Next stop, the moon! Artemis II is starting to feel ‘very real’ for astronaut Jeremy Hansen
In a few months, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen will create history.
When the Artemis II mission takes to the skies, the goal is to send Canadian Space Agency astronaut Hansen and his companions — NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Reed Wiseman and Christina Koch — to the far side of the moon to go deeper into space than any human has gone before.
Over the course of 10 more days, the crew will collect scientific data to test the limits of their rocket and their own human endurance. Scientists hope their findings can help prepare for future Moon missions and beyond.
Hansen sat down with quirks and quarks Host Bob McDonald to discuss the mission, which could launch in February. Here is an excerpt from their conversation:
How does it feel to be so close to the launch after so much wait?
Oh my god, some mixed emotions. There are some days when we’re finalizing a certain piece of training and it’s the last time we touch it before launch, and it starts to feel very surreal. And then there are moments when I say, “Okay, 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 impact your training?
The (NASA) Astronaut Corps, in general, we embrace aviation training because it’s one of the few things we do that can actually kill you. We have these amazing simulators, but when you’re in the 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 practice.
I find myself now… spending more evenings and weekends alone in the simulator and just trying things out, things that aren’t necessarily the accepted method. But I want to know what really works and what doesn’t work. And I want to have complete trust in Him.
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 with Apollo 8 in 1968. How will your flight be different from his?
There are some differences. The way I like to describe Artemis II is what we’re trying to do apollo 7 And apollo 8 In a mission. So Apollo 7, they stayed in Earth orbit and it was the first time that humans had flown it in that capsule, just like us. So they did all their life-support tests and their manual-flight-control tests in Earth orbit. And then Apollo 8 ejected the capsule and flew it into lunar orbit.
And in our case, since we want to do both, we’re releasing a lot of propellant to stay a day in Earth orbit to test our life-support systems and our manual controls. And so we have enough propellant to get into lunar orbit, but we don’t have enough propellant to get out of lunar orbit. And that’s 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 photo of Earth above the lunar horizon. You are going further back. I understand you will see both the Earth and the Moon in the same shot,
Yes, we should be able to see the full moon. But we’re actually expecting a full moon for us, which will be a new moon for you on Earth. And then we’re going to see some amazing things.
You will be the first person to see it.
Yeah, that’s pretty neat. Geologists are really putting it into our minds that you can make some important observations from a scientific point of view. And it took me a while to trust them because I was a little skeptical. We have these great satellites orbiting the Moon and the image of the Moon is absolutely spectacular, so it’s hard to imagine that we could see something that they haven’t noticed.
But now I’m convinced that the human eye is an incredible tool and that our brain… is capable of picking out things that are different. They want to know if we can tell if any of them are ‘kind of different’, that’s the best way I can describe it. And it can clue them into areas they might want to go and investigate more.
You are conducting an experiment on yourself with a wonderful name called Avatar. Tell me about that.
We don’t have to do much, just donate blood once or twice. They take your platelets and they go into the donation system. But then at the end of that donation, the investigator takes the insides of the machine that does whatever magic it does with your blood and he has bone marrow that he can use to replicate that in these chips.
And then you fly replicas of our living cells onto these chips, and during the mission they will be supported, fed, if you will. And so when we take off, they’ll actually be eight of us in the capsule, this identical version of us on a chip. And when we come back, they will compare how the radiation affected our bodies and how it affected the chips.
And if the results are similar, that gives us confidence that we can use them to do future research. And then you can send 1,000 astronauts at a time into space on these chips and get some real data that would be useful for drawing some conclusions.
Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen explains one of the science experiments that the Artemis II crew will conduct during its 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 huge honour. 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 a big 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 countries and then we start using space to understand our planet.
I don’t know how we got so adventurous, but then we decided that we were going to be the first country in the world to develop space robotics. No one had ever done this. And I applaud those visionaries because it required 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 fueled, it’s whirring, it’s whirring, it’s humming, it’s doing all these things, and the countdown is going according to plan. What do you think was going through your mind before it started?
It’s exciting to think about. You’ll have to ask me later because I don’t know for sure, but my experiences in the past have taught me that it will be game day for us and it will be mostly excitement, but there will be a little bird on our shoulder saying, “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
When we do these dress rehearsals and you go up to the launchpad and you know, the rocket will be standing there in the future and you imagine it like you described it: it’s talking to you, it’s alive.
I like it when (Artemis II Commander) reed wiseman Describes it. Sometimes he’s like, “Really the only reason I’m going up in your rocket is because it would be too embarrassing to walk away from it.”
Q&A edited for length and clarity.
