KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FLORIDA – A Canadian is Moonbound.
Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, the first non-American on a crewed Moon mission, rocketed off-Earth today (April 1) from Launch Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center at 6:35 p.m. With this launch, Hansen is at last leveraging 17 years of experience supporting space missions by flying alongside three veteran NASA astronauts: commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and mission specialist Christina Koch.
Hansen’s launch aboard the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft follows a heady week in international space policy. And if you look back to 2009 when he was first selected as an astronaut candidate, even more has changed. There was no Artemis program in 2009, although some of the hardware was in the works and NASA and Canada had decades of International Space Station (ISS) experience even back then. That year saw the first CSA long-duration spaceflight with astronaut Robert Thirsk, and the refurbishment of the Hubble Space Telescope with NASA astronaut (and fellow Canadian) Drew Feustel. The Space Shuttle was still active. SpaceX was 11 years away from sending astronauts to space. And two astronaut candidates joined the CSA corps: David Saint-Jacques and Hansen.
While Saint-Jacques flew in 2018, nine years after selection, it’s now been 17 for Hansen—as other Canadian mission assignments played out under our typical ISS flight rate of every five or six years. Hansen’s wait for space is just two years shy of the NASA record set by Don Lind. (We’re not including private astronaut flights in this calculation.) But Hansen, a quiet and effective astronaut, has a heavy step that echoes in Canada’s tight space circle, including groups ranging from Indigenous to the military, while serving as a Colonel in the Royal Canadian Air Force.
NASA took notice of Hansen’s skills, too. In recent years, Hansen was named the first Canadian to manage training schedules for an entire astronaut class (U.S. and Canada), which is also a key mentorship role for astronaut candidates. He helped develop tools for the ISS dark-matter detector’s upgrade and maintenance, assisting a team to refurbish an instrument not originally designed for spacewalks. Politicians as notable as former prime minister Justin Trudeau have lauded Hansen’s contributions to space policy.
So when an opportunity arose for the first Canadian to fly to the Moon, it was little surprise to the community here when Hansen stepped on to the stage during the announcement in an airplane hangar near NASA’s Johnson Space Center, on April 3, 2023. Hansen has been nothing but humble in media interviews in the three years since. Canada, he said, “earned it through decades of investment and incredible, incredible innovation,” he told SpaceQ in an exclusive interview in October 2025, late in his training.
The principal investment and innovation behind CSA-funded seats on NASA missions is the Canadarm series. Predecessor unfurling-antenna tech, developed by the National Research Council’s George Klein, flew to space in 1962 on Canada’s first satellite, Alouette. Canadarm itself reached space on early shuttle mission STS-2 in 1981.
Versions of Canadarm have helped astronauts repair a torn International Space Station (ISS) solar panel, scan for broken tiles on the shuttle’s belly, and catch cargo ships on their way to the ISS—all use cases for which the arm was never designed. And funny enough, the first CSA astronaut to use Artemis 2’s launch pad in 1992 was on a Canadarm-heavy mission: that was Stephen Maclean, who helped test tech for Canada’s Space Vision System aboard STS-52.
Canadarm’s new kid on the block, Canadarm3, is in design work under a $1 billion CSA contract awarded to longtime program operator MDA Space in June 2024. Canada’s funding for Artemis with Canadarm3 runs parallel and separate to ISS, and there’s a twist: days ago, NASA suspended the Gateway lunar station for which the robotic arm was designed. “The agency intends to pause Gateway in its current form and shift focus to infrastructure that enables sustained surface operations,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said March 24, also saying the intent is to get to the moon before China.
Reassurances about Gateway hardware followed almost as quickly: MDA Space told investors the Canadarm3 program is still active under a CSA contract, and that the arm can be repurposed for other environments as it has not been built. NASA promised that international partners in Gateway, who are under Artemis Accords agreements essentially pledging hardware for mission participation, could see their tech repurposed for NASA’s envisioned lunar base. (A logical spot for Canadarm3 could be the CSA-funded Artemis lunar utility rover, for example.)
So what will happen next with Artemis, and with Canadarm3? Hansen said at a media appearance in January at KSC, at his rocket’s first rollout, that it is up to the international partnership. He and his crew are so focused on that partnership that when SpaceQ asked about his mission legacy in October, Hansen said it is not his legacy—but the group’s: “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.”
Canadians and groups in Canada are involved in Artemis 2 in many ways. Now with Hansen off-Earth, CSA will be participating in its first astronaut mission in more than seven years. Several Indigenous groups contributed to Hansen’s mission patch and training. Some Canadians have experiments on board, while others are tracking the spacecraft. And a small group of Canadian journalists—including SpaceQ—were on site among hundreds of reporters at NASA’s press site at KSC, watching the Artemis 2 rocket roar into the sky.
We don’t know all the pieces of our country’s future in space, and a lot of what we planned is changing. But there’s one thing for sure: a Canadian is preparing to leave Earth’s orbit for the first time. Should his mission reach the Moon and accomplish all that was planned, Artemis 2 will contribute to forming the beginning of this new space direction. And Canada, as a participating nation in Artemis, must have a say in what comes next.