Flying with a squadron attached to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), he became the first CF-18 pilot to intercept a Soviet "Bear" aircraft in June 1985, forging a reputation as a pilot to be reckoned with.
A few years later, Hadfield graduated from U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California and then served as an exchange officer and military test pilot at the U.S. Navy's Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland.
Hadfield's flying career got a big boost in June 1992, when he became one of four Canadian astronauts selected from a field of 5,330 applicants. The recruiting drive was only the second in Canada's history.
"There was one class in 1983, and then in January of 1992, they stuck an ad in the newspapers: `Wanted: Astronauts Coast-To-Coast,'" Hadfield recalled. "And so there were a little over 5,000 of us who put in our resumes, and they slowly whittled it down until finally they just chose four of us."
Hadfield reported to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas in August 1992, and since then, he's managed to tally a couple of key Canadian space firsts.
Flying aboard Atlantis in November 1995, Hadfield became the first Canadian to operate the shuttle's Canadian-built robot arm, mounting a U.S. docking port to the Russian space station Mir.
On that same flight, he became the first and only Canadian to visit Mir, which was sent on a destructive dive back through the atmosphere earlier this year.
More recently, Hadfield was named NASA's chief "CAPCOM," or capsule communicator, leading the group of astronauts who maintain round-the-clock contact with both orbiting shuttle crews and those working on the international station.
He's the first Canadian to serve in that capacity, and also is chief of Canada's small astronaut corps.
On the lighter side, Hadfield is the first and only Canadian in an all-astronaut rock band called Max Q. The Canadian air force colonel sings and plays guitar with the band, which was named after the aeronautical term for the portion of powered flight during which a rocket or shuttle encounters maximum aerodynamic pressures.
Not everybody, however, is cut out for the astronaut business. Hadfield said the job requires both passion and drive, not to mention persistence and the ability to be a team player both in space and - perhaps more importantly -- on the ground.
"I've been an astronaut for almost nine years, and I've been in space for almost nine days. So you spend years on the ground for every day in space," Hadfield said.
"So the real life of an astronaut is very much about work on the ground - long hours of unrecognized but extremely vital work in preparation for something like we're doing today, [something] that people take notice of."
That's not to say, however, that Hadfield would swap his day job for any other. Especially not now, not at a time when the United States, Canada and 14 other nations are banding together to carry out the most complex construction job ever attempted in orbit.
"It is in my mind a great time to be an astronaut. We are in the thick of building the space station, which from an astronaut's point of view just provides such a wealth of challenges and opportunities and new things to try and do," Hadfield said.
"It's just a great era for us as we put this thing together unified as a planet. It's just an amazing life experience, and I'm really pleased to be in the thick of it right now."
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