Last month, for the first time in more than fifty years, four astronauts flew to the moon and back. Their mission, Artemis II, was a test run for future endeavors, including the construction of a NASA base on the lunar surface. Reid Wiseman, a former U.S. Naval aviator who served as the mission\u2019s commander, told me that the journey made him think about the Apollo astronauts of the nineteen-sixties. \u201cI wonder if they were a little bit scared, because I\u2019m a little bit scared,\u201d he remembered thinking. \u201cI bet they were.\u201d NASA\u2019s most powerful rocket hurled them more than a quarter-million miles into space\u2014farther than anyone has travelled from Earth\u2014and Earth\u2019s gravity brought them home.<\/p>\n
Wiseman and I met at the Johnson Space Center, in Houston, Texas. At fifty years old, he was fit and disarmingly earnest, wearing a blue astronaut jumpsuit over a pair of leather cowboy boots. He earned his NASA astronaut wings in 2011, before completing a six-month mission on the International Space Station. In 2020, his wife, Carroll, a nurse, died of cancer. He spent two years as the nation\u2019s chief astronaut, an earthbound role that allowed him to raise two teen-age daughters. Then, in 2023, NASA chose him to command Artemis II. He would work alongside a pilot, Victor Glover, and two mission specialists, Christina Koch and the Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.<\/p>\n
Wiseman, his fellow crew members, and their NASA colleagues essentially had to write their own how-to manual for twenty-first-century lunar missions. But they sometimes wondered if they would ever have a chance to use it. In the nineteen-nineties and the two-thousands, NASA\u2019s plans to return to the moon were cancelled owing to anemic budgets. \u201cWe weren\u2019t a hundred-per-cent sure if the nation was going to remain committed,\u201d he told me. \u201cWe spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C.\u201d I asked him when he realized that the mission was a go. \u201cWhen the solid-rocket motors lit,\u201d he told me. \u201cThat was when we knew we were going to the moon.\u201d Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n
Tell me about the moment you were selected for Artemis II. It sounds like it was as much a sobering moment as it was a joyful one.<\/strong><\/p>\n It was also an embarrassing moment. My crew and I didn\u2019t know that\u2019s what was coming. We had all these meetings on our calendar. I just completely ignored this meeting with the chief astronaut because I thought it was about something totally different. I was downtown at a medical appointment. My boss at the time sends me a text: \u201cHey, I really think you should be in this meeting right now. We\u2019re twenty minutes into it, and we miss you.\u201d I tied in through Microsoft Teams. I just saw my bosses sitting there. I saw Victor and Christina sitting there. It turned out that they were both late as well.<\/p>\n You don\u2019t feel like you won the Lotto. You don\u2019t feel like jumping for joy. You just feel, like, Whoa, this is going to be a lot of work. This is going to be a very intense situation.<\/p>\n What did your selection mean for you as a single father? How did your daughters receive the news?<\/strong><\/p>\n Before the formal announcement came out, we had about two weeks where we knew. I had talked to my kids about what I would be willing to do as an astronaut. I would only go back to the space station when they were in college. And if there was an opportunity to do an Artemis mission\u2014we call them short durations, although it certainly didn\u2019t feel like a short duration\u2014I would be interested.<\/p>\n No kid wants their only parent to go do that. I felt a bit selfish. I also felt like this was a crew, and a mission, that would really be rewarding in the end. I talked to my kids about it: \u201cThis is something I would like to do, and I know it is going to be difficult for you.\u201d The next day, my older daughter made moon cupcakes, and my younger daughter was all on board. She kept checking FamousBirthdays.com. She\u2019s, like, \u201cDad, you went from No. 80,000 to No. 50,000 on Famous Birthdays.\u201d She was happy with that. [Wiseman has now surpassed No. 6,500 on Famous Birthdays.]<\/p>\n Later, on the seventh day of the mission, I did a video chat with both of them. That was the day where I could tell, in the way they were looking at me and talking to me, that they understood why I\u2019d said yes three years earlier. They understood the weight of this mission.<\/p>\n Help me understand how you fit training into the rest of your life. Is it, like, twelve hours of emergency scenarios\u2014and then you\u2019re helping your kids with their math homework?<\/strong><\/p>\n That sounds about right. About a year prior to launch\u2014April of 2025\u2014we started to quiet down our lives. We stopped a lot of the public appearances. Even if friends were going and doing something, with very small exceptions, I started saying no. At the Johnson Space Center, we were working about eight hours a day. It was a fairly respectful schedule. We usually had Saturday and Sunday off, although as we geared up toward the mission, we were generally working voluntarily on Sundays. One daughter is in college, one daughter is in high school. I was very open with them: If you need help, it\u2019s going to have to come from tutors, teachers, friends. It\u2019s just not going to come from home.<\/p>\n In some ways, they are so much further along now than they would have been if I were there, nurturing them through this. A little of that makes me feel guilty that I wasn\u2019t there. I could not have done this if they were six and eight. For many years, I didn\u2019t fly in space because I was an only parent. It just was not an option for me. I think, in the end, they gave a lot of themselves to this mission. I\u2019m very proud of them for doing that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last month, for the first time in more than fifty years, four astronauts flew to the moon and…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":818775,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[24],"tags":[13633,994,336870,159,783,7279,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-818774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-astronauts","tag-moon","tag-nasa-national-aeronautics-space-administration","tag-science","tag-space","tag-space-flight","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116629069328056067","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=818774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818774\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/818775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=818774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=818774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=818774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}