While it may look like an ordinary class, these students are part of Royal Military College’s physics and space science program, and earlier this month a graduate of that same program, Col. Jeremy Hansen, was tapped to join NASA’s Artemis II mission to the moon.
“It’s historic, obviously — (the) first non-American to go up towards the moon and orbit around it — so we’re very excited about that and we’re very proud of Jeremy Hansen,” said RMC professor Ron Vincent.
RMC grad student Stefan Tarla said Hansen’s new mission is inspiring. “It’s almost kind of surreal, having gone here in undergrad looking to follow a pretty similar path to a lot of the Canadian astronauts before me.”
However, Vincent says not everyone who comes to the physics and space science program has their eyes set on the cosmos.
“We teach them satellite systems, we teach them orbital mechanics, we teach them remote sensing. There’s also something called space weather,” he said.
And while there is a lot of bookwork and study time, the students do get to break away and test their mettle.
“I was able to help …. learn how to build and then launch a small rocket, and I thought that was so cool,” RMC officer cadet Chloe Hataley said.
Both Tarla and Hataley say the possibility of going to space is exciting, but it’s not necessarily their only focus.
“There’s a wide variety of things. I haven’t made a concrete decision based on the opportunities currently presented to me,” Tarla said.
“Maybe (I’ll) be involved in launching things, maybe the equivalent of working at NASA or something,” Hataley said.
Col. Hansen is just one example that shows space isn’t as far away as it seems.
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