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IPFS News Link • Space Travel and Exploration

What can you learn from Chris Hadfield's class on how to be an astronaut?

• https://www.popsci.com, By Mary Beth Griggs

So many people long to be astronauts when they grow up, but only a few people ever actually make it to space. The ones that do are emissaries for the rest of us, their pictures and stories and data giving us a tenuous link to the burgeoning world of spaceflight.

There are books and conferences where you can learn about what being an astronaut is like, but Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield—of Space Oddity fame—just launched a program to take that learning experience one step further. This week, he announced a partnership with MasterClass, offering an in-depth course featuring 28 classes exploring what it's really like to be an astronaut. The content is available exclusively on MasterClass' new app for the first week, and on their website after May 1.

The course isn't exactly cheap—it's $90 for one class, or $180 for access to all of MasterClass' content—but the lessons are interesting, and Hadfield hopes the platform will give people a way to access his expertise beyond his books and numerous talks and lectures. "Really the idea of it is to try to share the experiences I've had in a way that is accessible to other people," Hadfield says.