Next stop, the moon! Artemis II starting to feel 'very real' for astronaut Jeremy Hansen

In just a few short months, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen will make history.

When the Artemis II mission takes to the skies, the goal is to send Canadian Space Agency astronaut Hansen and his crewmates — NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Koch — around the far side of the moon, to go farther into deep space than any human has ever gone before.

And over the course of 10 days, the crew will be gathering scientific data to test the limits of their rocket and of their own human endurance. Scientists hope their findings could help to prepare for future moon missions — and beyond.

Hansen sat down with Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald to discuss the mission, which could launch as soon as February. Here is part of their conversation:

How does it feel to be this close to launch after all this wait?

Oh my gosh, some mixed emotions. There's some days where we're finalizing a certain part of the training and it's the last time we're going to touch it before launch, and it starts to feel very real. And then there's other moments where I'm like, "OK, there's still a lot to do, I've got to get back to work."

You're a former jet fighter pilot, so how does that factor into your training?

The [NASA] Astronaut Corps, just in general, we embrace aviation training because it's one of the few things that we do that can actually kill you. We have these amazing simulators, but when you're in a simulator, you're going home at the end of the day, even if you make a mistake. And space is not like that. And so managing real risk is an important skill set that you want to exercise.

I find myself now ... spending more evenings and weekends in the simulator by myself and just trying things, things that aren't necessarily the approved method. But I want to know what truly does work and what doesn't work. And I want to have absolute confidence in that.

Your journey is going to take you out beyond the moon, and then you're going to loop around and come back without landing on the moon, which was first done in 1968 with Apollo 8. How is your flight going to be different from that one?

There are some differences. The way I like to describe Artemis II is we're trying to do Apollo 7 and Apollo 8 in one mission. So Apollo 7, they stayed in Earth orbit and it was the first time the humans had flown it on that capsule, just like us. So they did all their life-support testing and their manual-flight-control testing in Earth orbit. And then Apollo 8 took the the capsule out and flew it into lunar orbit.

And in our case, since we want to do both, we are giving up a lot of propellants in order to stay in Earth's orbit for a day to test our life-support systems and our manual controls. And so we have enough propellant to get into lunar orbit, but we wouldn't have enough to get back out of lunar orbit. And so that is why we're doing this free-return trajectory, where we'll fly around the moon and come home.

Apollo 8 gave us that famous Earthrise picture of the Earth above the lunar horizon. You're going to be further back. I understand you're going to see both the Earth and the moon in the same shot.

Yes, we should be able to see the entire moon. But we're really hoping for full moon for us, which will be a new moon for you here on Earth. And then we're going to see some spectacular things.