If all goes as planned, some time early next year, four astronauts will blast off on a mission that’s been a long time coming: a return to the moon.
The last time anyone visited the moon was in December 1972, when American astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt walked on the lunar surface, while Ronald Evans orbited above.
The last time a Canadian visited the moon? Never.
But that will change early next year when astronaut Jeremy Hansen, along with his three American crewmates, will circle the moon as part of the Artemis II mission, giving him a view of the moon’s far side and of Earth unlike any astronaut has seen before.
Depending on the launch date, the astronauts will travel somewhere between 7,400 and 11,000 kilometres beyond the moon’s orbit.
NASA’s Artemis program is a return to the moon. Artemis I was an uncrewed test of the space agency’s newest heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS) and its uncrewed Orion spacecraft, which orbited the moon in 2022.
Now it’s time to test the Orion spacecraft with astronauts on board. That flight, Artemis II, is planned for early 2026, with U.S. astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christian Koch, and Hansen.
And Hansen is prepped and pumped to go.
Hansen has been training ever since he was chosen in 2009. But since then, things have changed a little bit.
He knows a lot more about the mission, he says, and training has been consistent from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. throughout the week, simulating launches, to the point they even sleep at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
But Hansen is in his element.
“I love this stuff. And this is what you dream of doing as an astronaut,” he said. “Developing a new vehicle, testing out things and finding things that don’t work, and then figuring out solutions with your team. It’s just like solving a puzzle all the time…
“I’m going to be excited to launch and go see the moon and the Earth from the perspective of the moon, but I’m going to miss this phase for sure when it’s behind me.”
One of his favourite parts of training, he says, is the simulator where their “evil teachers” are “coming up with scenarios to try and trip us up and try to kill us.”
“And we’re working through those situations with the team. That’s really fun stuff. And it’s even more fun when you solve it and you survive. That feels really good.”
Asked what is the “right stuff” — a term used to describe NASA’s earliest astronauts — Hansen said: “Teamwork. You can’t go to space by yourself. If you could, I would have went a long time ago with my treehouse. And it takes takes an incredible team of people to do something crazy like this.”
While in the past, Apollo astronauts were mainly focused on testing their spacecraft’s systems, this time it’s about testing both the hardware and themselves.
As NASA puts it, they will be both subjects and scientists.
The human body was not meant to be in space. And since the return to the moon isn’t solely about beating another country to its surface as it was during the space race of the 1950s and ’60s, scientists are looking to find out what happens to a human body under those conditions.
“Being in space, obviously is fun and it’s beautiful and it’s moving and exhilarating, but it’s very bad for you, simply put,” said Canadian astronaut and physician David Saint-Jacques, who was in the same astronaut class as Hansen, and who spent 204 days in space in 2018-19.
“They have all these experiments to do on themselves. They’ll be the guinea pigs of a lot of medical experiments.”
But their spacecraft needs testing too. And right now, he says, much of what’s they’re doing is testing its limits — “the corners of the envelope,” he says — “so that we can do it in a safe way when our life is not dependent on it.”
“A lot of all of our days are just filled up with that: ‘OK, let’s try this with the vehicle. Let’s try that with the vehicle,” he said.
All of this is paving the way for Artemis III, scheduled for 2027, which will return astronauts to the lunar surface.
Hansen has made a big impression on those around him.
“Jeremy is just a pleasure to work with,” said Jeff Radigan, lead Artemis II flight director at the Johnson Space Center during a news conference on Tuesday. “He’s a fantastic astronaut. Every once in a while, you get a little bit of the Canadian accent. And, you know, we get to joke about that a little bit.”
NASA prepares to send astronauts around the moon
Hansen is “one of the most curious people I’ve ever met in my time here,” he said. “Always wants to know exactly what’s going on, and demands a level of rigour. Not not that we aren’t, rigorous here anyway, but he just adds that little bit on the top that I think is truly helpful for our flight here.”
Hansen hasn’t been the only one training hard. Canada’s Jenni Sidey-Gibbons, who is Hansen’s backup for the mission, has also been hard at work. And she, too, says he’s the perfect candidate for it.
“Jeremy just embodies, I would say, the best of us. He is such a wonderful person. He’s a phenomenal Canadian. He is an excellent leader and I’m really happy he’ll be on this mission,” she said. “I think he’ll make a lot of people really proud.”
His old astronaut classmate echoes that sentiment.
“He’s a just as good a follower as a leader when needed. And I just have to say, he’s, he’s just a nice guy to be around,” Saint-Jacques said.
“He’s the guy you want to go on a camping trip with. He’s the guy you want to go on an expedition with. He’s a kind you guy you want to climb a mountain with, and he’s the guy you want to go around the moon with.”
