Reddit Social Media from Space

So there you are, orbiting 200 miles above the earth on the International Space Station, blazing through space like a tin comet, blinking in wonderment as continents and oceans fly by beneath your feet like road signs flicking past the car window as you hurtle down the motorway, and what’s top of your mind?

A Reddit social media webchat with randoms back on earth. That’s right: check boosters, clean airlock, polish space suit, click on the world wide web, log-on to Reddit social media and answer dumb-ass questions from goons I’ve never met.

That’s exactly what International Space Station Commander (how’s that for a job title on your business card?) Chris Hadfield did a couple of weeks ago (February 17th to be precise).

Hadfield followed in the footsteps of Barack Obama and Snoop Lion (apparently that’s the new name for the hip hop artist formerly known as Snoop Dogg) by answering questions posted through Reddit. But unlike his terrestrial predecessors, of course, Hadfield beamed his answers down to Reddit social media users from space.

Hadfield answered questions while orbiting earth just above the western coast of Australia in the Indian Ocean.

Social media celebrity-ness (is that a word?) is nothing new for the Canadian astronaut, however. He was already a social media sensation for his often poetic updates from space. He likened the view from space to “a carpet of countless tiny perfect unblinking lights in endless velvet, with the Milky Way as a glowing area of paler texture.”

Tapping away on his laptop high above the earth, he side-stepped questions from Reddit social media users about masturbation and farting in a spacesuit. He did though comment on the meteorite that had crashed into Russia the previous week.

“We didn’t see the meteorite that did all the damage in Russia, as we were on the other side of the Earth. But I see small ones burn up between ISS and the earth every day,” he said.

“I watched a large meteorite burn up between me and Australia. To think of that hypersonic dumb lump of rock randomly hurtling into us instead sent a shiver up my back,” he said.

Indeed, we reckon here at SEO Web Marketing that life on a space station is clearly not for the faint-hearted. Hadfield said he and his six colleagues often hear “pings as tiny rocks hit our spaceship, and also the creaks and snaps of expanding metal as we go in and out of sunlight. The solar panels are full of tiny holes from the micro-meteorites.”

He said as well as the vital research the team undertake, one of the big aims of the mission is to engage and inform people about space. “It is important that people see the world from this new perspective that technology has given us,” he said. One day, he added, man would establish permanent bases on the moon “and beyond”.

‘To the moon and beyond’ – haven’t we heard a phrase like that somewhere before?