Canadian Dave Williams, who went to space twice and spent more than 17 hours outside the International Space Station on spacewalks, said Hansen being the first non-American on a lunar mission is another achievement for our country.
“This really means that Canada — [the] third country in the world to send satellites into space, second country in the world to send humans to the moon, and the first country in the world to build the world’s most complex space robot — [is] a major spacefaring nation, and proud of it,” he said from the Kennedy Space Center ahead of the launch.
Williams, who went on two space shuttle missions in 1998 and 2007, said those launches were already “the ride of a lifetime” — but the new spacecraft is even more powerful.
“You can only begin to imagine what this is like, going from being stationary, lying flat on your back, to travelling 25 times the speed of sound in eight-and-a-half minutes,” he said.
“And once you get to space, you float out of your seat, you pinch yourself, look out the window and go, ‘I guess I’m really an astronaut now.'”