Spaceboy, the Canadian who made us all want to be astronauts again, has landed back on solid ground after a six-month stay on board the International Space Station.
Commander Chris Hadfield blasted off last December as an astronaut and test pilot but returns to Kazakhstan this morning as a full-blown celebrity.
His thousands of tweets, hundreds of arresting pictures from space and his humanity helped win him an audience of 800,000 followers on Twitter and hundreds of thousands more fans on Facebook.
He spent decades as a military pilot and later a mission specialist on board the space shuttle, but somehow he never lost his sense of wonder as he looked down on Earth from above. It is this almost childlike delight that came to the fore once on board the space station.
He began a Twitter exchange last January with actor William Shatner, a fellow Canadian made famous through his portrayal of Capt James T Kirk in the Star Trek TV series. Soon after he was in touch with other Star Trek heros, Leonard Nimoy and George Takei.
Tagging into the actors’ existing Twitter and Facebook audiences made Hadfield an overnight social media phenomenon. Yet from then on it was all about him as he won over hearts and minds with his thought-provoking tweets and his daily feed of outstanding photographs.
“You can’t help but go to the window and have a look,” he said in one video beamed back to Earth. When there, as often as not he had a camera to hand and would tweet a glorious image.
In orbit 350km up, he took on the role as Everyman, answering the questions we would ask and adding a scatological few that we would be too embarrassed to pursue.
Who else would explain in a video how to throw up in weightlessness or how to brush your teeth? He was like us all, wanting to spit off the bridge or toss a penny off the skyscraper to see what might happen.
He must have broken some rule when he started squirting water about in a space station packed to the metal rafters with sensitive electrical equipment. Of course the blobs of water were all deftly caught in a face cloth so no harm done . . . but we did get to see them.
He also knew instinctively how to please a particular audience, for example sending back nighttime pictures of Ireland on March 17th, while of course there had to be a rendition of Danny Boy performed with a corny green tie to celebrate Ireland's day and a few words tweeted in Irish, "Tá Éire fíor- álainn!", the first from space.
His daughter Kristin, meanwhile, is involved in a PhD programme at Trinity College Dublin and he has promised to visit some time soon.
He served on board the space station as commander, a role he handed over to cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov before leaving.
As a parting shot for his fans, the Canadian put together his own rendition and video of the 1969 David Bowie classic Space Oddity , the Major Tom song that somehow seems distinctly appropriate to the character that is Chris Hadfield.
He published this on Sunday and is pictured in different locations around the space station, peering pensively out a window or strumming a guitar with cables and pipeworks in the background or eerily empty space suits.
Hadfield’s efforts impressed the rock icon so much so that Bowie saw fit to tweet back, “Hallo spaceboy”. How very appropriate for this remarkable astronaut who never forgot what it feels like to be amazed.
