A Canadian to command the Station

The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) has announced that its astronaut Chris Hadfield will assume the role of commander of the International Space Station’s Expedition 35 from March 2013, during the second half of his six-month space station mission. Born in 1959, this military test pilot was selected by his country’s space agency in 1992. He has already been to space twice during U.S. space shuttle missions STS-74 in 1995 to the Russian space station Mir and STS-100 in 2001 to install the Canadian robotic arm on the ISS. So, Chris Hadfield will once again fly to the International Space Station in December 2012, but this time in a Russian Soyouz rocket accompanied by the American Tom Marshburn and the Russian Roman Romanenko forming Expedition 34 with 3 other astronauts already onboard the station (the American Kevin Ford and the Russians Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin). As announced above, he will take command of the Station three months later in 2013 for Expedition 35 and will return to Earth in June 2013. Below is the video of the press conference where Chris Hadfield talks about his appointment as future commander of the Station and first Canadian to hold this position.

Published 3 September 2010

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