In just a few months, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen will make history.
When the Artemis II mission takes to the skies, the goal is to send Canadian Space Agency astronaut Hansen and his crewmates—NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Reed Wiseman and Christina Koch—around the far side of the Moon to venture further into deep space than any human has ever gone before.
And for 10 days, the crew will collect scientific data to test the limits of their rocket and their own human endurance. Scientists hope their findings will help prepare for future lunar missions—and beyond.
Hansen sat down with Quirks and Quarks host Bob McDonald to discuss the mission, which could begin as early as February. Here's part of their conversation:
How does it feel to be so close to launch after all this waiting?
Oh my god, some mixed emotions. There are days when we complete a certain piece of training and touch it for the last time before launch, and it starts to feel very real. And there are other times when I say, “Okay, I still have a lot to do, I have to get back to work.”
Are you a former fighter jet pilot, how does that influence your training?
[NASA] Astronaut Corps as a whole, we support aviation training because it's one of the few things we do that can actually kill you. We have amazing simulators, but when you're in a simulator, at the end of the day you go home even if you make a mistake. But space is not like that. Therefore, managing real-world risks is an important skill set that you should train.
Now I… spend more evenings and weekends in the simulator alone and just trying things that aren't necessarily the approved method. But I want to know what really works and what doesn't. And I want to have absolute confidence in this.
Your journey will take you beyond the Moon and then you will circle around and return without landing on the Moon, which was first done in 1968 by Apollo 8. How will your flight be different from this one?
There are some differences. I like to describe Artemis II this way: we're trying to do Apollo 7 And Apollo 8 in one mission. So Apollo 7 remained in Earth orbit, and this was the first time that people, like us, flew it in that capsule. So they did all the life support tests and manual flight control tests in Earth orbit. And then Apollo 8 took out the capsule and put it into lunar orbit.
And in our case, since we want to do both, we give up a lot of fuel to stay in Earth orbit for a day to test our life support systems and our manual controls. So, we have enough fuel to go into lunar orbit, but we don't have enough to return from lunar orbit. That's why we choose a free return trajectory, which will take us around the Moon and back home.
Apollo 8 gave us the famous photograph of the Earth rising above the lunar horizon. You will find yourself even further away. I understand that you will see both the Earth and the Moon in one frame..
Yes, we will be able to see the entire moon. But we really hope for a full moon for us, which will be a new moon for you here on Earth. And then we will see some impressive things.
You will be the first people to see it.
Yeah, that's pretty neat. Geologists have really drilled it into our heads that it is possible to make some really important observations from a scientific point of view. And it took me a while to believe them because I was a little skeptical. We have huge moons orbiting the Moon, and the images of the Moon are amazing, so it's hard to imagine that we could notice anything that they didn't notice.
But now I am convinced that the human eye is an incredible instrument, and our brains are capable of… distinguishing things. They want to know if we can tell if any of them are “other different” is the best way I can describe it. And that can give them ideas about areas where they want to go and do more research.
You are conducting an experiment on yourself with the wonderful name AVATAR. Tell me about it.
You don’t need to do much, you just need to donate blood a couple of times. They take your platelets and send them to the donation system. But then at the end of that donation, the investigator takes the insides of the machine that works wonders on your blood, and he ends up with bone marrow that he can use to reproduce in these chips.
And then you end up running a copy of our living cells on these chips, and they will be supported, they will be fed, if you will, during the mission. And when we take off, there will actually be eight of us in the capsule, this identical version of ourselves on a chip. And when we come back, they're going to compare how the radiation affected our body and how it affected the chips.
And if the results are the same, then this gives us confidence that we can use them in the future for research. And then, using these chips, it will be possible to simultaneously send 1000 astronauts into space and obtain real data, based on which it will be useful to draw some conclusions.
Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen talks about one of the science experiments the Artemis II crew will conduct during their 10-day mission to fly around the Moon early next year.
What does it mean to you to be the first Canadian to walk on the moon?
This is a great honor. It's a dream come true for me, but what it really means to me is that it's a reflection of our country and what we're capable of. I'm just a huge fan of our space industry and academia in Canada.
We were the third country in the world to launch a satellite into space. Why? Because we wanted to understand how we can use it to communicate. And then we start using it to communicate across the country, and then we start using space to understand our planet.
I don’t know how we mustered up such courage, but then we decided that we would become the first country in the world to develop space robotics. Nobody has ever done this. And I applaud these visionaries because it took a lot of courage.
When you're strapped into a rocket and launch day arrives, it's not a rehearsal or a simulation. This is the day when the rocket is alive, full of fuel, hissing, creaking, humming, doing all these things, and the countdown is going according to plan. What do you think will be going on in your head before it takes off?
It's interesting to think about. You'll have to ask me later because I don't know for sure, but my past experience has taught me that it will be game day for us and it will be mostly exciting, but there will be a little bird on our shoulders saying, “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
When we do dress rehearsals, you walk up to the launch pad and you know that in the future there will be a rocket there, and you imagine it as you described it: it talks to you, it is alive.
I love it when [Artemis II Commander] Reed Wiseman describes it. Sometimes he says, “Really the only reason you actually get on a rocket… is because it would be too embarrassing to leave.”
Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
