Hans Henken is the SailGP star who wants to become an astronaut: ‘I still have those aspirations'

New York Times

3 days ago

Shooting for the stars and achieving the extraordinary is nothing new for elite athletes who reach the pinnacle of any sport.
Hans Henken is one of the world's finest sailors; an Olympic medalist last year, a member of the U.S. SailGP team, and a Rolex Yachtsman of the Year. But he is a man whose ambitions aren't restricted to sea level.
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'If you ask a five-year-old what they want to do when they grow up, everyone says they want to become an astronaut. I still have those aspirations,' the 33-year-old Californian tells The Athletic over the phone from his home in Long Beach, south of Los Angeles, ahead of this weekend's SailGP Grand Prix in Germany.
Henken's is not an idle dream. The Stanford University graduate has a Master of Science and Bachelor of Science in aeronautical and astronautical engineering.
'I was really drawn to it, obviously, because of my childhood dream, and the astronautical engineering is one of many prerequisites that NASA looks for in terms of their application process,' Henken says. 'Part of me just wants to work on really challenging projects that require the nth degree of precision. And I think there's nothing more precise than trying to build a rocket that goes into space.'
For now, however, his focus is on the current Rolex SailGP season, a high-octane close-to-shore championship, and improving his U.S. team's fortunes.
The current campaign has proven heavy going for driver Taylor Canfield, team boss and strategist Mike Buckley and the rest of the crew. After a promising third place at the first event in Dubai last November, the Americans have struggled and are currently last in the 12-team standings.
In the six-member crew, Henken is the flight controller, managing the ride height of the boat above the water, aiming to avoid any costly nosedives or crashes. He has in the past likened it to being a soccer goalkeeper, given that there is nowhere to hide if things go wrong.
Team USA constantly reminds fans they are all working hard to get better. They have access to the Red Bull Athlete Performance Center in Santa Monica, California, where its personnel spend time going through physical and mental training programs, as well as picking up ideas from athletes in other sports.
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'I still go, minimum, once a week,' says Henken, who, along with teammate Ian Barrows, won America's sole sailing medal at the Paris Olympics last year.
'It's a bit of a long drive from my place in Long Beach, but the coolest thing about Red Bull is the diversity of their athletes and the diversity of sports. I've been asking some of the extreme-sports athletes how they train for whatever crazy thing they do, and they're like, 'Oh, we don't do a lot of training physically. We do a lot of visualization, because you only get one go at it.'
'In things like skydiving or base jumping, they only do it so often, so they have to use a lot of visualization techniques. I think there's a lot to pull from that kind of mentality and put it towards SailGP because we have a similar challenge of minimal training time.'
The main question the team has to answer is how to raise performance levels when practice time is so limited.
The Americans are experiencing a level of publicity and scrutiny that sailors haven't previously experienced and would probably rather do their learning away from the spotlight, but there's no avoiding it because the one thing they severely lack is time on their F50 catamarans.
There's no other boat that prepares you for the high-tech, foiling F50 than the F50 itself. Access is generally limited to just one practice day before each two-day race weekend. With 12 events across the current season, plus a few extra training days, it adds up to just 42 days. 'We're talking 24 race days plus a training day before each event, plus a few extra, so you probably get 18 training days,' Henken said.
The lack of training time stands in stark contrast to Henken's decade on the Olympic trail. A bronze medalist in the men's skiff competition at Paris 2024, he has taken time away from that scene to focus on SailGP, a relative newcomer in sailing in its fifth season, and is weighing up whether to compete on home waters in Los Angeles at the 2028 Games.
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'We campaigned for multiple years, spending over 250 days per year on the water to go racing for five days at the Olympics,' he says. 'Here in SailGP, we don't count days on the water, we count minutes on the water. It literally is 'Minutes matter', and if we're getting an extra 20, or even just 10, minutes at the end of a day, it really goes a long way towards learning new things about performance.'
With the bulk of their time on the F50 spent racing in the heat of battle, there is little option but to try new ideas and test the limits while going full bore at up to 50 knots, side by side alongside 11 rivals.
Ahead of the New York Grand Prix in June, Henken talked about using that time to 'push the envelope on performance.'
'If you're never pushing to what you think the limit is, you're just gonna get passed by boats,' he said.
'You might be beating another team because they're pushing the limits and crashing, while you're keeping it safe and consistent. You might be beating them for the first three events, but by event five, six, seven, or maybe even the next season, at some point, they're going to go past you.
'Because the time frame's so short, you have to make rapid decisions really, really quickly on how you're going to utilize that time. If you don't do it that way, you end up spending too much time not exploring your options. And then you kind of get stuck in a No-Man's Land of not really committing to one process or another, and you never really quite find out if it was a performance gain or not.'
Current leaders of Season 5 are the New Zealanders, led by driver Pete Burling and his wing trimmer and long-time sidekick Blair Tuke.
Together they won three Olympic medals in the 49er skiff, including gold at Rio 2016, and have helped win the past three America's Cups for their country. They are the hottest properties in sailing, but Henken points out that for all their undoubted prowess, even Burling and Tuke have had to serve their apprenticeship in SailGP.
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'Pete and Blair are the duo that everyone wants to be. Everyone wants to be exactly who they are because they are winning at the highest level and everything that they do,' says Henken, recalling the New Zealanders' difficult start in SailGP.
'They come into the league in Season Two. They push the envelope, they're learning the boat. They're not winning events. But by Season Three, Season Four, all of a sudden, they've figured it out. They've pushed hard, and they've used that time and training at every regatta to be able to find that.
'I think right now, our team is basically trying to find what that (winning formula) is in racing, and it's really, really challenging.'
For Henken and his teammates, the next opportunity to test their progress comes this weekend in Sassnitz, a town on northern Germany's Baltic Sea coast.
Some crew changes are in the offing for the eighth event of the 2025 season, and even Henken did not know if he would be on the boat this time.
'I imagine that will probably be announced about five minutes before the first race… We've been doing a lot of rotation (in training), a lot of changes. Not one person has been on the boat all day long,' he says. 'We're going to wake up on Saturday, the roster is going to get filled out, that's going to be the A team and they're going to go racing.'
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