The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) reports that astronaut Chris Austin Hadfield is currently the backup for NASA astronaut Sunita Williams who is scheduled to take off for the International Space Station on a Soyuz spacecraft on 15 July 2012. As such, he has passed all the final qualifications leading up to the launch and is on standby this week.

Wikipedia notes that Chris Hadfield is a Canadian astronaut who was the first Canadian to walk in space. Hadfield has flown two space shuttle missions, STS-74 in 1995 and STS-100 in 2001.

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