Artemis II moon astronaut Jeremy Hansen says there is ample opportunity for Canada to contribute to NASA’s newly expanded moon base project. Hansen told SpaceQ in a Thursday (June 11) phone interview that the moon base, announced roughly a week before the historic April 1 Artemis II mission, shows leadership and vision from NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman.
Canadian discussions are ongoing, he emphasized. “Part of the process is to work it with NASA to make sure the investments and commitments we make fit into the puzzle, so we’re not duplicating effort and we’re committed on what exactly we’ll provide.”
The announcement also came with a pause of the Gateway space station, the original destination for the Canadarm3 robotic arm. Canadian Space Agency (CSA) president Lisa Campbell and MDA Space, which is building Canadarm3, note the CSA contract is ongoing and say the robotics can be repurposed. Moreover, CSA is funding a lunar utility rover to assist astronauts, which has early-stage contracts awarded for an expected flight date in 2033, and which has formed a large part of agency messaging lately.
“We were contributing to Gateway, and we’re going to make significant contributions to the lunar surface. So I’ve got no concerns about where we’re going,” Hansen said. He added the new vision of surface operations set by NASA, which is the leader of the Artemis program and Artemis Accords, “makes a lot of sense” because “it’s taking what we know from what we’ve learned over the past decade, I’d say, and just updating the plan to make the most of what industry we have available – and what we’ve learned will help us probably be more successful on the moon.”
The Artemis II crew has also met recently, post-splashdown, with many of the U.S. policy-makers responsible for space matters or diplomacy, including key Congressional committees, the U.S. embassy in Ottawa, and the White House (including a visit to the Oval Office with U.S. President Donald Trump). Hansen said from the perspective of Canada and space contributions, in conversations with these American leaders he always tried to share “respect for our American partners, and gratitude for their leadership and the opportunities that they provided us. And also just shining a light on we do bring value, we know we do, and we know we have to participate.”
Sovereign launch
Hansen was touring Canada during the SpaceQ conversation, including a stop in Canso, Nova Scotia, to watch a T-Minus Engineering suborbital launch (which experienced a high-altitude anomaly) on Wednesday (June 10) from the Maritime Launch Services launch site. Building a young spaceport takes time, Hansen said, but he lauded the “visionary people” involved in the project as well as contributions from the local community.
MLS recently received funding amounting to a $20 million annual pad lease ($200 million over 10 years) from the Canadian Department of National Defence out of the expectations that it would become a site for sovereign launch. There have been critics of their work, but MLS says it has a viable pathway; you can read more about their plans here in a recent SpaceQ story.
“There’s just so many people involved in regulatory framework, and being a first is always hard,” Hansen noted, adding he was proud to witness the launch and to speak with the people there. “It’s humble beginnings, but this is how it starts. And you can very easily listen to the plans and see the vision. You very easily see going back there in the years to come and seeing a real spaceport.”
Readying for Artemis III
When asked about how the handover is going between the Artemis II and III crews, Hansen joked, “It hasn’t been great for me because I’m here this week,” referring to him being in schedule conflict with obligations in Canada while the crew announcement took place at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston on Tuesday (June 9).
Hansen is normally based at JSC; luckily, all three of his crew members (NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch) were available to pass a ceremonial baton to the new crew on stage. “I’ve only been able to reach out to them on text,” Hansen said of his conversations this week with the Artemis III astronauts, which include NASA’s Randy Bresnik, Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio and the European Space Agency’s Luca Parmitano.
There are direct links between Artemis II and III: Bresnik, formerly assistant to the chief of NASA’s Astronaut Office, worked closely with the Artemis II crew during their training while Douglas served as one of the Artemis II backups and a member of the pad closeout crew.
“So there’s just a lot of experience in that crew already that know a lot of what we learned of Artemis II. So we will support them in any way that we can. But I just don’t think they’re going to need a lot from us because they already have so much,” Hansen said. While he didn’t cite Parmitano and Rubio directly due to time considerations on the interview, Parmitano is a former ISS commander (so is Bresnik) and Rubio holds the U.S. record of 371 days for a single spaceflight.
Additionally, CSA’s Jenni Gibbons – backup for Hansen on Artemis II, and CAPCOM (Capsule Communicator) during the lunar flyby – is named lead CAPCOM for Artemis III. She will be managing all the CAPCOMs on the mission, Hansen noted, making her “a point of contact for anyone who needs to come through that console. She’s obviously very experienced from Artemis II, from both fully trained to fly Artemis already, plus she performed the CAPCOM duty, so it’s a natural fit for her to lead a group.”
Hansen also praised the leadership of CSA’s Josh Kutryk, assigned just after Artemis II to SpaceX’s Crew-13 mission that will launch in September. The two have known each other for many years in the Royal Canadian Air Force; also, Kutryk was shortlisted in the 2009 astronaut selection (Hansen’s class) before being named an astronaut in 2017.
Crew cohesion
SpaceQ asked Hansen to comment on the incredible cohesion of the Artemis II crew – which was evident, for example, on the live video showing the crew very carefully maneuvering around each other with centimetres of clearance. The media also commented on moments such as the emotional hug the crew shared in space when they proposed naming a crater on the moon after Carroll, Wiseman’s wife who died of cancer in 2020.
“That’s the result of significant effort and started with a commitment to one another after assignment to launch as friends and land as friends,” Hansen said, noting the crew spent their years of training talking about friction points and differences in point of view that often come from “things that are buried in us from the past and trigger points.” (Wiseman also has shared the work the crew did with psychologists to help them with this process.)
Hansen said the crew approached discussions with each other with the expectation that “we were going to be working very closely together for some number of years, and we were probably going to spend the rest of our lives talking about it together from time to time.” (Note that Apollo astronauts often appeared as crews in public events for many decades after their missions, essentially until they were quite elderly.)
When Hansen was asked about what life experiences he tried to bring to keep “on the joy train”, a phrase he uses to discuss his approach to working with his crew to keep a positive attitude, first he cited “grace over time as you live through your life on this planet,” including drawing from his time in Air Cadets, the Air Force and his 17 years with CSA. He also cited his experiences with Indigenous elders, including a vision quest that “helped bring that into focus for me, like what’s important, and how I use my energy on a daily basis to try to improve the small parts of society that I interact with.”
Observing the moon
Teams led by NASA continue to analyze science results from the mission, including reams of imagery from the crew, their health performance and similar items, according to a recent agency press release. The process of preparing peer-reviewed publications may take years. Hansen noted the science investigators, including Canadian researchers, would be best placed to discuss how that is all going.
That said, Hansen is highly trained in geology thanks in part to his periodic crater expeditions with Western University planetary geologist Gordon Osinski (who will help the surface geology team on the first Artemis moon landing, which may be Artemis IV in 2028). As such, Hansen was able to share his moon observations in that realm. A full transcript of his observational remarks is below.
“As we started to get close to the moon, the one thing that was really capturing our attention was that the moon was starting to look different based on our trajectory. Even when we were far away, we were already seeing around the far side of the moon. And it does look different and unfamiliar. It’s not what you’re used to looking at, so that was pretty neat.
“And then as we woke up for the day of observations [April 6], we were already, even when we were still a ways away, we were already picking out a lot of features that we were familiar with—but also noticing things that we just hadn’t noticed in the imagery before. I guess it’s just the lighting angle, and the fact that you’re looking at it from a glancing angle as opposed to straight down at it.
“Things started to really jump out at us, and that was really neat. And if you listen to the audio recordings, you’d see just how excited we were to see these things, point them out to one another, and start talking about them. [Mare] Orientale is obviously spectacular because it’s an enormous crater, and what really struck me was just the depth of the crater rim walls, especially on the northeast edge. As we went over top of it, I was just looking down these sheer cliffs and I could see detail in the cliffs and texture in the cliff walls. And I just, I thought that really was striking for me.
“And the other thing that jumped out at me is it was very obvious how much that crater event reshaped the far side of the moon. I could just start to really get a sense of the extent of excavated material, and how far it had been flung across the far side of the moon.”
Hansen’s lunar reflections
Hansen added the thing that is most important to him concerning his moon mission is “that sense of gratitude that you’re left with, when you reflect on a journey like that. And gratitude as an individual, but gratitude on behalf of all of us, for this oasis that we have in the vacuum of space to live on. We all know it. We’ve seen pictures, but you can’t witness it with your own eyes from deep space and not be moved by it.”
Hansen also shared something quite interesting about looking at the stars, which is not something usually discussed in Apollo program transcripts due to emphasis on the moon activities. “When the lighting was right, when you looked at the Earth with the backdrop of the galaxy, you could actually perceive the three-dimensionality to the galaxy, that stars were closer or further. And it was all around you, not just straight out, but all around you.
“That was really awe-inspiring,” he continued, “and left me feeling very insignificant as an individual, but very powerful as a human species. That we could collaborate to make it possible to send emissaries from humanity out to be witness to that.”
Hansen also thanked the many people he has spoken with, or who he has heard about, who expressed their “moon joy” about Artemis II during and after the mission. “Coming back to Earth, and starting to wrap our arms around what and how people did … how they came together—how they shared the moon joy, how they used that inspiring mission to create other positive things—was really, really special, and has just renewed my hope and reinforced my hope that humanity can focus on creating a positivity, as opposed to the opposite. It’s very meaningful.”