Anish Moonka@anishmoonka
Jeremy Hansen became an astronaut in 2009. He waited 17 years to go to space. His first trip off Earth is a flight around the Moon.
He grew up on a farm near a small town in Ontario, Canada. As a kid, he saw a photograph of Neil Armstrong standing on the lunar surface and wondered what it would feel like to be up there. He joined the Air Cadets at 12. Earned his glider wings at 16. Had his pilot's license at 17, before he could legally drink or vote in Canada.
He went to military college and studied space science. Got a master's in physics. Then he spent six years as a fighter pilot flying CF-18 Hornets (Canada's version of the F-18) out of Cold Lake, Alberta, protecting North American airspace under NORAD, the joint US-Canada defense system that monitors every aircraft entering the continent's skies. He flew Arctic missions. Logged more than 4,000 hours in the cockpit across 25 different aircraft.
The Canadian Space Agency picked him in 2009. Two spots opened up out of the entire country. He got one. Moved to Houston. Finished NASA's astronaut training in 2011.
Then he waited. And waited. Canada only gets a crew seat on the International Space Station about once every five or six years because of how funding is split among countries. His colleague David Saint-Jacques, who was selected the same year, flew to the station in 2018. Hansen kept training. He lived underground for six days in a cave in Sardinia, Italy. Spent a week on the ocean floor in a small habitat off the coast of Florida, simulating what deep space isolation feels like. Joined a geology expedition in the Canadian High Arctic, studying rock formations that look like the surface of the Moon. In 2017, NASA asked him to lead the training of an entire class of new astronauts, the first time they had ever given that job to someone who wasn't American. He did all of that without ever leaving Earth.
Canada earned its seat on Artemis II because of the Canadarm, the robotic arm that flew on every Space Shuttle mission for 30 years and now runs on the Space Station. Canada put roughly $2 billion toward building the next version for future Moon operations, and NASA gave them a crew spot on the first flight back. Hansen was the pick.
Five days ago, on April 1, he launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. His three crewmates, Wiseman, Glover, and Koch, have all been to space before. Hansen hadn't. His first time feeling weightlessness, his first time seeing Earth from outside it, his first time in a spacecraft at all, is a ten-day trip around the Moon, roughly 252,000 miles from home, farther than any human has ever traveled. He told reporters from orbit that it "makes me feel like a little kid." He is 50 years old, with three teenagers and a wife named Catherine, who is a doctor back in Houston.
On flight day one, as Orion swung back toward Earth before the engine burn that would send them to the Moon, Hansen turned to his commander and said, "It feels like we're going to hit it. It's amazing that we're actually going to go around and miss this thing."
