Chris Hadfield Photo Credit/Canadian Space Agency
Chris Hadfield will become the first Canadian to command the International Space Station in 2013, NASA and its 14 partners in the project announced on Thursday.
Hadfield, 51, is a retired Canadian Air Force colonel and test pilot.
Since his selection for astronaut training in 1992, he’s participated in two trips to space.
In 1995, Hadfield journeyed to Russia’s former Mir Space Station during an eight-day NASA shuttle mission.
In 2001, Hadfield traveled to the ISS as part of an 11-day shuttle mission that delivered Canada’s robot arm.
His two spacewalks on the second flight were the first conducted by a Canadian astronaut.
Hadfield will lift off for the station in November 2012 aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket with cosmonaut Roman Romanenko and Tom Marshburn of NASA. The three men will serve as members of the Expedition 34 crew until March 2013.
At that point, Hadfield will assume command of the first half of the six-month Expedition 35 mission.