With Integrity

In 1990, the Milky Way Galaxy was 13.61 billion years old, and I was eight. My family lived on a dairy farm far away from significant light pollution, so my views of the ancient heavens were sweeping and brilliant, with shooting stars a regular feature of the nighttime sky.

Four years after the Challenger disaster, NASA was once again launching space shuttles from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and in my grade 2 classroom, we watched footage of Discovery lifting off with the Hubble Space Telescope on board. The crew of five astronauts soared 621 kilometres above the earth — the highest a shuttle would ever fly. Two months later, we learned the cutting-edge telescope had a cataract, but I was still mesmerized by its initial glimpses of distant constellations, however blurry.

Lego released its first space shuttle in 1990. The 392-piece set included an astronaut minifigure, as well as two technicians and a transfer vehicle, complete with NASA’s worm logo. After clearing the red service tower, the orbiter could open its payload bay doors to reveal a miniaturized telescope, not exactly Hubble but close enough.

The problem with the Lego shuttle was that my older brother received it as a gift rather than me. He promptly dismantled the service tower and repurposed its parts for the large University of Nebraska football stadium he was building in the basement. I was deeply jealous and took my brother’s apparent disregard for that set as evidence of his limited imagination. (He would redeem himself much later, when he accepted a five-month internship at the Johnson Space Center, outside of Houston.)

It was in 1990 that Voyager 1 — launched thirteen years earlier and travelling at 61,000 kilometres per hour — looked back and snapped sixty pictures of the solar system it would one day leave. Among those shots was the last photograph that the space probe took of Earth, the pale blue dot that then inspired the title of a Carl Sagan bestseller.

A different Sagan book, Contact, eventually led me to major in English literature. I read his only novel, which was adapted as a Jodie Foster movie in 1997, around the same time that I finished a memoir by John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth and a bona fide hero as far as I was and am concerned. The one‑two combo made me realize that I probably wasn’t cut out to be an astronaut myself but that I could still visit distant worlds through books.

We saw arresting images of another blue dot in 1990, when Galileo zoomed past Venus on its way to Jupiter (where it was ultimately destroyed, intentionally, so as to not contaminate any of our largest neighbour’s 100-plus moons). Even with a malfunctioning camera, Galileo managed to transmit sixteen pictures from the “celestial billiard shot” that increased its speed to 142,800 kilometres per hour — the rough equivalent of a marathon every second.

Unbeknownst to me, as I stared upon those prairie skies and studied the remarkable space photography that filled my grandparents’ copies of National Geographic, the governor general of Canada was giving royal assent to the Canadian Space Agency Act in May 1990. Headquartered in Longueuil, Quebec, the new organization it created took the aspirational motto “Ad finem ultimum,” or “To the ultimate end.”

All these years later, Jeremy Hansen has personified that yearning, having become the first Canadian to leave low Earth orbit and one of four astronauts to go farther into space than anyone before them. On April 6, their reusable aluminum-lithium alloy Orion capsule flew around the far side of the moon, where they took their own incredible photographs, which will long transfix space enthusiasts young and old.

For ten straight days, one of us could barely take his eyes off the Canadian Space Agency’s Artemis II online tracker, with its trajectory maps and telemetry readings. I followed along as Hansen and his crewmates rested, as they woke to “Pink Pony Club” and “Under Pressure,” as they ate their meals and tested their new spacecraft, as they saw places and celestial marvels nobody had ever seen.

Artemis II, which splashed down on April 10, is a thing to celebrate. Although it may be a while before Hansen makes it back to his hometown of Ingersoll, Ontario, I look forward to learning of all the schools and parks and boulevards that will rightly be named in his honour — whether in that small city or elsewhere in Canada. He deserves a stamp, a commemorative coin, a bobblehead. I’ll happily collect them all.

Writing for Esquire in 2009, the journalist Chris Jones described the astronaut Don Pettit’s “six-year-old’s heart” and how the fifty-three-year-old “had never stopped believing in the things we used to believe in.” Even more now, we need wonders to behold, so that we might dream of a better tomorrow. At least today, Artemis II has renewed my starry-eyed faith.