When officials from two space agencies gather on Monday morning to announce the crew of Artemis II – the crucial next step in the U.S. space program’s plans to return humans to the moon – the event will have special import for Canada.
Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen to join Artemis II mission
For the first time, a Canadian will be among those selected for a lunar voyage, a milestone that takes the country’s space program where it has never been before.
“We’ll be only the second country to send an astronaut that far into space,” Lisa Campbell, president of the Canadian Space Agency, told The Globe and Mail. “Being a full partner in lunar exploration gives us a bright future for our astronaut program.”
A poster showing the Orion capsule for the Artemis II mission at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Aug. 28, 2022.CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP/Getty Images
Artemis II, which is set to launch no earlier than November, 2024, will carry four crew members on a 10-day journey around the moon’s far side and back to Earth. The mission will not land on the moon, but it will serve as a necessary test of NASA’s space launch system and the Orion crew module, marking the first time the spacecraft will fly with people on board and setting the stage for subsequent missions to the lunar surface.
An earlier mission, Artemis I, successfully completed a lunar flight without a crew last December after a long-delayed departure.
The overarching goal of the Artemis program is to re-establish a human presence on the moon – which has not existed since the end of the Apollo program in the 1970s. But unlike Apollo, which was solely a U.S.-branded effort, Artemis has so far garnered commitments from 22 other countries including Canada.
As per an agreement struck in late 2020, Canada is guaranteed a seat on Artemis II, as well as on a later trip to a future moon-orbiting space station called Gateway. In exchange for its participation, Canada is supplying Gateway with a robotic arm and other technical contributions.
Plans for Artemis II have been under way since the program was announced four years ago. But NASA and the Canadian Space Agency indicated that the choice of the first crew to fly around the moon in over half a century would not be made until after an analysis of data gathered during Artemis I.
Now the time to reveal that choice has arrived, including the name of the Canadian who will be aboard when Artemis II lifts off.
Canada’s astronaut corps has four active members.
Of the four, only David Saint-Jacques, a 53-year-old physician-scientist, has flown in space. In 2018-19 he spent more than 200 days aboard the International Space Station, setting the record for the longest single space flight by a Canadian.
Jeremy Hansen, 47, an air force fighter pilot who was selected to the program alongside Dr. Saint-Jacques in May, 2009, has been waiting the longest to fly. The other two candidates, Joshua Kutryk, 41, and Jennifer Sidey-Gibbons, 35, were selected in 2017 as part of the Canadian Space Agency’s most recent call for astronauts.
Ms. Campbell said the decision on which one of the four will fly on Artemis II was made in close collaboration with NASA and took into consideration a range of mission factors. She added that the Canadian agency has long been preparing for the selection and that all of Canada’s astronauts are “qualified and ready” to join a lunar mission.
During the 10-day mission, the crew will be involved in a range of performance and human-machine interface tests as part of the task of learning how to work in the Orion capsule during an active deep space mission. As the mission proceeds it will also serve to reacquaint the world with the spectacle of astronauts travelling far enough from Earth to see the entire planet as a solitary orb travelling through space.
On Friday, Ottawa said that François-Philippe Champagne, Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, will join NASA and Canadian Space Agency officials for the 11 a.m. ET announcement at the Johnson Space Center near Houston.