Canadian astronaut’s bon mots help heal wounds from French language row

Jeremy Hansen sitting in a helicopter on the flight deck of a US navy ship after the Artemis crew were extracted from their Orion spacecraft. Photograph: NASA/Bill Ingalls/Reuters

Few 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.