Another Space Oddity: Benedict Cumberbatch and Chris Hadfield Related

Talk about star wars.

Turns out that Star Trek newcomer Benedict Cumberbatch isn’t the only one in his family with an interest in the final frontier. Researchers at Ancestry have discovered that Into Darkness bad guy Benedict Cumberbatch is related to Canadian superstar astronaut Chris Hadfield through shared British roots. The two are 6th cousins.

Cumberbatch stars in the newest Star Trek film as super-villain John Harrison opposite fictional commander Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and his colleagues on the USS Enterprise.

Hadfield has broken new … er, ground … in making space exploration accessible to the masses, from his impressive cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” to his hilarious Twitter exchange with the original Captain Kirk, William Shatner.

Hadfield and Cumberbatch are related through Thomas Little and Elizabeth Snell, who were farmers in St. Keyne, Cornwall, England in 1780. Could they have imagined, looking at the stars in Cornwall so long ago, that their descendants would live their lives in the clouds? Now, their family members connect one of the largest science fiction franchises of our time to one of the people working to make science fiction a reality.

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