The next giant leap for mankind should be back on the moon not Mars, the astronaut Chris Hadfield has said.

Famous for sporting a military moustache, tweeting spacewalk selfies and strumming David Bowie songs on board the International Space Station (his hugely popular cover of Space Oddity has recently been reposted on YouTube with Bowie’s consent), Hadfield was the first Canadian to walk in space and became the first Canadian commander of the ISS when he took the reins last year on his final space mission.

Speaking at a Guardian Live event at the Royal Geographical Society in London on Sunday, Hadfield criticised the current scramble to put an astronaut on the red planet. “If we started going to Mars any time soon everybody would die,” he said. “We don’t know what we are doing yet. We have to have a bunch of inventions between now and Mars.”

He believes our level of unpreparedness is even worse than that of the 1845 expedition to chart the Northwest Passage, an attempt which ended in tragedy with the death of the entire party including its leader, Sir John Franklin, who was a founder of the Royal Geographical Society. “We are previous to Franklin in our ability to go to Mars right now,” said Hadfield.

Hadfield’s speech to a packed auditorium about his experiences in space was set against a backdrop of breathtaking images from his latest book, You are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes.

The title of the book – a collection of astonishing photographs taken by Hadfield from the ISS – refers to the time it takes the space station to orbit Earth.

But, while praising the engineers who built the Orion spacecraft that was launched last week in Nasa’s first step towards a new series of manned space missions, Hadfield stressed the next big step should be to construct a permanent lunar base.

“That is a great vehicle,” he said of Orion. “But where we are going to go next is the moon. That’s where we are going to go because it just makes sense. It is only three days away and we can invent so many things.”

Hadfield’s comments come just days after he denounced the privately funded Mars One mission in the online magazine Matter, claiming the ambitious project is technologically unprepared. “There’s a great, I don’t know, self-defeating optimism in the way that this project has been set up,” he warned.

Chris Hadfield was speaking at a Guardian Live event in London. Guardian Live is our series of debates, events and interviews. Find out more about upcoming events and how to sign up to Guardian Membership