Astronaut Chris Hadfield, a veteran of two space shuttle flights, will become the first Canadian to serve as commander of the international space station in 2013, NASA and its partners announced Sept. 2.
Hadfield will launch to the station in November 2012 aboard a Russian Soyuz vehicle with Tom Marshburn of NASA and Roman Romanenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency to join Expedition 34 as flight engineers. Hadfield’s three-month command will begin in March 2013 when three of his fellow Expedition 34 crew members depart the station in a Soyuz.
