Canadian Jeremy Hansen has wanted to be an astronaut ever since he first saw a photo of astronaut Buzz Aldrin standing on the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission of 1969. In 2025, NASA plans to launch the Artemis 2 mission. As one of the 4 astronauts on the Artemis 2 crew, Colonel Jeremy Hansen will circle the Moon to test the Orion spacecraft that is scheduled to take people to the Moon’s surface in 2026. Recently, we spoke with Colonel Hansen about his exciting upcoming mission.
You will also be testing a new high-speed laser communication system.
We’re going to be really far away – 400,000 km. The new high-speed optical communication equipment will use lasers to transmit more information back to Earth more quickly. It’s ultra-precise and gives us more bandwidth. It will be like having higher-speed internet rather than low-speed internet.
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Artemis 2 will use a special flight path that will enable you to return to Earth even if your engines stop working. Can you explain that?
We’ll be going our top speed (mach 38 or 46,552 km/hr) when we’re leaving the Earth. But then the whole way to the Moon we’re actually slowing down, because the Earth’s gravity is pulling us back. When we get really close to the Moon, there’s a point where the Moon’s gravity is more influential than the Earth’s. The Moon will pull us around itself, then the Earth’s gravity will take over and pull us back to Earth. And by the time we get back we’ll be doing mach 38 again.
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What’s an interesting training exercise you’ll be doing in the next little while?
The US Navy will take a mock-up of our capsule out into the part of the Pacific Ocean where we intend to land. They’ll put us in the capsule and then all the rescue forces will do what they’re going to do on the day we land. There will be helicopters and people in boats and they’ll come out and hook up to the capsule. They’ll lift us out of the water with a helicopter and take us back to the ship. And then they’ll recover the capsule and bring it to the ship. We’ll practice all of that a few times to make sure everybody on the team knows what they need to do.
