Jeremy Hansen praised for speaking French in space after Air Canada chief’s linguistic snub exposed tensions and drew rebuke from PM
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ew people foresaw humanity’s quest for the moon as accurately as the 19th-century French author Jules Verne, whose two works –From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon – anticipated many of the features of modern lunar exploration.
But Verne’s language had never been spoken in deep space until the Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen uttered four words during Nasa’s recent Artemis II mission.
On day three of the mission, as the Integrity spacecraft hurtled towards the moon, Jeremy Hansen turned to a camera. “Bonjour tout le monde,” he said from nearly 125,000 miles away – a greeting with a literal translation that captured the immensity of the journey: hello all of the world.
