Commander Hadfield does Major Tom and wins the internet today, hands down.

Commander Chris Hadfield handed over the reins to the International Space Station overnight to Pavel Vinogradov , and will be climbing into the Soyuz capsule together with Tom Marshburn and Roman Romanenko for a wild three-hour ride back to Kazakhstan later today.

Prior to his departure, he tweeted the following musical number. What else, but David Bowie's Space Oddity! And like so many of his posts, it created a social media sensation! Understandably: this was an outstanding post. Enjoy!



I found myself thinking that his singing voice was not what I expected—a lot higher pitched. But then I remembered that the ISS atmosphere is thinner than on Earth, noticably changing vocal pitches.

I do wish the one scene where he sang:
"Floating in a most peculiar way..."
was flipped 180 degrees so he was hanging from the 'ceiling'.

Nice to see towards the end that the guitar was caught just before it crashed into anything. That is going to be one incredibly valuable guitar once it's back on Planet Earth!

Hadfield's return to Earth will bring to an end what I'm sure was the most shared and publicly followed six months in ISS history. When I started following him on Twitter while he was still training for this mission, he had a few thousand followers. As he is leaving the ISS he has an amazing 777,000 followers!

Take a full tour of the International Space Station with former Commander Suni Williams

The ISS is bigger than a football field, orbits the Earth 16 times per day, at about 360 kilometres altitude. Back in November, as Station Commander Suni Williams prepared to board a Soyuz capsule to return to Earth, she recorded a tour of the full station. Not sure why I've never comes across it before, but here it is for your viewing pleasure.