In just a few short 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, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Koch — around the far side of the moon, to go farther into deep space than any human has ever gone before.
And over the course of 10 days, the crew will be gathering scientific data to test the limits of their rocket and of their own human endurance. Scientists hope their findings could help to prepare for future moon missions — and beyond.
Hansen sat down with Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald to discuss the mission, which could launch as soon as February. Here is part of their conversation:
How does it feel to be this close to launch after all this wait?
Oh my gosh, some mixed emotions. There’s some days where we’re finalizing a certain part of the training and it’s the last time we’re going to touch it before launch, and it starts to feel very real. And then there’s other moments where I’m like, “OK, there’s still a lot to do, I’ve got to get back to work.”
You’re a former jet fighter pilot, so how does that factor into your training?
The [NASA] Astronaut Corps, just in general, we embrace aviation training because it’s one of the few things that we do that can actually kill you. We have these amazing simulators, but when you’re in a simulator, you’re going home at the end of the day, even if you make a mistake. And space is not like that. And so managing real risk is an important skill set that you want to exercise.
I find myself now … spending more evenings and weekends in the simulator by myself and just trying things, things that aren’t necessarily the approved method. But I want to know what truly does work and what doesn’t work. And I want to have absolute confidence in that.
Your journey is going to take you out beyond the moon, and then you’re going to loop around and come back without landing on the moon, which was first done in 1968 with Apollo 8. How is your flight going to be different from that one?
There are some differences. The way I like to describe Artemis II is we’re trying to do Apollo 7 and Apollo 8 in one mission. So Apollo 7, they stayed in Earth orbit and it was the first time the humans had flown it on that capsule, just like us. So they did all their life-support testing and their manual-flight-control testing in Earth orbit. And then Apollo 8 took the the capsule out and flew it into lunar orbit.
And in our case, since we want to do both, we are giving up a lot of propellants in order to stay in Earth’s orbit for a day to test our life-support systems and our manual controls. And so we have enough propellant to get into lunar orbit, but we wouldn’t have enough to get back out of lunar orbit. And so that is why we’re doing this free-return trajectory, where we’ll fly around the moon and come home.
Apollo 8 gave us that famous Earthrise picture of the Earth above the lunar horizon. You’re going to be further back. I understand you’re going to see both the Earth and the moon in the same shot.
Yes, we should be able to see the entire moon. But we’re really hoping for full moon for us, which will be a new moon for you here on Earth. And then we’re going to see some spectacular things.
You’ll be the first humans to see that.
Yeah, it’s pretty neat. The geologists have really been hammering that into our heads that you might 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 bit skeptical. We have these great satellites orbiting the moon and the imagery of the moon is just absolutely spectacular, so it’s hard to imagine that we could notice something that they haven’t noticed.
But I’m now convinced that the human eye is an incredible instrument and our brain is able to … pick out things that are different. They want to know if we can tell if any of them are a ‘different kind of different,’ is the best way that I can describe it. And that might cue them into areas where they want to go and do more probing.
You’re doing an experiment on yourself with a wonderful name called AVATAR. Tell me about that.
We don’t have to do much, we have to donate blood a couple of times. They take your platelets and they go into the donation system. But then at the end of that donation, the investigator takes the innards of the machine that’s doing whatever magic it does with your blood and he ends up with bone marrow that he can use to replicate in these chips.
And then so you end up flying a replica of our living cells on these chips, and they will be supported, they’ll be fed, if you will, during the mission. And so when we take off, they’ll actually be eight of us in the capsule, this identical version of ourselves on a chip. And when we get 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 that gives us a confidence that we could use them in the future to do research. And then you can send 1,000 astronauts to space on these chips at a time and get some real data that would be useful to draw some conclusions on.
Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen explains one of the scientific experiments the crew of Artemis II will conduct during their 10-day mission to fly around the moon early next year.
What’s it mean for you to be the first Canadian to go to the moon?
It’s a tremendous honor. It’s a dream come true for me, but what it really means for me is it’s a reflection on our country, what we’re capable of. I’m just such a huge fan of our space industry and academia in Canada.
We were the third country in the world to send a satellite into space. Why? Because we wanted to understand how we could 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 got so bold, but then we decide we’re going to be the first country in the world to develop space robotics. No one had ever done it. And I applaud those visionaries because that took a lot of courage.
When you’re strapped into the rocket and it’s launch day, it’s not a rehearsal, it’s not a simulation. It’s the day the rocket is alive, it’s filled with fuel, it’s hissing, it’s creaking, it’s humming, it’s doing all of those things, and the countdown is going according to plan. What do you think is going to be going through your mind before it takes off?
It’s exciting to think about. You have to ask me after because I don’t know for sure, but my experiences in the past have taught me that it’ll be game day for us and it’ll be mostly excitement, but there’ll be a little little bird on our shoulders saying, “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
When we do these dress rehearsals and you walk up to the launchpad and you know, in the future the rocket would be standing there and you imagine it just as you described it: it’s talking to you, it’s alive.
I love when [Artemis II Commander] Reid Wiseman describes it. Sometimes he’s like, “Really the only reason you actually get into the rocket … is because it would be too embarrassing to walk away.”
Q&A edited for length and clarity.
