While packing for his six months onboard NASA's International Space Station, Chris Hadfield added in an acoustic guitar, two plastic guitar picks, and his laptop, writes Phys.org. He made a basic sign for his time on the space station that said "Recording in Progress," using it to make sure everyone else stayed relatively quiet while he recorded original music and a David Bowie cover (per The Georgia Straight). Hadfield used Apple's music program GarageBand to put together his recordings, according to LifeGate.
His original pieces, similarly to Bowie's "Space Oddity," dealt with his feelings regarding being in space. They are mainly blues and rock pieces and are mostly rhythm driven. After Hadfield got back in the middle of 2013, he decided to take the recordings and turn them into an album. The album sales have been used to support Canadian music schools.
NASA's psychologists encouraged Hadfield's playing, feeling that music and art could only be to the benefit of astronauts' mental health. The guitar he played, a Larrivee Parlor, was originally brought on the international space station in 2001 and has been played by a score of astronauts and cosmonauts (via LifeGate). No one other than Hadfield used it to compose and record an album.
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