Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen is in his last few weeks of media availability before embarking on the first crewed mission to the moon in more than 50 years.
Hansen, mission specialist on the Artemis 2 Orion spacecraft, is expected to lift off no earlier than February 2026 with his three NASA crewmates: Reid Wiseman (commander), Victor Glover (pilot) and Christina Koch (mission specialist). They will fly around the moon and back on a 10-day mission, marking the first time any human has done a lunar excursion since Apollo 17’s landing mission in December 1972.
Hansen has been in training as an astronaut or astronaut candidate since 2009, following a career as a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot. Artemis 2 will be his first spaceflight. The 17-year wait for liftoff is due to how international agreements in space work: Canada is a powerful minority partner in robotics, which typically equates to a spaceflight every six years on the International Space Station, for example.
For perspective: Only three CSA astronauts have flown in space since Hansen was selected, who are Bob Thirsk (launching to the ISS just weeks after Hansen’s selection in May 2009), Chris Hadfield (2012-13, who was preparing for that ISS mission around the time Hansen was selected), and David Saint-Jacques (2018-19 – note he is Hansen’s older classmate in the 2009 astronaut selection).
The Artemis 2 mission is funded slightly different than ISS, with Hansen’s seat being paid for (in large part, but not solely) by MDA Space’s Canadarm3 – the robotic contribution funded by CSA to the future Gateway space station. Hansen’s selection for the mission was announced in April 2023 and follows many substantial contributions he made on the ground.
Some milestones – although there are too many to list – included being the first Canadian selected to manage training for an entire astronaut class (in 2017), Canadian and American; helping with tool development during four years of spacewalk planning to repair a complex dark-matter detector on the ISS; and working behind on the scenes on teams with Canadian policy-makers to craft future space direction.
SpaceQ has been fortunate to speak with Hansen many times in the last 16 years. This Q&A, only lightly edited for clarity to let Hansen’s words speak for themselves, is based on a phone interview recorded on Oct. 8, 2025 while Hansen was training at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Hansen’s response to the last question in this interview is especially poignant.
SpaceQ: What do you want people to know about the Artemis 2 mission? What’s the most distinctive thing that we should be talking about?
Hansen: There’s so many options [to talk about] there, but I just really want people to know that it’s happening, and what it represents. You’ve heard this from me before: It’s humanity’s striving for collaboration, and working together to do hard things.
And this is going to be a very visible example of that: numerous countries coming together under the Artemis program to do this. Although we’ll see three Americans and a Canadian on board this mission, it’s a much broader collaboration [under the Artemis Accords] that is making this happen.
And then I also want to keep reminding Canadians that it’s pretty extraordinary that we’ll be the second country in the world to send a human in deep space. And that we earned it, and we earned it through decades of investment and incredible, incredible innovation.
And that if we can send a human around the moon in 2026, just imagine what we could do next – and sort of help us think a little bit bigger than sometimes we hold ourselves to.
SpaceQ: Can you talk about the contributions of Indigenous groups to your mission?
Hansen: I’ve made a lot of Indigenous connections in my years as an astronaut in Canada. And so there are many that have sort of guided me on this path to understanding a small subset of Indigenous culture. The more I have come to understand, the more appreciative of it I am.
There are some significant contributions directly related to Artemis, one being the Innu people inviting us into their sacred territory and Kamestastin Crater in Labrador. In fact, Oz (Western University Planetary Geologist Gordon Osinski) just went back there a few weeks ago now, with another NASA team and two other NASA astronauts to further that work. [Editor’s Note: Oz also does geology training for new astronaut classes, and will serve on the geology team for the Artemis 3 mission.]
And so we anticipate every other year there’s going to be an expedition to Kamestastin, and that astronauts who go to the surface of the moon will, on their journey, visit Kamestastin to benefit from understanding the cratering process and anorthosite, in that sacred territory. So that’s a pretty significant contribution. They’re very much on that path.
Turtle Lodge was very instrumental, of course, in my preparation with Sabe [Dave “Sabe” Courchene III, leader of Turtle Lodge] committing to – or offering to, really – help me prepare for the mission, and I participated in a few visits to the Turtle Lodge and some ceremonies there, eventually.
Probably the most enriching ceremony – and just such a tremendous personal experience – was the vision quest that he led myself on, as well as a number of other individuals. And that was an extraordinary experience for me, and really did help me in my preparation for this mission.
And then, of course, with Henry Guimond from the Turtle Lodge creating and gifting the beautiful Artemis 2 mission patch for the Canadian Space Agency – which I speak about all the time with all audiences, but I really do love sharing it with Canadian youth. And I often point people towards the teaching of the beaver in that patch. So it’s a pretty rich connection, and I’m super grateful that all of these people have just leaned into being part of Canada going to the moon.
SpaceQ: What does this mission mean for Canadian space policy, in your opinion?
Hansen: It’s an interesting time, where we are. I think Canadians are recognizing that space is a significant part of our future wealth and economy, and space has been changing. You and I have been talking about it [space] for a long time, but I do think it is becoming a little bit more upfront of mind, and it’s not as nebulous to people anymore.
And so Artemis 2 should hopefully be a bit of a conversation starter on what are the clever ways that we can harness the tremendous confidence we have in our country – the genius with respect to using space.
I mean, we’ve been a world leader in space – for certain areas – for decades and decades now. But now it’s becoming much, much more fast-moving, more exportable, and more directly applicable to our daily lives and the planet.
When you talk about, like, communications like [Telesat] Lightspeed, you talk about our Earth observation capacities, our communication capacities within space and companies like Kepler [Communications] and MDA. I don’t really want to point out specific companies, because there’s just so much going on in Canada right now, but there’s a lot of tremendous potential here.
And as we look at building our sovereign capacity, space is such an amazing place to do it, because it’s so exportable. When you create a space solution, you create a global solution. And so part of us will be very much focused on humans going out into the deep space and getting back to the surface of the moon, with an eye on Mars and all of that. Of course, however, it will also be an opportunity to talk about how to Canada get here, and it’s really about a bunch of other capacities that we have, to use space, that are useful in our endeavor to explore space – but also to provide services on the planet.
SpaceQ: Turning to some of the specifics of the mission, the first question that I had there was, if you don’t mind sharing, which parts of it have been easier for you to learn and which have been harder.
Hansen: I’m not really sure where I want to go with this. To be frank, I mean, all of it, this whole thing, it’s really the diversity of things that is the biggest challenge. There’s just so much to learn, and you’re constantly filtering: “Okay, what am I going to know how to do, and what am I going to trust the experts to know how to do?”
So like, a lot of it filters down to off-nominal situations where we’re just trying to survive, versus optimizing for mission accomplishment on every objective. And kind of distinguishing between those two.
There’s also, like, another category where it’s sort of nice to know a little bit about why things are happening – but also realizing that doesn’t really make a difference of what our outcome is. And so trying to figure out that bottom line all the time. So it’s a lot of filtering to figure that out, and make sure we put our energy in the right place. Otherwise we could be, like, replicating everybody else’s job – which is not our job.
Flying, you know, is the other thing that’s very fascinating to me. That’s a challenge, flying a highly automated vehicle that is not completely automated. And so the best I could describe that is Artemis 1 went out and did this job [flying around the moon in 2022] with nobody on board, and you could fly Artemis 2 with nobody on board, and it could go to space and come back – unless it couldn’t because of loss of comms or something like that. But you can’t just press play and launch and have it go and come back here. You have to manage and push the automation through its different automations, if that makes sense.
And so you end up in these situations where you want to leverage the capacity and capability of all this automation, but it’s very complex. And when you don’t have Mission Control to help you, you are trying to figure out how to manage the automation, or when you’re just going to basically turn it off and manage it yourself. That’s a very challenging thing. So this human-machine interface on a very automated vehicle, in some ways, is harder than just having it manually controlled from the get-go.
SpaceQ: And then briefly, what about working with your crewmates – about this filtering, and also about challenges such as turning off and turning on the automation, so to speak, in the spacecraft. How do you work together on that?
Hansen: Yeah, that’s all six of us: the four prime crew, and then our two backups, Andre [Douglas, from NASA] and Jenni [Gibbons, from CSA]. We all have different perspectives on a class or a sim that we’ll do. And so the kind of advantage there is learning how to take all those different perspectives and people.
Each of us are cueing each other in at different times on something that is really, really important – or has been missed, or that we haven’t figured out yet. It just goes to show you that diversity of minds is really advantageous in a development mission. You wouldn’t want six Jeremys on a mission. It just wouldn’t be as competent as a mission with all these different brains.
SpaceQ: Got it: no six Jeremys. Now, while I’m pretty sure everything is going to be fine with the mission overall, obviously a lot of your training is off-nominal scenarios. And so as a person who’s done this [as a pilot] for decades, can you bring me through the thinking of what you all will be doing if something arises, whether large or small?
Hansen: Yeah, we’ll be trying to solve the problem. And that’s really what this comes down to, is creative thinking to try and figure out the best path forward. The one thing we won’t be doing is like, panicking. We have some situations that require what we would say is “fast hands”, but most do not. And so, like, we really drill that a lot as a crew, like, “No fast hands, unless it’s one of these really urgent things.”
But other than that, we need to try to leverage all the brains that we have on board and leverage MCC [the Mission Control Center]. But I have given some thought to – you know, how you manage your emotions in a dire situation. I definitely thought through that. And you know, it’s just really important to just keep trying to survive another minute, and be adding them up until you get back safely in the ocean, somewhere on the planet.
And so I’ve often thought about when we’re selecting astronauts that you want to hire, people that have that sort of can-do attitude. Even where you can’t know for sure that you’re going to survive, you certainly are going to try. Or if you do fail, if you do not succeed, that you will die trying.
SpaceQ: Understood. Now, assuming things are going well, based on your experience as a pilot – through the mission, there’s obviously a part of your brain that’s occupied with checklists, SOPs [standard operating procedures], etc. But do you have a sense ahead of time about when you will have some time to look around and enjoy the experience, and how?
Hansen: It’s a bit hard to imagine that, because we only sim the busy times. We practice over and over again. So every time we’re in the sim, we’re busy. And I know in some of the coast days, you know, after TLI [trans-lunar injection] and heading to the moon, we [still] have busy schedules. But I do feel like there probably will be little bits of time to look out the window.
The Earth and the moon will not always be in the window. It depends on the attitude of the vehicle for thermal [heating], and things like that. But there’ll be time to look at the Earth and the moon and just take it in. But I don’t think, a lot [of time]. It is a pretty full schedule.
And something that you have to keep in mind: I think we’re planning 12 downlinks over the course of those nine days. So those will add up. There’s exercise – that adds up. Some eating. But anyway, I don’t know. I think we’ll have some really pleasant times in the vehicle. We’ll have a moment to take a breath, and hang out as crew and as individuals.
I hope to just kind of take some notes and have some time to think. I don’t have anything I really want to do while I’m up there, other than look out the window and just sort of take it in in the little bit of time that are there. But I know it’s going to go by, just way too fast.
SpaceQ: So I know that you’re, of course, very focused on training the mission, making sure you execute safely. But do you have a moment to think about your legacy, like what you want people to take away from you being on this mission, and how we should be thinking about that as Canadians, and also as people on Earth?
Hansen: It’s not my legacy, of course, but it is really what I started the conversation with. What I want people to be reminded of right now: Collaboration needs to be the ultimate goal for humanity. And we can do really hard things together. We just have to decide that it’s worth it, and then commit ourselves to it.
And it won’t be easier, in some ways. It’ll be harder. But we will be better for it, as we force ourselves towards our collaboration. And so we’re not going to fix that, in 2026, with Artemis 2. But we’re definitely going to be a reminder of what collaboration can do.
And then, I mean, Artemis 2 is like – we go with the 2. And then there’s a 3 [Artemis 3], and 3 goes to the surface. I mean, they [Artemis missions] just get more and more and more exciting as we go.
I don’t know if you watched the [Sept. 24 crew] press conference or not, but I love what we said about, you know, being forgotten. I think that is great way to look at it. If we’re successful on 2, it won’t be too big of a deal, and No. 3 will eclipse that. And then we’ll go and we’ll do some even more cool stuff on the surface.
SpaceQ: We hope you won’t be forgotten – we remember [round-the-moon mission] Apollo 8, and all that. Is there anything else you want to touch on that you would like to include?
Hansen: I think, you know, when you asked about Indigenous – I think it’s neat to see how others lean into leveraging this time frame, and Artemis. I think it’s really good to encourage people to – I mean, that’s the point, whether it’s like, watch the launch or watch events, this is a neat, neat opportunity to get Canadians together and to celebrate what we’re capable of. Not what Jeremy’s capable of, but what the country’s capable of.
And the sky’s the limit on that. I mean, I’m sure creative people will come up with ways to leverage it, and I’m seeing it as I go along. And I love that, and I think it’d be really neat in the final analysis, to see what people have done. So maybe encouraging people to think outside the box and figure out how we can use this moment to set us up for the next big challenge we’re going to take on.
I guess the other thing, Elizabeth, that you could touch on too, is just focusing on the opportunity ahead a little bit. This is not the peak of our mountain, in Canada. This is just a step along the way – and just encouraging people to think as they set the next big goals. We could do some extraordinary things, in human space exploration, that are directly related to our basic needs on the planet: water, food, health, security, and just technology in general. And so, like, let’s go do those things, and at the same time leverage them with our international partners to send humans to the surface of the moon and to the Gateway space station – and eventually, to Mars. You can definitely go do those things with some intentional focus right now.