you may wind up being ready for something that never happens, if the stakes are at all high, it’s worth it.
One topic I love to talk about is Chaos Engineering. In software engineering, it’s still not a common practice—but it’s an incredibly powerful one.
The idea is simple: introduce chaos into your systems on purpose. By doing so, you learn not just what breaks, but what holds. It gives you a deeper understanding of how your systems behave under stress, and more importantly, how your team responds when things go wrong.
Astronauts approach this in a surprisingly similar way. During training, they use scenario cards to inject failure into already complex simulations. These aren’t just minor glitches—they’re layered, high-stakes situations designed to push teams to the edge of failure, forcing them to think clearly, follow process, and rely on preparation.
When we’re simulating deorbit to landing, for instance, dozens of people observe, hoping that something new—a flaw in a standard procedure, say, or a better way of doing something—will be revealed. They actually want us to stumble into a gray zone no one had recognized could be problematic in order to see whether we can figure out what to do.
It reminded me of Game Days in engineering: deliberately simulating outages to test our systems, our tooling, and ourselves. Like astronauts, we train not just to avoid failure—but to be ready when it happens.
The truth is that nothing went as we’d planned, but everything was within the scope of what we prepared for.
Learning Culture, Not Blaming Culture
It’s always easy to blame someone when things go wrong. But blame doesn’t lead to better outcomes— learning does.
[…] a mistake is like a loose thread you should tug on, hard, to see if the whole fabric unravels.
Instead of pointing fingers, we can choose to treat mistakes as signals, not failures. This mindset isn’t new. In fact, the Toyota Production System is built on the very idea of continuous improvement (kaizen): finding and fixing even the smallest inefficiencies, over and over again.
At NASA, where the organizational culture focuses so explicitly on education, not just achievement, it’s even easier to frame individual mistakes as teachable moments rather than career-ending blunders.
What struck me is how this same mindset appears in how NASA operates. There’s a constant effort to look for flaws—not to assign fault, but to make the technology, the processes, and the people better, all the time.
It’s a culture of curiosity, not judgment. Reflection, not reaction.
That’s the kind of environment where true resilience is built.
Architectural Guardrails
One reason we’re able to keep pushing the boundaries of human capability yet keep people safe is that Flight Rules protect against the temptation to take risks, which is strongest when momentum has been building to meet a launch date.
This line really made me think about how we manage risk in software engineering.
There’s often a love-hate relationship between software engineers and software architects. Sometimes, architecture is seen as something that gets “enforced” from above—rigid, abstract, disconnected from real-world pressures.
But when done well, architecture isn’t about control—it’s about guardrails.
Just like Flight Rules at NASA, architectural guidelines exist not to block momentum, but to prevent risky decisions made under pressure. Especially as teams race toward deadlines, it’s easy to cut corners, skip tests, or ignore best practices.
Good guardrails help teams move fast without flying blind. They protect us from the kinds of mistakes that feel tempting in the moment but could cause real damage down the line.
We don’t need rigid control—we need thoughtful constraints that support good decisions, even in high-stress environments.
Collaboration
Being an astronaut means living in space for long periods of time, often with just a handful of people in close quarters. That requires exceptional social skills—the ability to communicate clearly, resolve conflict, and support one another under pressure.
But social skills aren’t just for astronauts. They’re essential for all of us.
In many situations, soft skills matter more than technical ones. You can be the most brilliant engineer in the room—but if you can’t collaborate, listen, and adapt, your impact will always be limited.
You are all part of a system, one part does need the other to operate.
Working together makes it easier to achieve your goals. Shared success is better, stronger, and more sustainable than going it alone.
The more senior you are, the greater the impact your flippant comment will have. Don’t snap at the people who work with you. When you see red, count to 10.
And it’s not just about working well within your own team, or focusing on your own isolated system.
True collaboration means working across teams, across domains, and with systems that you may not fully control or understand.
Like an astronaut aboard the ISS, you’re just one part of a much larger mission. Your work matters—but it only succeeds when it connects and integrates with the work of others.
Bullying, bickering and competing for dominance are, even in a low-risk situation, excellent ways to destroy morale and diminish productivity.
Recognizing that you’re part of a bigger system —one that relies on communication, trust, and shared responsibility—is key to doing meaningful work, whether you’re in space or building software here on Earth.
Servant Leadership
Ultimately, leadership is not about glorious crowning acts. It’s about keeping your team focused on a goal and motivated to do their best to achieve it, especially when the stakes are high and the consequences really matter. It is about laying the groundwork for others’ success, and then standing back and letting them shine.
That, to me, is the kind of leadership worth striving for. Not showy. Not heroic. Just quietly intentional, deeply supportive, and relentlessly focused on helping others succeed.
Conclusion
I marked so many quotes in the book—but in the end, I had to choose just a few to share. So if any of this intrigues you, I’ll simply say: read the book.
Even if you’re not an engineer, or you’re not looking to study anything in particular, it’s just a fascinating read full of incredible stories about going to space.
The life of an astronaut is one of simulating, practicing and anticipating, trying to build the necessary skills and create the correct mind-set.
And I think there’s something in that for all of us.
We can all keep improving—sharpening our skills, doing our work with more intention, and preparing ourselves for the inevitable challenges that come our way.
Related Reading
- Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery by Scott Kelly
- Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds by David Goggins