Several weeks ago, astronaut Chris Hadfield spoke on CBC Radio's The Current about the Voyager 1 satellite, which left Earth 37 years ago. Listening in was five-year-old Timur, who lives in British Columbia, Canada. And Timur did not like what he heard.
There's a satellite all alone, floating through space? What if something goes wrong and there's nothing to fix it? What if it gets lost? These questions worried Timur so much that he couldn't sleep, so with some help from his mom, he got a chance to ask Hadfield directly, and the resulting "interview" is definitely worth a full listen.
Hadfield, who commanded Expedition 35 to the International Space Station, reassures Timur that Voyager is "a very tough little spaceship."
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"I think the real question is, is Voyager happy or not? Is Voyager a happy machine, or a sad machine?" Hadfield tells Timur. "I think about that…I really like the machines that I'm working with to be happy. And what I was thinking, Timur, was, machines really like to do something. They like to do what they're built for."
At the end of the exchange, Hadfield asks Timur, "Does it make you happier?" to which the little boy responds, "Not really." Maybe he'll be more reassured by Voyager's own admission that it's doing just fine, (via a NASA-run Twitter account for the satellite):
You can listen to the full, absolutely adorable interview over at CBC Radio.
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