Travel with Rick Steves · Saturday, July 25, 2026
Astronaut Chris Hadfield believes that incorporating art, such as singing David Bowie's 'Space Oddity,' helped make the complex science of space exploration and the International Space Station more accessible to the public. He observed that this approach made the experience more 'real' and intuitively understandable for people.
“I think it tied art to the science of what's going on. And people have trouble understanding this. Space station or the 200 scientific experiments on board. But when they saw the iconic music, uh, the sort of the almost prescient music and and very well-known tune by Bowie, suddenly in a new human place, it made it, I think, more real for people or at least they understood it intuitively better.”
“And so when you look down at the earth, you see this incredible fragile planet. And it's like a fragile jewel in the in the darkness of space. And so we have a tremendous responsibility to take care of it.”