Why Is a Canadian Going to the Moon on Artemis II?

The recent announcement of the crew for NASA’s upcoming Artemis II mission in Houston, Texas, featured a major role for Canada. Introduced with NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch was Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen. The four astronauts are scheduled to test the Orion spacecraft in high Earth orbit, then make a loop around the Moon—becoming the first human beings to venture into deep space since the Apollo 17 astronauts in December 1972. It is an honor to be selected for this crew, so why would a United States agency give up one of the seats to a Canadian?

Part of the answer is simply that Artemis, which aims to establish a permanent human presence on and around the Moon, is an international project. Like the International Space Station (ISS) and the Space Shuttle, the United States invited multi-national participation at the outset of the Artemis Program. That policy goes back to the Nixon Administration in 1969 and 1970. In the wake of the triumphant Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, Richard Nixon was happy to use that success to boost America’s international image, which was battered by the Vietnam War. But he was not interested in supporting NASA’s grand plans for a space station and human exploration of the Moon and Mars. His attitude reflected the majority opinion of the American public, which had never enthusiastically supported spending billions on Apollo and fairly quickly lost interest after the first landing. Nixon sought a post-Apollo human spaceflight program that was economical. In the end, his administration supported the development of a space shuttle that was supposed to dramatically lower the cost of launching payloads and humans into orbit (it never did). Another way to save money, and pursue foreign policy goals, was to invite allies to participate. Western Europe, through the European Space Agency (ESA), would develop Spacelab modules and related equipment to be carried in the payload bay of the shuttle. Canada offered an articulated Remote Manipulator System (known north of the border as the Canadarm) for handling payloads in the bay. Following that model, in the 1980s the Reagan Administration invited participation in the Space Station Freedom project. ESA and Japan promised laboratory modules, while Canada would develop Canadarm 2 for the station. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Freedom became ISS, incorporating Russian modules and crew transport. It effectively became a joint American-Russian station with contributions by the other nations.
 

Artemis had a long and winding path to approval as a Moon landing program, reflecting American political indecision about what should follow the Space Shuttle and ISS. Thanks to congressional intervention in 2010, NASA continued to develop the giant Space Launch System (SLS) booster and the Orion spacecraft for human deep space missions, but Artemis only acquired that name, and an accelerated lunar landing goal, during the Trump Administration. In 2019, the Russian Space Agency chief announced that Russia would not participate in Artemis, reflecting deteriorating relations with the United States. But the next year, CSA promised a Canadarm 3 for the small, lunar-orbiting station called the Gateway that will support surface exploration. Following that, Europe and Japan committed to developing modules for the station. ESA, through its contractor Airbus, had already begun building European Service Modules for the Orion crew vehicle, based on a cargo transport ESA had launched to the ISS. Crew positions would be allocated to non-American astronauts in proportion to the money the agencies were spending on the program—the same deal in place for the ISS.

Based on being the first nation to commit to the U.S. Artemis program, CSA requested, and NASA agreed, that a Canadian astronaut be included on the first crewed mission, Artemis II. The completely successful flight of Artemis I in November and December 2022 paved the path to a public crew announcement on April 3, 2023. Col. Jeremy Hansen, an experienced F-18 fighter pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force, has been a Canadian astronaut since 2009. Based in Houston, Texas, he has participated in European and American cave and undersea experiments simulating isolated space habitats. In 2017, he became the first Canadian to lead the training of a new astronaut class. He has not flown in space previously, as Canada has an ISS crew slot only every five or six years, given its relatively small monetary contribution to that program.  
Hansen will certainly not be the last non-American astronaut to go to the Moon. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a European crewmember on Artemis III, which is scheduled for the end of 2025 (2026 is more likely). Two of those four astronauts will descend to the surface in a version of the SpaceX Starship spacecraft. Those two will likely be American, but European, Japanese, and Canadian astronauts will eventually land too. China is pursuing its own lunar program, with some level of cooperation with Russia. Deep space human exploration is simply too expensive to make standalone national programs likely any longer. The Moon will become a multi-national destination, albeit one still divided by rivalries imported from Earth.

Michael J. Neufeld recently retired as a Senior Curator in the Space History Department. A native of Canada, he was the lead curator of the Destination Moon gallery.