Hadfield’s ISS ‘Space Oddity’ video goes viral

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has been a social media superstar since heading into space — tweeting regularly, posting videos to YouTube and seeing his followers count soar amid a busy schedule of scientific experiments.

Now that he’s about to leave the International Space Station, his last video could be his biggest social hit yet: a music video he made to David Bowie’s Space Oddity. In less than a day, it has racked up over 500,000 views, with no end in sight. (As of 10 a.m.on Monday, it had more than a million views.)

The news even got the attention of Bowie himself, with the singer tweeting “Hallo Spaceboy.”

Hadfield, who will return to Earth after five months in space on Monday night, sent his goodbye message to his 824,452 Twitter followers.

 

He’s posted dozens of videos from the orbiting station, including demonstrations of how astronauts cry (and vomit) in zero gravity.

Hadfield has become known for his use of social media while in space, playing his guitar for schoolchildren and tweeting stunning photos of Earth.

However, his main task was performing over 100 science experiments, including changes to the spine, bone density and nutrition in space.

Hadfield handed off command to Pavel Vinogradov, a Russian cosmonaut, on Sunday and will return to Earth on Monday at 10:30 p.m.

CityNews.ca will carry a live stream of the event, beginning around 9:30 p.m.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of Twitter followers.

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