NASA publishes the first photo of the far side of the Moon taken by the Artemis II mission

Together with the other three astronauts of the Artemis II mission, he passed the midpoint between the Earth and the Moon on Saturday morning, more than 241,000 kilometers from home.

They must carry out the first manned lunar flyby in more than half a century.

During the first hours aboard the Orion spacecraft, Jeremy Hansen, a 50-year-old former fighter pilot making his first trip to space, saw “extraordinary things.”

“By the time we took a short nap and got up, the Earth was already so far away,” said the astronaut, along with his American colleagues Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman, during a question and answer session organized by the Canadian Space Agency (ASC).

Jeremy Hansen spoke after the translunar injection, a propulsion maneuver that takes Orion to fly less than 200 kilometers around the Earth before heading to the Moon.

“I had the feeling that we were falling from the sky towards Earth, and I said to Reid: ‘It looks like we’re going to crash into it,’” the astronaut explained.

“It’s incredible. We actually dodged it (…). It was so close (…). It was really phenomenal,” Hansen added.

The astronaut, who joined the ASC in 2009 after a career as a fighter pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force, will be the first non-American to fly around the Moon.

Orion’s next stage, scheduled for the fifth day of this ten-day mission, will be to enter the lunar sphere of influence, where the Moon’s gravitational pull exceeds that of the Earth, according to NASA.

Jeremy Hansen is eager to see the far side of the Moon up close and observe “an eclipse of the Sun.”

Asked about the advice he would give to the new generations, this father of three urged the youngest to “follow their passions, but also to share their passions with others.”

“To achieve great things like what we are doing in this capsule, traveling to the Moon, flying around the Moon, you need a great team behind you. And that goes for all of us in our lives,” he declared. “Behind the Moon, which is going to be really cool.”