Jeremy Hansen, astronaut: Moon mission shows best of humanity

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1:12You'll reach the right buyers because you can target by company, industry, job title, and more. So cut the bull spend. Advertise on LinkedIn. The network that works for you. Spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a 250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com slash broadcast. That's linkedin.com slash broadcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hello, I'm Rebecca Murrell, the BBC's Science Editor, and this is the interview from the BBC World Service. the best conversations coming out of the BBC, people shaping our world from all over the world. If you're not a little bit afraid, then you're not paying attention.

2:01We have never seen a people so united. Do not make that boat crossing. Do not make that journey. Being born in America, feeling American, having people treat me like I'm not. We're more popular than populism. For this interview, I was joined by the retired British astronaut Tim Peake as we met the Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen on a video call while he was in quarantine in Houston. Hansen is one of four crew members of the Artemis II mission, NASA's latest mission into space. Launching from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, they'll be heading to the moon and will circle it before returning home.

2:39Although they won't be landing, it's the first time in over half a century that humans have ventured to the moon. If the mission is successful, 50-year-old Hansen will become the first non-American and fellow crew members Victor Glover, the first person of colour, and Christina Cook, the first woman to leave low-Earth orbit. It was pretty humbling to be assigned to this mission on behalf of Canada and to kind of think about it from that perspective, that this would be my first mission, it would be the first time that a non-American had left Earth orbit, it, but also pretty exciting when I sat in the backyard and I looked at the moon.

3:15I have to admit, it just looked a little different to me. It looked further away. I was starting to think about the realities of how hard it is to get there. That's pretty neat to wrap your mind around.

3:29Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Jeremy Hansen. It's been a long few months waiting for a liftoff, but most of us, we're not going to be the ones who are going to be sat on top of SLS. So I was wondering how the recent launch delays have affected you and the crew and your families. And does that give you more or less confidence in the launch vehicle itself? Gosh, there's a lot there. I guess to characterize it for us, the delays, I mean, it's all been positive from a crew, well, mostly positive, I'd say from a crew point of view. This is just sort of par for the course, as you well know, Tim.

4:05I mean, it's human space flight, it's complex and you want to get it right and yes you do want to go as quick as you can and you're anxious to go and everybody wants to see the final result but nobody likes the result when it's not good either and so it's good to get it right it's good to slow down when you need to and that's what it feels like we've done so that has felt very good very comforting but not surprising like that is what we expect from this system and this team so it felt pretty normal for us. I'd say the only negative impact that I really noticed was from us, like us, the crew, was just the impact on our family and friends.

4:44I have three kids in university. They really want to support and be at the launch. And that's a big ask to come back and start this two-week quarantine, get all geared up, ready to go, and then have to shift and go back to school and make all those adjustments again to have the space to come do this. I really appreciate them. Absolutely. It must be a roller coaster ride. But as you say, you know, absolutely safety is paramount. So it's the right thing to do. Yeah, no, absolutely. And then from the other thing I'd add, I think it is interesting. In space exploration, you are going as quick as you can, as soon as stuff is ready, and you feel like you've got what you need, you do go.

5:23And so we were ready to go in that February window, but it was rushed. It was a heavy lift. Everyone was running, sprinting to the finish line, checking off all the boxes. And then when we took that first delay, we had a little bit more room to go do a few extra things, some of the nice to do things. And that felt pretty good. And so going into this launch period, I do feel a little bit more. I feel more rested, a little bit more prepared. So this actually feels pretty good. That's really good to hear. Jeremy, the thing I can't quite get over is that this is going to be your first trip to space.

5:54and it is such a big trip. How does it feel that your space debut is a mission to the moon? How did you feel when you first found out you were going to be heading to the moon? Well, obviously pretty excited. As Tim could attest, as an astronaut, you just want to go execute the mission, whichever that, whenever that mission is. And so you're not too choosy. It's like my colleague and crewmate Victor always says, you want to be on the next thing smoking that leaves the planet. But it was pretty humbling to be assigned to this mission on behalf of Canada and to kind of think about it from that perspective that this would be my first mission.

6:32It would be the first time that a non-American had left Earth orbit. And so that was very humbling to think about, but also pretty exciting when I sat in the backyard and I looked at the moon. And I have to admit, it just looked a little different to me. It looked further away. I was starting to think about the realities of how hard it is to get there. That's pretty neat to wrap your mind around. Yeah, it's not something that many people get to think about as well. Yeah. And I think, as you mentioned, they're looking at the moon. When we think of the Artemis program, we also naturally reflect back to Apollo.

7:06And despite the enormity of what those missions accomplished back then in the 60s and 70s, it was very much One Nation's mission and it had geopolitical motivations. But as you mentioned, you're going to be the first Canadian to get that close to the moon and you're going to be guided there by a European service module. And I was just wondering what your thoughts were on the kind of international collaboration that is involved in this mission. Yes, I've spoken about it a lot that I just firmly believe that this collaborative example that we set in the space program is so valuable for humanity.

7:40Our stated goal as humans has got to be working together to tackle problems and to lift one another up. And, you know, I'm sure the news stories that surround this one, you know, they're not as uplifting, but this one is. It is an example of us collaborating on a global scale and setting that example, doing that hard work now. And how do we do hard things together? And when it comes to something like human space exploration, I think arguably we can all admit it would be a little easier if you just had all the resources in one country and you just went off and did it. It's harder to bring countries together from around the world to accomplish these goals.

8:15Like you mentioned, Tim, we're flying on the European service module. It's just complicated to bring all that engineering together from these different places. But once you figure out how to do that hard part, the rest is easier because you were going together and you're bringing more minds, you're bringing more solutions, more resources together. That's the key that we're working on. The secret sauce for humanity's future is how to do these hard things together. And what we often speak about as a crew, Artemis 2 is extraordinary. We're going to return to the moon, four humans in deep space, fly around the far side, see the Earth from the perspective of the moon.

8:47But that's just the next step. It just gets more interesting from here on. And just imagine what we as humans can do next as we collaborate together. One of the questions I wanted to ask was, you know, there's a big difference between Artemis 1 and Artemis 2, you know, in that you're going to be on board along with three other human beings. Aside from the technical objectives, what science are you hoping to do? And I think you're going to be a guinea pig yourself. Some science is going to be conducted on you, if I'm correct. Yes. Obviously, science and technology and exploration, they go hand in hand.

9:26That's why we can do these things, because we develop understanding through science. And so through science, we're always asking new questions and trying to solve the next part of the puzzle. And so we take every opportunity we can to do science. The biggest science on this mission is the humans themselves. We are the guinea pigs. And so we do just all of this testing before we go. We do some testing in space while we're there, and then a whole bunch of testing when we get back to try and get all the data. Some of the data they won't even necessarily know what to do with now, but can be used for the decades to come as we collect more and more data.

10:01And then we can put all those pieces together. But just a couple of examples. One is that I think is pretty neat. We're doing this experiment. We call it Avatar, but where we fly living cells of our body on these chips in space with us. And they're kept alive. They're fed through this machine. And then we get back, we compare how our cells in our body reacted to the radiation environment, for example, against how the chips reacted. And if the results are similar, which they expect they will be based on ground testing, then you can send thousands of people on these chips to space and you can get the data sets you need to get real science done.

10:40So that's an exciting experiment. We do lots of blood draws, et cetera, for that one. And then the other science piece or another big one is obviously observing the moon. So there'll be parts of the moon that have never been seen by human eyes, depending on our launch date, how much or how little. But geologists are really excited about what we could observe with the human eyes, which is just different than the sensors that are on the satellites orbiting the moon today. Avatar sounds fascinating. I can't wait to kind of follow up on that. I know, Jeremy, you and the other crew members, you would have spent many, many long hours training together and understanding each other's roles.

11:17And I was wondering, as a mission specialist, both yourself and Christina, are there any particular tasks that you both have to do during the mission? the most you know focused tasks that are like specific to who does them of course are for the commander and pilot for launch and entry because we're strapped into our seats so that's the easiest one to understand so um you know reed and victor will pilot the craft through those phases of the mission but once we get to space since this was a test flight and since we had the time to train all four crew uh reed our commander made a very intentional decision that he wanted all four crew members to be fully trained on everything and to actually do it through the mission.

11:58So even though we have these names, we actually all try everything. We all do manual control and piloting of the spacecraft at some point. We have all these different burns. So for example, like for the transluter injection, which is a big burn, for our perigee-raised burn at the end of our really long first day those are burns and that christina and i are responsible for so we will be at the displays for those and working through that but then we also cycle through all the other tasks like toilet maintenance gets cycled every day as you know tim like everybody's got to work on the toilet and take care of that and so we do everything every single job you can imagine on there

12:43you're listening to the interview from the bbc world service It was a really eye-opening experience speaking to Jeremy Hansen. For a start, it's not every day you get to speak to an astronaut who's about to head to the moon, especially while they're in the quarantine period, where they're isolated from everyone apart from their crew members to avoid any viruses and bugs to keep them in peak physical condition for their flight. I think what was striking to me was how open he was about the very special voyage he was about to undertake. Okay, let's return to my conversation with Jeremy Hansen.

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14:23Clearly, there is a risk involved with human space exploration. And this is the first time that humans will have flown on the space launch system in the Orion spacecraft. How do we approach this subject with your family? You know, how do you talk about risk with them? And how are they doing at this time? We have had those conversations and they're challenging, but they're maybe not as hard as I might have imagined they would be. It's a lot like life that we all go through, that we live with a lot of uncertainty in our lives. We take a lot of things for granted, but when we step back for a moment, we realize these things can have these bad outcomes.

15:04You We watch them happen in the world every single day. And so when you kind of break it down practically, I think it helps them and myself as humans to just sort of think about it from that perspective. And then, but to be honest, it is really risky to go and fly around the moon. It's over 400 ,000 kilometers or it's about 400 ,000 kilometers away. It's an extraordinary distance to be away from home. There's so much energy involved to get there. Controlling that much energy is just inherently risky. We do a great job of it, but all along the way of the program, you accept risks. You say, this isn't perfect, but we think we can manage it.

15:44But at the end of the day, every time you take a risk, you have to also acknowledge it could come to fruition. Even if it's unlikely, that could happen. Or three of them could happen and they stack up and you have a loss of crew. And so this is a very acute risk period for me. and I wanted my family to understand that and what I wanted the most to understand is that they will be okay you know we've we've done the homework here we've got dotted the i's cross the t's administratively they will be okay we've made sure of that and they'll be it'll be really tough you know there'll be a period of mourning but what's important for me to know going to this mission is that they understand that they can lean on each other and get through it and come out this other side okay.

16:27Thank you for sharing that. I mean, I think because we see people travel to space so frequently, you almost forget about the risks involved and they must be difficult conversations to have. But important. Usually. I remember having the same conversations with my family prior to launch and Rebecca telling me that she always felt that being an astronaut was far safer than being a test pilot. I'm not sure about flying around the moon, though. but last year, Jeremy, I had the chance to go to the centrifuge at RAF Crownwell, and I asked them to put me through the SLS G launch profile, which is brilliant and fun, really exciting to do any rocket launch in the centrifuge.

17:08But of course, you're going to experience this for real with all the noise or the vibration and all that kind of the sensatory inputs you're going to have. So I was wondering just on a raw level, what your thoughts are about feeling about sitting on top of you know such a powerful rocket nasa's most powerful rocket built to date and what parts of the mission are you most looking forward to yeah when it comes to riding the rocket what is really kind of fun to think about is we don't exactly know what to expect yes the vehicle has flown once with no humans on it and data was collected but the vehicle is slightly different things have changed and nothing really captures the full experience we don't imagine anyway.

17:51And you've got these solid rocket boosters, which we know from the shuttle days, the people who flew shuttle, they are just real, they create a lot of vibration. They're a very rumbly ride. But the big thing is, is we won't know if that's normal. I think, you know, coming as this thing vibrates itself and you're like, is it coming apart or is this okay? Like we, there's nobody to ask that what it's going to exactly feel like. And so we're just going to have to have faith, uh, that whatever we're experiences is probably normal unless it were convinced it's not. So that'll be an interesting mental experience, I think, doing that.

18:25The things I'm really excited to see, even in the first 45 minutes of this flight, we fly out to probably close to 2 ,000 kilometers from the planet. International Space Station's about 400. So we get some pretty extraordinary views even in that first 45 minutes. And those will be my first views of the planet from space. I'll see it go from pretty close to all, you know, pretty far away. And then within 12 hours, we're going to be basically out at 60 ,000 kilometers from the planet. And that would be extraordinary. And then as I was mentioning before, we'll fly around the moon over 400 ,000 kilometers away and look back at the planet in the background of a lunar foreground, which I think will be an extraordinary human experience.

19:14And I hope humanity will stop for a moment when four humans are on the far side of the moon and just look at some of the imagery that we are sharing and just be reminded that we can do a better job as humans of just lifting each other up, not destroying, but creating together. I know Artemis 2 is not going to fix it. I'm realistic about that. But at least if we can be reminded of what's possible in a time like this, I hope that humanity will pause for a moment. Well said, and I hope so too. And I think they will. I think the world will be watching and be with you on that mission. I just wanted to pick up a bit on what you said about you're going to be the first ones to experience this rocket ride.

19:58I remember Jeff Williams, he spoke to me the night before undocking from the space station and re-entering the atmosphere. And he talked me through it step by step. And I was so grateful that he did, because, you know, when the bells and whistles are going off and the bangs and the vibrations and the noises. So I do sympathise that you're going to be the ones who will be able to pass this information down, but you won't actually have anyone to tell you that to begin with. And launch day itself, it's going to be for you a very long day. You're going to have many hours of work before you even launch.

20:32And then you go into a very busy host launch sequence of events. And I know one of the major events, and you mentioned this earlier, was this translunar injection. And that's the point where you fully commit to going around the moon. So I was wondering in that very busy period, you know, what's the kind of no go, no go criteria that you have to actually push that button and go for TLI? Obviously, it just comes down to looking at our overall systems on the vehicle and making sure we have at that point before we go for the trans-zero injection redundancy to survivability. So if we are down to our last system that's keeping us alive, we won't leave Earth orbit.

21:14We'll probably do another turnaround in this one-day orbit and then come back in a case like that. So things that would cause us not to go That would be like a loss of redundancy on our carbon dioxide removal system, a loss of redundancy in our propellant systems. Maybe we bled out some of our propellant and we're down to the last string of thrusters, for example, or engines that can bring us back safely to Earth. And those are the kinds of things that the ground will look at with us and then make a decision that we have the redundancy for an eight day mission. Because like you said, Tim, once you accelerate to 39 times the speed of sound, you're going somewhere.

21:57You're going far. And you don't have the energy to just, you know, you can't just do a U-turn and come home right away. There are some off-ramps that we can try, but even those are not quick. And they're dangerous in that they are major, major burns. There's a lot of risk in trying to turn around. And a lot of ways it's safer to do what Apollo 13 did with their malfunction is to ride it out for the whole trip around the moon. And so, yeah, once we make that decision, we've taken on a lot of risk. Yeah, I was going to ask about that, actually. I mean, it's not quite a point of no return. I mean, yes, a return, because you're using the gravity of the moon to bring you back round again.

22:35But it does become really hard to get home quickly after that. It really does. Yeah, the best you can do, if right away after you burn to head to the moon, right away you decide to come home. You can maybe get home in a day. But as the hours tick by after you accelerate to Mach 39, it's many days before you can get home. And in a lot of cases, better to just go around the moon and come back. Do you think that you'll have a moment to pause and think about the enormity of this all? I mean, is it going to be when you're close up with the moon or is it going to be when you're safely back on Earth again at the end of your mission?

23:17Don't know, Becky. You'll have to ask me after. I've had glimpses of it. You are just so focused on the job as an operator, even in training. I think I do forget the enormity of what is about to occur. And then you protect yourself a little bit from it because, A, it hasn't happened. It's not done until it's done. And so I don't know when it'll hit me. I've had glimpses of it when people like you ask me and you ask questions like that and you put it that way. And I'm like, gosh, yeah, I guess you're right. But maybe when I get back and we're hugging each other as a crew, maybe it'll sink in. Then what has actually happened?

23:58And, you know, I'm glad you bring it up because it's just such a good opportunity to reflect on what has happened to bring us here. I know the four people will see the four faces, but gosh, everyone knows it takes thousands of people to make this happen. It's extraordinarily hard to send people to the moon. And we joke. And I know there are lots of non-believers about the Apollo program, but I'm a believer. I firmly believe we went to the moon in the Apollo days. But it does make you question because it's extraordinary what they did. It is literally just so hard. And we are facing those same challenges.

24:32It hasn't gotten any easier. Yes, we have better technology, but it's still really complicated. And so it takes a big team of people. And you just can't help but admire them. You see them toiling away and the solutions are coming up with and then they solve it. And then all of a sudden, if somebody realizes, no, what if this happens and now it's all broken again? And then they go, they solve it again. And it's just like this continuous cycle of people overcoming challenge. And it's really beautiful to watch what makes you proud of them and gives you hope.

25:05Thank you for listening to the interview. The BBC World Service's space podcast 13 Minutes will be following the Artemis mission with special daily episodes. Search for 13 Minutes Presents Artemis II, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. And for more compelling conversations, search for the interview. You'll find episodes from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally, Ukraine's President Vladimir Zelensky, plus many others. Until the next time, bye for now.