Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield becomes a social media superstar

A few weeks ago, Chris Hadfield's name was not so well known, even in his native Canada.

The 53-year-old may have been the country's most experienced astronaut, the first Canadian to walk in space and a veteran of two Shuttle missions, but few people would have stopped him in the street to ask for an autograph.

Then, on December 21, Hadfield (pictured) arrived at the International Space Station for his latest mission and everything changed.

In a deliberate campaign to take earth by storm, Hadfield harnessed the power of social media to inspire the sort of interest in space exploration that Nasa and other agencies have been trying to attract for more than a decade.

Now he is on the way to becoming a star in his own right, the first internationally recognisable astronaut since the grainy black and white television images made Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and the original Apollo astronauts into superstars.

Hadfield used his Twitter feed and a high-powered camera to bring the beauty of the world, as well as the banalities of space, to hundreds of thousands of people on social media.

With seemingly incessant 140-character bursts accompanied by stunning photographs, shot from a glassed-in section at the bottom of the space station orbiting 400 kilometres above the earth, the former fighter pilot with a love of music and a poet's turn of phrase has seen a 15-fold increase in Twitter followers since he blasted off on a Soyuz rocket before Christmas.