Jeremy Roger Hansen was born in London, Ontario, in 1976, and raised on a family farm near Ailsa Craig — dairy cows, early hours, quiet mornings.

At twelve, he joined the 614 Royal Canadian Air Cadet Squadron in London. At sixteen, he earned his Air Cadet glider pilot wings in Trenton.

When Hansen was in his mid-teens, his family moved to Ingersoll, Ontario. He graduated from Ingersoll District Collegiate Institute — and Ingersoll is the town he still calls home.

To the Air Force.

From cadets, Hansen went to the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston and earned a degree in space science. He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, trained as a CF-18 fighter pilot, and served operationally through the 2000s.

By 2009, he was a captain and had a master’s degree in physics.

That was the year the Canadian Space Agency called.

To the CSA.

Hansen was one of two Canadians selected in the CSA’s 2009 astronaut class. The other was David Saint-Jacques. The two men trained together at Johnson Space Center in Houston for nearly a decade.

Hansen served as a Capcom — the astronaut who talks to space-station crews from Mission Control. He commanded NASA underwater training missions. He became the first Canadian ever to be entrusted with training a class of American astronauts.

In April 2023, NASA and the CSA announced the crew of Artemis II — the first crewed lunar mission since 1972. Hansen was on it.

To the Moon.

Artemis II launched on April 1, 2026. Four astronauts. One Orion spacecraft. Six days.

On April 6, 2026, Hansen and his crew flew around the far side of the Moon and back — the first human beings to reach lunar vicinity in over fifty years, and the farthest anyone has ever travelled from Earth. 252,756 miles.

No non-American had ever gone that far before.

They splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on April 10.

Canada was in celebration.

Home to Ingersoll.

In June, Hansen came home.

The Ingersoll Public Library had put up a display in his honour. Staff say space books have been flying off the shelves since the display went up. Kids come in every week to look.

Mayor Brian Petrie put it plainly. “It’s still a little unbelievable that someone from our town is at this level.”

CBC News summed it up in a headline: “From our little town to the moon.”

What comes next.

In July 2026, Hansen announced he would step down from active CSA astronaut training in September, to work on “creative, ongoing ways to support and enable the vital work happening in Canada with respect to space.”

The Canada he now supports has more space cadets than it did a year ago.

Many of them are in Ingersoll.

Photo: Flickr, NASA Johnson, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0