Col. Jeremy Hansen is Canada’s longest-serving astronaut who has not yet flown in space. Selected in May 2009, the former CF-18 fighter pilot (including NORAD Air Defence Operations) has played a plethora of ground roles for Canada and NASA over the last 13 years.
One of the most prominent of Hansen’s past roles was coordinating the training schedule for the 2017 astronaut class; he was the first Canadian to do so, serving as a helper and as a mentor for the “Turtles” class that included newer Canadian astronauts Josh Kutryk and Jenni Sidey-Gibbons.
That role, however, wrapped up in January 2020 when the Turtles graduated. NASA astronaut Shannon Walker is now playing the same role for the new class, Hansen said, which is freeing his time for training as well as assisting with tasting space food for future moon Artemis missions.
“Providing feedback on that food is always challenging because the details are changing,” Hansen said. He noted this feedback he is providing is different from the ongoing Deep Space Food Challenge co-run by NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, but added he is a big supporter of the project and its potential to provide a unique Canadian contribution to spaceflight.
NASA has gone through a few vehicle iterations since Hansen’s arrival. He arrived shortly before the space shuttle retired in 2011. Then, astronauts exclusively used Russia’s Soyuz to reach the space station as new commercial crew vehicles developed. Today most astronauts use the SpaceX Dragon to reach orbit, and there are hopes that Boeing Starliner will pass its second uncrewed test in orbit later this year to ferry astronauts as soon as 2023.
Further in the future, a Canadian is expected to fly on Artemis 2 under NASA’s still unflown Orion spacecraft, which will be tested during an uncrewed round-the-moon mission launching no earlier than this spring. A second Canadian at the least will have a space station mission in the 2020s, too, although no one has been officially named yet to either opportunity.
Hansen said although the approach sounds complex to have multiple vehicles potentially on offer for astronauts, NASA’s training approach is having all its astronauts learn space station activities and long-duration missions. This skillset is easy to pivot for different vehicles or for shorter missions as required, he noted.
Behind the scenes, Hansen continues to highlight the importance of Canada’s role in space to decision-makers in the Canadian government. With SpaceQ, he pointed to the contributions Canada has made since the beginning of the shuttle era (namely, Canadarm) and said the country has done well in contributing to the space program, including in areas like satellites in the north.
“Canada continues to have amazing opportunities abroad, but we’re also very aware that we have to intentionally go after that. You can never rest, even though we’ve had some amazing successes and people are always working and doing great things. We have to be thinking of what’s next,” Hansen said.
Being an exporter in the space world is “rapidly changing,” and Hansen said there are several areas Canada should keep thinking about. The contribution of Canadarm3 to the planned NASA Gateway space station is a “key cornerstone of our future exploration plan,” not only coming down to the hardware, but the machine learning intelligence that will assist the arm in performing its maintenance and debris mitigation.
Food (including the Deep Space Food Challenge) “addresses challenges that we’re currently facing here on the planet, which are enhanced by climate change certainly felt drastically by Canadians,” Hansen said. He added that Canada is well-positioned to “co-create solutions” through international partnerships.
Canada’s ongoing Deep Space Healthcare Challenge, which seeks novel technology and ideas to detect and diagnose medical conditions, will have applicability both in space and in remote areas on Earth, Hansen said, reflecting language from the Canadian Space Agency. “We can help people there and take it to space,” he said.
Lastly, climate solutions will be essential for Canada to seek avenues of participation, he said. “We don’t need a crystal ball anymore to understand that climate change is very real. It’s happening, and very real.” (Canada already monitors such change through the RADARSAT Constellation Mission, RADARSAT-2 and the aging SciSat, and hopes to launch a wildfire-focused satellite in the coming years. It also uses datasets from international partners in the United States and Europe through various agreements.
Hansen said he is enjoying the astronaut training flow and the challenge of the new vehicles coming on board, but noted, “the caveat that comes to mind are some of these early vehicles in the early stages.”
Happily, he said, NASA astronauts are involved with the certification of these vehicles before they open up to international astronauts, allowing a spaceflyer’s experience to be directly reflected in the design and training plan for the vehicles.
As for his own role as an astronaut, Hansen said, “nothing’s really changed for my day, except that the mission is always evolving” – meaning that the astronaut corps continues to adapt to new vehicles and mission requests as they arrive.