Chris Hadfield, who crawled out of a space capsule on the plains of Kazakhstan early Tuesday, is dealing with gravity for the first time in five months and sudden global celebrity after singing a gone-viral made-in-space music video.
By late Wednesday, almost 10 million people had viewed the astronaut's cover of David Bowie's ethereal 1969 hit "Space Oddity" ("Ground control to Major Tom . . ."), published on YouTube just two days earlier.
In the meantime, Hadfield fell to Earth. He and two fellow astronauts squeezed themselves into a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, undocked from the international space station Monday night and returned to terra firma 400 km below, their capsule landing as planned in Kazakhstan.