Chris Hadfield

• 1. Introduction

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  Chris Hadfield was nine years old when he made up his mind. Sitting in front of a television on a corn farm in southern Ontario in 1969, he watched Apollo 11 carry three American astronauts to the Moon and back. Canada had no space program. There were no Canadian astronauts. The odds against a farm kid from Milton, Ontario, ever reaching orbit were, by any reasonable measure, enormous. Yet that single broadcast planted a direction that would shape every choice he made for the next four decades.

  How does a child's television moment become a career that spans fighter jets, spacewalks, and a viral music video watched tens of millions of times? What does it take to become not just the first Canadian to walk in space, but also the first to command the International Space Station? And what happens when one of the most decorated test pilots in North American history decides the story isn't over after landing?

• 2. From Farm to Flight

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  the 29th of August 1959, in Sarnia, Ontario, is the date on Chris Austin Hadfield's birth certificate, though the family home was in Milton, where his parents Eleanor and Roger Hadfield raised him on a corn farm. That agricultural upbringing gave little outward signal of what was coming. He was a Wolf Cub in a pack that met at the Milton Fairgrounds.

  Hadfield's path to the sky began formally through the Royal Canadian Air Cadets. By age 15, he had earned a glider pilot scholarship; by 16, a powered pilot scholarship. At White Oaks Secondary School in Oakville and then Milton District High School, where he graduated as an Ontario Scholar in 1977, he was already accumulating hours in the air alongside his classwork.

  After high school in 1978, he enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces and split his undergraduate years between Royal Roads Military College and the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario. He graduated in 1982 with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering with honours, and in the same year began post-graduate research at the University of Waterloo.

  That engineering credential opened the door to advanced flight training. Before graduating from college, he had already begun basic flight training at CFB Portage la Prairie, and in 1983 he took top honours as the leading graduate from Basic Jet Training at CFB Moose Jaw. Fighter training followed at 410 Tactical Fighter Operational Training Squadron at CFB Cold Lake, where he flew the Canadair CF-116 Freedom Fighter and the McDonnell Douglas CF-18 Hornet. Flying CF-18s with 425 Tactical Fighter Squadron on NORAD intercept missions, Hadfield became the first CF-18 pilot to intercept a Soviet Tupolev Tu 95 long-range bomber over the Canadian Arctic.

• 3. The Test Pilot Years

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  In the late 1980s, Hadfield enrolled at the US Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, a posting that would define the technical depth of his eventual astronaut career. He went on to serve as an exchange officer with the US Navy at Strike Test Directorate, Patuxent River Naval Air Station.

  Between 1989 and 1992, his record at Patuxent River was unusually dense. He tested the McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet and the LTV A-7 Corsair II. He performed research work with NASA on pitch control margin simulation and flight. He completed the first military flight of F/A-18 enhanced performance engines. He piloted the first flight test of the National Aerospace Plane external burning hydrogen propulsion engine. He also developed a new handling qualities rating scale for high angle-of-attack testing, and participated in the F/A-18 out-of-control recovery test program.

  In 1988, this body of work earned him the Liethen-Tittle Award as the top pilot graduate of the US Air Force Test Pilot School, and in 1991 he was named US Navy Test Pilot of the Year. In May 1992, he completed a master's degree in aviation systems at the University of Tennessee Space Institute, with a thesis focused on the high-angle attack aerodynamics of the F/A-18 Hornet.

  By the time the astronaut selection panels assessed him, Hadfield had logged flight time in over 70 different types of aircraft. That breadth, combined with his specific research into aircraft behaviour at the edges of the flight envelope, made him an unusually complete candidate.

• 4. Three Flights to Orbit

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  In June 1992, Hadfield was chosen as one of four new Canadian astronauts from a field of 5,330 applicants. Three of those four, including Dafydd Williams and Julie Payette alongside Hadfield, eventually flew in space.

  His first mission, STS-74, launched in November 1995 aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis. The flight was NASA's second shuttle mission to dock with the Russian space station Mir. The crew attached a five-tonne docking module to Mir and transferred over 1,000 kilograms of food, water, and scientific supplies. Hadfield flew as the first Canadian to operate the Canadarm in orbit, and became the only Canadian ever to board Mir.

  STS-100 followed in April 2001 aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour. The crew delivered and installed Canadarm2, the Canadian-built robotic arm, along with the Italian-made resupply module Raffaello. Hadfield performed two spacewalks during the 11-day flight, making him the first Canadian to leave a spacecraft and float freely in space. During his first spacewalk, the anti-fog solution used to polish his visor caused severe eye irritation, temporarily blinding him and forcing him to vent oxygen into space. He worked through it. In total, he spent 14 hours and 50 minutes outside the station across those two walks, travelling around Earth ten times.

  The third and longest mission launched on the 19th of December 2012, when he flew aboard Soyuz TMA-07M to join Expedition 34 on the ISS. His craft docked two days later. When Expedition 34 ended in March 2013, Hadfield formally assumed command of the station as head of Expedition 35, leading a crew of five and overseeing dozens of scientific experiments on the effects of low gravity on human biology. He returned to Earth on the 13th of May 2013, after five months aboard.

• 5. Command and Connection

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  NASA had publicly announced in 2010 that Hadfield would become the first Canadian commander of the ISS, giving him roughly two years to prepare for a role no Canadian had held. His responsibilities during Expedition 35 included running the station as a functioning facility, supporting a crew of five, and coordinating dozens of active science programs.

  What he did alongside those duties was unusual. Hadfield photographed Earth continuously and shared the images on social media. He enlisted his son Evan to help manage the accounts from the ground, the two working in tandem to push out a stream of images and explanations that reached over 2,400,000 Twitter followers by the mission's end. On the 17th of February 2013, he hosted one of the top Reddit ask me anything threads ever created. His exchanges with William Shatner and other Star Trek actors received widespread coverage. Forbes described him as perhaps the most socially connected astronaut ever to leave Earth.

  On the 12th of May 2013, the day before he returned home, Hadfield recorded a music video aboard the ISS of a modified rendition of David Bowie's "Space Oddity." The video would accumulate over 56 million views on YouTube. The performance raised a genuine legal question: what are the copyright implications of publicly performing a copyrighted work while in Earth orbit? Glenn Fleishman examined exactly that question in a piece published in The Economist on the 22nd of May 2013.

  In June 2013, one month after landing, Hadfield announced his retirement from the Canadian Space Agency, effective the 3rd of July 2013. His statement on leaving included a note about a private promise: after living primarily in the United States since the 1980s, he was finally moving back to Canada, making good on a commitment he had made to his wife nearly 30 years earlier.

• 6. Music in Orbit

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  The Larrivée Parlor guitar was already aboard the ISS before Hadfield arrived. During free time on Expedition 35, he used it to record music, and the first result, a song called "Jewel in the Night", was released on YouTube on Christmas Eve 2012, becoming the first song ever recorded in space.

  A more visible collaboration came with Ed Robertson of Barenaked Ladies and a Canadian school choir, the Wexford Gleeks. The track, called Is Somebody Singing, shortened sometimes to I.S.S., aired on the CBC Radio program Q and was released by CBC Music online on the 8th of February 2013. Hadfield sang it with students across Canada as part of the national Music Monday program. He had also been credited on albums by his brother Dave Hadfield and sang the "Canada Song" with him, released on YouTube on Canada Day 2014.

  After retirement, the musical work continued in a more formal shape. In October 2015, Hadfield released Space Sessions: Songs From a Tin Can, an album drawn from recordings made aboard the station during Expedition 35. The "Space Oddity" video, meanwhile, kept generating discussion long after its release, not only for its visual quality but for the questions it raised about intellectual property in locations that exist outside conventional legal jurisdiction.

• 7. Life After the Station

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  On the 8th of October 2013, the University of Waterloo announced that Hadfield would join as a professor for a three-year term beginning in the fall of 2014. His work there spanned instructional and advisory roles in aviation programs across the Faculty of Environment and Faculty of Science, with additional involvement in astronaut health research through the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences.

  In 2017, he hosted the BBC show Astronauts: Do You Have What It Takes? alongside Kevin Fong and Iya Whiteley. Twelve contestants competed to earn his recommendation as a candidate for future astronaut applications, facing challenges that replicated real tests used by space agencies in Europe and America, including hypoxia training and centrifuge sessions.

  His autobiography, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, published in 2013, drew on his career and the lead-up to Expedition 35. It became a New York Times bestseller and the bestselling book in Canada written by a Canadian on a Canadian subject. Then in 2021 he shifted to fiction, publishing The Apollo Murders, a Cold War thriller. Sequels, The Defector and Final Orbit, followed in 2023 and 2025. As of October 2025, Hadfield had drafted an outline for a fourth book in the series.

  Also in February 2021, Virgin Galactic announced he would join their Space Advisory Board, alongside former astronaut Sandra Magnus and David A. Whelan, Chief Scientist of Cubic Corporation. On the 9th of February 2023, King Charles III held an audience with Hadfield at Buckingham Palace to discuss sustainability in space. The corn farm in southern Ontario is a long way from Buckingham Palace, but the asteroid 14143 Hadfield, named in his honour, is further still.