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In Flight USA Articles
Interview With Astronaut, Chris Hadfield
By Shanon Kern
The following is an interview by In Flight USA reporter, Shanon Kern, with astronaut and author, Chris Hadfield. Chris started in general aviation at age 16 and has flown nearly every aircraft available. He currently has a book, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life, on the New York Times Bestseller List.
SK: Over the last couple of years, you’ve kind of given the world a front-row view of space and what it’s like to be an astronaut. What made you decide to put everything out on social media?
CH: I served as an astronaut for 21 years. I’ve always felt that a really vital part of the job was to share the experience, not to keep it to myself. So, through the whole 21 years, I used all the technology I could think of to share it. I used ham radio. I used Castle Blends 70 mm film and Imax movies. I spoke in thousands of places in person, but it wasn’t until my third space flight that social media was invented. That was when we had connectivity. The space station is not the best place all the time, but it has Internet connectivity. So you could take a picture and often within a few minutes share it with the world, so it was really just a continuation of what I’d been doing for 20 years, and I was doing my absolute best to use the technology that existed to share a really rare human experience. It’s just been amazing to see the result of that work.
Pancho Barnes Legend is Committed to Film With Pancho Barnes and The Happy Bottom Riding Club
By S. Mark Rhodes
The great Pancho at the peak of her profane glory. (Courtesy of the Pancho Barnes Trust Estate)If there was ever a figure worthy of cult status in the aviation world, that individual must be Florence “Pancho” Barnes. Barnes is probably best known as a character in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff as well as the film version (played by Kim Stanley). The time frame of the book and especially the film pick up at a point in Barnes’ life where she is the owner and operator of the “Happy Bottom Riding Club.” The HBRC was basically a saloon out in the middle of the Mohave Dessert, which catered to the flyers at Muroc Field (later Edwards Air Force Base) who happened to be some of the finest and most legendary test pilots of the time like Chuck Yeager, Scott Crosffield and Buzz Aldrin. Barnes held court at this raucous bar and “dude ranch” for many years helping provide emotional and libational support to this elite group of aviators.
The recently released Pancho Barnes and the Happy Bottom Riding Club (Nick Spark Productions) helps give a full picture of Barnes that has only been hinted at in The Right Stuff. Barnes grew up in a kind of blue blood family in Pasadena, California where she was expected to become a society lady like her mother. This was not to be as the young Florence showed an adventuresome streak that was at considerable odds with her mom’s idea of how a young woman should conduct herself in public.