When Chris Hadfield was a southern Ontario farmboy dreaming of being an astronaut, it just couldn't happen.

Canada had no astronaut program and no Canadian could realistically expect to follow in the American footsteps Neil Armstrong had planted as the first man on the moon in that steamy summer of 1969.

Forty-three years later, the trail-blazing Hadfield is in quarantine in Kazakhstan, waiting to blast off in a Soyuz capsule for the International Space Station, making history again when he takes over as its first Canadian commander in March.

"For me, it is just surreal," the 53-year-old astronaut said in an interview this week from Star City, Russia, where he spent several weeks training ahead of the Dec. 19 liftoff.

Hadfield talks thoughtfully of the professional and national significances of his upcoming command.

"As an astronaut, it's a pinnacle," he says. "It is the highest level of responsibility of an astronaut to command a spaceship because of course, the lives of the people on board are my responsibility."

As a Canadian, he sees it as the latest notable step in the country's 50-year-old space program, which began when a 145-kilogram Alouette-1 satellite piggybacked on a U.S. rocket.

"It did very well, but still was, in perspective, a fairly small thing to the point now where you go through all of the satellites, the technologies, Radarsat, Canadarm, Marc Garneau, the other astronauts that have flown, now to the point that a Canadian is commanding a spaceship," he says.

But when Hadfield considers the personal significance of his upcoming command, that giddy schoolboy enthusiasm he had in Milton, Ont., in the late 1960s seeps out again.

"To be able to command the space station, yes, it's professional, and yes I'll take it seriously and yes it's important for Canada, but for me as just a Canadian kid, it makes me want to shout and laugh and do cartwheels."

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Chris Hadfield ready for 'surreal' space station odyssey