What's your job?: Jeremy Hansen; astronaut, fighter pilot, ocean explorer

Jeremy Hansen’s career as an astronaut was determined early on in life.

As a child growing up in on a farm in southern Ontario, he would look up at the moon in the dark night sky and imagine the day he, too, would fly into space.

“That had a profound effect on me,” Hansen (no relation) said in an interview from Houston, Texas where he lives and trains as an elite member of the Canadian Space Agency.

“From that point forward I was looking in my school library for books on space and it was all about building bases on other planets and travelling to other planets. I thought, ‘That is what I am going to do some day.’,” he said.

Hansen, 38 and a CF18 fighter pilot in the Canadian Air Force, has yet to head into space. But he did recently surface from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean where he spent seven days living in tight quarters alongside members of NASA’s Extreme Environment Mission Operations 19 (known by the acronym NEEMO 19). The deep-sea voyage was an opportunity for the six-person crew to simulate an actual space mission and explore the ocean floor as it were an asteroid or surface of Mars.

It was a highlight in a career rife with impressive accomplishments. Hansen is one of just two active Canadian astronauts with the Canadian Space Agency. He won the spot in 2009 after beating out more than 5,000 qualified applicants.

While waiting for his turn to head into space, he’s studying robotics, brushing up on his Russian and learning to Tweet on a par with celestial superstar Chris Hadfield. (You know, that other Canadian pilot who made history in 2013 when he took over command of the International Space Station and wooed us all with his other-worldly rendition of David Bowie’s Major Tom.)

Can Hansen match that magic? He’s game to try. We recently caught up with @astro_jeremy to get his take on space travel and why he’s so eager to explore the final frontier.

Let’s talk about your most recent experience with the NEEMO Project. You just surfaced after spending seven days with five others living 20 metres under the ocean off Florida. What was that like?

It was an incredible life experience for me. It’s an extreme-environments mission where you take a group, in this case six individuals, and you live in basically a tin can on the ocean floor for seven days and during those seven days you simulate a space mission.

What was the objective?

One of the things we were trying to understand was how a communications delay will effect exploration. We know that as we get farther into space exploration and we get out to, let’s say, an asteroid or, eventually, to mars, we’re going to have delays on the order of five to 10 minutes each way. We still want to be effective in how we communicate. We actually had it all simulated so that all our communications were delayed five minutes each way and then we would go out on these space walks on the ocean floor and execute science objectives while the ground control would watch it five minutes later and give us inputs and we would try and effectively integrate it. I learned tons about preparing to go to space.  

What was it like to live underwater for a week?

It was incredible. We had these great port windows and you are sitting there eating on the ocean floor and the fish are coming by and they are looking at you and you are looking at them. Then, you go on these amazing space walks. We did a night dive just to take it all in. Seven days was not long enough.

Can you describe the habitat you were living in?

It’s about 15 metres long and three metres in diameter but it is filled up with equipment and so imagine a submarine where there is one narrow passageway in the middle and if two people try and pass, you both have to turn sideways. Personal space? There is really none. There is a very small bunk, three high and small in volume. You are living in very close quarters to one another, which is another great simulation. It was another great opportunity for us to just practice working together.

What was your role in NEEMO?

My responsibility was the exploration lead. Specifically, the simulated space walks and making sure that we understood the objectives that ground control had laid out for us so that we could autonomously operate. When you have a communications delay like that, you can’t wait 10 minutes to make a decision.

Did you come away with any valuable insights?

What I really take away from it is the spirit of exploration and how much that motivates me, how excited I get about going someplace new and seeing it with my own eyes and trying to share that with other people and capture that feeling and pass it along so that they can experience it as well. The sense of going exploring is absolutely incredible for me.

You were a pilot with the Canadian air force before you were an astronaut. Do those roles overlap?

I am still a regular force member. It is one of the really neat aspects of my job because I still fly the CF18 with the RCAF on a semi-regular basis. I spend about four weeks a year flying the CF18, which is a really great training for me. It’s an opportunity to stay safe and confident in the aircraft and make a contribution back to the fighter community. But I am on loan to the Canadian Space Agency and have been for the last five years.

Is space travel something you’ve thought about since you were a kid?

Yes, it captured my imagination when I was quite young. Certainly in elementary school I really had the idea that I wanted to fly in space when I grew up. Obviously I didn’t know what that meant. I used to spend a lot of time reading the encyclopedia. I was really interested in airplanes and I wanted to fly and had never been able to go flying. One time I stumbled across Neil Armstrong and saw this picture of him standing on the moon. It wasn’t lost on me. I read the article and thought, ‘Wow. That is incredible. Human beings went to the moon.’

Did your family think it was nuts that you wanted to be an astronaut?

I don’t remember anyone telling me it was nuts, which was kind of neat. I’m sure everyone knew it wasn’t likely and I think for a long time it wasn’t even really well understood how I would do that. But no one ever told me I couldn’t do it.

What made you think you could?

As I was growing up I was seeing examples of Canadians flying in space. Marc Garneau and, eventually Chris Hadfield. [Hadfield] became a prominent mentor for me. He followed the exact path that I was passionate about. I wanted to fly fighter jets and he flew fighter jets. He was flying in space while I was going to Royal Military Colleague in Kingston and I had the opportunity to speak with him on a number of occasions and I thought, ‘Okay, this really is possible. Here are some the things I am going to need to do to prepare myself.’ There is one other important aspect. It was really my father who pushed me in that direction. I really wanted to fly. So, at the age of 12, he’d heard about the air cadets and he came to me and said, ‘They’ll teach you how to fly and it’s all free’, because it wasn’t something that we could really afford. So I joined air cadets and it opened all the doors for me. I was a pretty shy farm kid and air cadets put me way outside my comfort zone on a number of levels -- Leadership, standing in front of crowds speaking, teaching – all kinds of things that I wasn’t very comfortable doing, but I was willing to do it if they were going to let me fly.

My only contact with space, like most people, is through the movies. Space travel makes me think of Apollo 13 – you know, where a small team is forced through a life-and-death situation to work together to survive. Is that the kind of attitude you look for in an astronaut?

Absolutely. When things are going really poorly, and you are not sure you are going to survive, it’s a matter of how you are going to react. Are you going to curl up in the corner sulking or are you going to be actively trying to solve the problem, even if you are not sure you are going to make it? That is the kind of skill set we are looking for. Who are the types of people who are trained to do certain steps and they are going to keep plugging away at those steps until the very end. That is the kind of person you want to fly in space with.

Chris Hadfield has really raised the bar on the kind of communication that is possible from space. How do you live up to that?

Chris’s message has always been work your hardest, do your best, set goals, follow those dreams and just be yourself. That is one of the great things about Chris. The Chris you see publicly is the real Chris. The one thing I take from Chris is just be willing to share the real you, what you really feel, what you are really experiencing. Be satisfied with that.

How comfortable are you with social media?

Social media is something the CSA definitely embraced as a method to try and share the experiences that we have and educate Canadians on what we are doing in the space program. It’s just part of the job now. It’s one more thing you have to learn to fit into your day and to try and get better at. For me this is not something that comes naturally. I have a very military background -- hide all your emotions and just get the job done. Now I need to step back sometimes and say, ‘Okay, I need to share how this experience touches me.’ That is something different for me.

You are married and have three children. What do your kids think of dad ‘The Astronaut’?

It is your family that makes you the most humble. My kids go to school with a bunch of kids who have parents who are astronauts, so, for them, it is very common place and not really all that exciting. Though every once in a while something will capture their imagination. I had the opportunity to share this last mission with them because we had such great connectivity under the water. I could actually video chat with them and show them the fish outside and where we were living and that was really fun.

When do you hope to go to space? I understand there is no Canadian space travel plans until 2017. Is that correct?

We don’t have any missions assigned to a Canadian astronaut right now and this is very standard. We have many Canadian astronauts who have waited many years to fly in space. We know the plan is to fly  (fellow Canadian astronaut David St. Jacques) and I at some time in the future and that is pretty exciting. I enjoy the job I am doing now even though I am not flying in space. Knowing that I will some day is really motivating to me.

Do you know what you will fly in when you do go to space?

We anticipate having the International Space Station for many, many more years and so I would anticipate my mission would be to the ISS and supporting that operation in some capacity.

You talked about landing on an asteroid or heading to Mars. Is that a possibility within your lifetime?

For sure it is. My personal feeling is that I will see a Canadian walk on Mars in my lifetime. I have a feeling that it will be after my career is over. But I feel like I have a great opportunity to be part of preparing for taking humans beyond the earth orbit again. I suspect there will be missions where we go to shorter destinations short of the surface of mars, maybe a Martian moon or an asteroid, I think those could very likely be within my career timeframe and I would love to be a part of that.

Why is space so exciting? Is it simply because it’s unexplored?

We don’t know what we are going to find and it pushes the envelope. We have many great minds, people who do amazing things, but when we come up with a common goal, something that is really hard and really challenging to do and we bring a whole bunch of great minds together, we accomplish way more than the sum of what we would accomplish individually. From these great challenges come great rewards and, often, the most amazing things we learn are the things we never thought about before. That is what excites me about exploring new places.