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Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield participated in an annual event for Canadian music students from a unique location: a long-distance perch in the Cupola of the International Space Station. Before launching to the ISS in December, Hadfield wrote a song with Ed Robertson of the band Barenaked Ladies, and Friday morning the song premiered as Hadfield, Robertson and a school glee club sang together: Hadfield performed his part on the space station; Robertson did his in Toronto with the Wexford Gleeks. The song was part of Music Monday in Canada, and while todays premiere was pre-recorded, in May, students across Canada will play the song live with Hadfield in space. The song is called I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing), it begins with the words:

Eighteen-thousand miles an hour Fueled by science and solar power The oceans racing past At half a thousand tons Ninety minutes moon to sun A bullet cant go half this fast.

Music aficionados can find the sheet music here and here.

Chris Hadfield in the Cupola of the ISS. Credit: NASA

Hadfield plays the guitar and sings with a couple of bands on Earth. Before he began his Expedition on the ISS, he told Universe Today he would be doing as much singing as he could in space.

Music is really important to me, ever since Ive been a kid. Ive always played guitar and sang, he said, and Im really hoping to have the chance to sit weightless with the guitar on board and play music, and also record some of the music Ive written.

He also is working to finish some songs he started writing on Earth while living on the ISS, which he called a particularly inspirational environment and maybe write some news ones.

We have all the recording equipment we need on board, he said. It is basic but it is good enough to be able to record and Im hoping to record at least one full CDs worth of original music up there. Its neat Im writing with my brother who is a musician, and he pointed out that a lot of the traditional folk songs came from people who were the first on the frontier the early explorers, sailors, miners, and the fishermen the people who are involved in the day-to-day of a specific human experience. To think I might be involved in helping to write some of the first space faring music, music that people might play and sing as they leave Earth for Mars, it is an interesting time in history.

This isnt the first Earth-Space musical collaboration: in 2011 astronaut Cady Coleman did a flute duet with Jethro Tulls Ian Anderson.

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Space Jam: Astronaut Sings Duet From the Space Station

HOUSTON The last man to walk on the moon made an unexpected call to the most recent men to live in space this week during a visit to NASA's Mission Control room.

Gene Cernan, who in December 1972 commanded Apollo 17, the sixth and final lunar landing mission, was touring the Johnson Space Center here with some friends when he was invited by flight controllers to talk live with Expedition 34 commander Kevin Ford and flight engineers Chris Hadfield and Tom Marshburn in the U.S. Destiny laboratory on the International Space Station, 260 miles (415 kilometers) above the Earth.

"I didn't know I was going to be able to do this," Cernan told the station's crew during the visit on Tuesday (Feb. 5). The moonwalker, who was using a phone receiver to talk with the astronauts in space, could see Ford, Marshburn and Hadfield on the large screens at the front of the control center room.

The ISS residents were in turn able to see Cernan via live streaming video on one of their laptop computers.

"I'm personally proud," Cernan commented. "I'm at the age now where most of you were probably in diapers or knee pants when I went to the moon, but at least what we did worked because it inspired you to do what you're doing." [Apollo 17 Moonwalker Calls Space Station (Video)]

"I think I was 12 when you came home from the moon for the last time," Ford responded, "and you did inspire us for sure, just like whole world, frankly. Every place I go in the world, they know NASA because what you guys did back then that long ago."

Elbow room in space

The space-to-ground conversation, which aired on NASA's television channel and was streamed through the space agency's website, showed Ford, Marshburn and Hadfield floating inside the orbiting laboratory with room to spare. And they were inside just one of the space station's dozen modules, which they share with three other crewmates, Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy, Evgeny Tarelkin and Roman Romanenko.

Cernan was struck by the sheer size of the space station, especially given his own experiences in orbit.

"You guys live in a hotel. You're living in a palatial palace up there," Cernan stated. "I got to go back to the Gemini days when you had to share elbow room with your buddy and you never got out of your spacesuit for three days."

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Last Moonwalker Calls Space Station, Compares Cosmic Elbow Room

An unmanned Russian cargo ship undocked from the International Space Station Saturday (Feb. 9) to make way for a fresh delivery of supplies for the six astronauts living on the orbiting laboratory next week.

The trash-filled Progress 48 supply ship undocked from the space station's Russian Pirs docking port at 8:15 a.m. EST (1315 GMT) and was expected to intentionally destroy itself by burning up in Earth's atmosphere a few hours later.

"We just undocked a spaceship from our Space Station," Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, a flight engineer on the space station, wrote in a Twitter post Saturday. "The Progress robot ship is loaded with trash, to burn up like a meteorite in 3.5 hrs."

The departure of Progress 48 clears a parking spot for the next Russian cargo ship to use when it launches toward the International Space Station on Monday (Feb. 11). That spacecraft, the Progress 50 supply ship, will launch from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 9:41 a.m. EST (1441 GMT on Monday, though it will late evening at the launch site. Russia's Progress cargo ships are vital spacecraft that have helped keep astronauts stocked with food, clothing and other vital supplies during their six-month missions.

Like recent Progress missions to the space station, the flight of Progress 50 will last just six hours. The spacecraft is due to dock at the space station at 3:40 p.m. EST (2040 GMT) after four orbits of Earth. The flight plan is faster way for Progress ships to reach the station. Before it was implemented, Progress flights took two days to reach the space station, much like Russia's manned Soyuz space capsule flights. [Space Station's Robot Cargo Ship Fleet (Photos)]

Progress 50 will deliver nearly 2.9 tons of supplies for the space station's Expedition 34 crew, which includes three Russian cosmonauts, two American astronauts and Hadfield, who represents the Canadian Space Agency. The new cargo ship will deliver about 764 pounds (346 kilograms) of rocket propellant, 110 pounds (50 kg) of oxygen and air, 926 pounds (420 kg) of water and 3,000 pounds (1,360 kg) of spare parts, science equipment and other supplies, NASA officials said.

The Russian Federal Space Agency's three-module Progress spacecraft are similar in appearance to its crew-carrying Soyuz spacecraft. Both vehicles have orbital and propulsion modules, but the Progress spacecraft does not have a crew return capsule in its middle. Instead, it has another cargo module to carry propellant for the space station's maneuvers.

Since Progress cargo ships are not designed to return to Earth, they are regularly filled with tons of trash and unneeded items, and then sent to burn up in the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean. Robotic resupply ships for the station built by Europe and Japan also meet the same fate.

The American unmanned Dragon cargo ships built by the private spaceflight company SpaceX, which flew to the space station twice in 2012, are designed to re-enter the atmosphere and can return science experiments and other gear to Earth.

NASA will broadcast live views of Monday's Progress 50 spacecraft launch and docking via NASA TV. You can watch the Progress 50 spacecraft live on SPACE.com here, courtesy of NASA's feed.

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Robotic Russian Supply Ship Leaves Space Station