CANADIAN ASTRONAUTS ''OVER THE MOON'' ABOUT GOING AROUND IT
Dec 16, 2020
By Bob Komsic
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Ottawa and Washington have an agreement that will send a Canadian astronaut around the moon.
The trip, planned for 2023, is part of a bigger, American effort to establish a new international space station above the lunar surface to allow for exploration of the moon and future missions to Mars.
The ‘Gateway Treaty’ also calls for a second flight for a Canadian astronaut to that space station, known as the ‘Lunar Gateway.’
The trip, the first crewed mission to the moon since the Apollo missions, will not include a landing.
It has not been decided which of the four current Canadian astronauts will go.
Astronaut Joshua Kutryk says he and his colleagues are ”over-the-moon excited.”
(left to right – Joshua Kutryk, Jennifer Sidey-Gibbons, David Saint-Jacques, Jeremy Hansen)
While Ottawa has not said how much the flight will cost, it recently committed nearly $23-million to the first phase of developing Canadarm 3; a new robotic arm that’ll be used on the moon station.