Commuters often take extreme measures to protect their personal space while travelling to work, but donning a self-contained astronaut suit more normally seen in the inhospitable vacuum of space does seem a small step too far.

Puzzled commuters at St Albans City railway station found themselves queueing for their morning train with a fully dressed Nasa astronaut this morning and took to Twitter to express their confusion.

Ross Chapman, who spotted the astronaut, said: "I was running late for work. Commuters were huddling in the lobby, trying to stay warm on a cold morning.

"As I stared up to the departures board to determine my wait for the next train, I sensed a large, slow moving force behind me.

"The astronaut appeared from the cold and proceeded to the ticket gate. The attendant said 'May I see your face, please?' The astronaut did not oblige but provided his ticket and continued to bounce through to platform one.

"As I got onto my train on platform three, I heard the attendant call into his radio 'Could someone tell me why there's an astronaut on platform one?'

"Didn’t anyone tell him there’s no space on Govia Thameslink trains?"

His bulky backpack, although useful for storing life support systems and an air supply, will probably prove unpopular on a busy train.

So who is the St Albans City astronaut? A voyager from another world or simply someone on the way home from a fancy dress party?