Artemis II crew and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen ready for historic moon mission

Jenni Gibbons, left, and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen, both Canadian Space Agency astronauts, work in the Orion mission simulator at Johnson Space Center on Friday, July 25, 2025, in Houston, ahead of the Artemis II mission. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP-Ashley Landis

LONGUEUIL — The crew of the Artemis II mission, including Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, are heading around the moon in 2026, but the team said Wednesday they are most concerned about laying the groundwork for future missions.

“We look through the lens of mission success, which is Artemis III getting back to the surface of the moon,” Hansen told a news conference Wednesday at Johnson Space Centre in Houston.

“And so we do all of this training, all this preparation ... always thinking about what are we handing off to the next crew. Is what we’re developing going to help them achieve that objective?”

“It’s just a really neat way to look at this.”

The trip is scheduled for sometime in the first few months of 2026 and would be the first mission to the moon by astronauts since the last Apollo mission in 1972.

Hansen, 49, of London, Ont., who is serving as a mission specialist on the mission, made the comments alongside veteran NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, who will act as commander, pilot, and mission specialist respectively.

The spacecraft in the Artemis II mission will approach the moon and then perform a figure-eight manoeuvre around the far side of the moon before returning to Earth.

Koch noted that depending on the illumination on that side of the moon, it could mean the astronauts will be able to witness areas that have never been viewed by human eyes.

It may also set up the missions that follow.

“Believe it or not, human eyes are one of the best scientific instruments that we have,” Koch said “Our geologists are beyond excited for our eyes to look at the moon, and we’ve been training how to turn those observations into tangible science for them. There are incredible basins on the moon.”

It would also be Hansen’s first mission in space, making him the first non-American to travel beyond the lower Earth orbit. But despite the personal accolades, he’s focused on the bigger picture.

“For us, Artemis II is about much more than just going back to the moon. It is about the pursuit of excellence,” Hansen said.

In January 2024, NASA announced it was delaying the Artemis II moon mission to allow time to fix technical issues with the spacecraft.

NASA is planning a subsequent mission, Artemis III, to land astronauts on the moon for the first time in more than 50 years on the moon’s South Pole.

The agency also plans an Artemis IV mission to begin assembly of the Gateway lunar space station. The station would be a small lunar outpost that would orbit the moon. It is also expected to be fitted with Canadian-made technology, Canadarm 3.

In late November 2022, NASA launched Artemis I, an uncrewed NASA Orion spacecraft that orbited the moon before returning to Earth after a 25-day mission.

NASA said this week a launch window for Artemis II could open as early as February 2026 and the agency had previously announced that it planned to hold the mission no later than April 2026.

Wiseman, the mission commander, said the team weighed themes like peace, hope, working together as they pondered a name for their spacecraft. They eventually landed on the name “Integrity.”

“The feeling that I have inside is hope. I just imagine when that is going to be like and we know that Artemis II is not the solution for humanity on planet Earth, but it is a contribution in the positive column,” Hansen said.

“We hope that just for a moment that people will pause and say, wow, it’s extraordinary when you look back upon the earth with eight billion people and you see this concrete example of what humanity can do this extraordinary thing when we set big goals and we work together to achieve them.”

Another Canadian astronaut, Jenni Gibbons, 37, of Calgary, was appointed in November 2024 as a backup to Hansen, who was assigned in April 2023.

Fellow Canadian astronaut Joshua Kutryk, 43, of Fort Saskatchewan, Alta., is slated to travel to the International Space Station on the first mission of the Boeing-built spacecraft Starliner-1. He will spend six months in space.

Sidhartha Banerjee, The Canadian Press