Space Station Astronaut Calls for Peace on Earth

From high above Earth, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is broadcasting a message of peace for the people of Earth, with a little help from 200,000 Twitter fans.

The three-time spaceflyer, a flight engineer and prolific Twitter user on the International Space Station, spoke solemnly Thursday (Jan. 10) about a picture he recently took of war-torn Syria.

The picture had special poignancy given that the Earth appears as "one place" from orbit, Hadfield told reporters in a press conference at the Canadian Space Agency's headquarters near Montreal, Quebec.

"When we do look down on a place that is in great turmoil or strife, it's hard to reconcile the inherent patience and beauty of the world with the terrible things that we can do to each other as people, and can do to the Earth itself, locally," Hadfield said from space.

Hadfield, 53, spent his first three weeks in orbit sending dozens of pictures of his view on Earth. That, plus a Twitter chat with Star Trek actor William Shatner and other celebrities, propelled his social media account @Cmdr_Hadfield on to the world stageafter his launch Dec. 19.

This weekend, Hadfield's Twitter feed surpassed 200,000 followers. As of Sunday (Jan. 13), the count was at 204,630 fans.

"Thats probably the reason we work so hard to communicate what were doing up here, as an international team ... to just try to give people just a little glimpse of that global perspective, of that understanding that were all in this together, and that this is a spaceship, but so is the world."

'A lot of the world's territory'

Chris Hadfield, who will be Canada's first space station commander in March when he takes charge, played down his sudden celebrity on Twitter, saying that he is "just a member of the rest of the team here". He attributed his popularity to the "fundamentally fascinating" work that he and the rest of the station's six-man Expedition 34 creware performing in space. [Photos by Space Station's Expedition 34Crew]

"With these new technologies in communications, we can directly give people the human side of that. The fact that now, gosh, more than 150,000 people are directly following us every day I think its just a direct measure of how important and useful this is in the human experience."

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Space Station Astronaut Calls for Peace on Earth