The Leader of NASA’s Artemis II Mission Is Still Moonstruck
Last month, for the first time in more than fifty years, four astronauts made a return flight to the Moon. Their mission, Artemis II, was a test for future projects, including the construction of a NASA base on the lunar surface. Reid Wiseman, a former US naval aviator who served as mission commander, told me the trip made him think of the Apollo astronauts of the 1960s. “I wonder if they were a little scared, because I’m a little scared,” he remembers thinking. “I bet they were.” NASAHumanity’s most powerful rocket propelled them more than a quarter of a million miles into space – further than anyone has ever traveled from Earth – and Earth’s gravity brought them home.
Wiseman and I met at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. At fifty, he was fit and disarmingly serious, wearing a blue astronaut suit over a pair of leather cowboy boots. He won 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’s chief astronaut, a terrestrial role that allowed him to raise two teenage 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 Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
Wiseman, his fellow crew members and their NASA my colleagues essentially had to write their own how-to manual for 21st century lunar missions. But they sometimes wondered if they would ever be able to use it. In the 1990s and 2000s, NASAPlans to return to the Moon have been canceled due to anemic budgets. “We weren’t a hundred percent sure if the nation was going to stay engaged,” he told me. “We spent a lot of time in Washington, DC,” I asked him when he realized the mission had launched. “When the solid rocket motors ignited,” he told me. “That’s when we knew we were going to the moon.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about the moment you were cast in Artemis II. It seems like it was as much a moment of reflection as it was of joy.
It was also an embarrassing moment. My team and I didn’t know this was what was going to happen. We had all these meetings on our calendar. I completely ignored this meeting with the chief astronaut because I thought it was something entirely different. I was in town for a medical appointment. My boss at the time texts me, “Hey, I really think you should be in this meeting right now. We’re twenty minutes in and we miss you.” I connected via 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.
You don’t feel like you’ve won the lottery. You don’t want to jump for joy. You just think, Whoa, this is going to be a lot of work. This is going to be a very intense situation.
What did your selection mean to you as a single father? How did your daughters receive the news?
Before the official announcement, we had about two weeks to find out. I had talked to my children about what I would be willing to do as an astronaut. I wouldn’t go back to the space station until they were in college. And if there was an opportunity to do an Artemis mission – we call them short duration, although it certainly didn’t seem like a short duration – I would be interested.
No child wants their only parent to do that. I felt a little selfish. I also felt like this was a crew and mission that would be really rewarding in the end. I talked to my kids about it: “This is something I’d like to do and I know it’s going to be hard for you. » The next day, my oldest daughter made moon cupcakes and my youngest daughter was on board. She continued to check FamousBirthdays.com. She says, “Dad, you went from #80,000 to #50,000 in famous birthdays. » She was happy about it. [Wiseman has now surpassed No. 6,500 on Famous Birthdays.]
Later, on the seventh day of the mission, I had a video chat with both of them. That was the day I could tell, by the way they looked at me and spoke to me, that they understood why I had said yes three years earlier. They understood the weight of this mission.
Help me understand how you integrate training with the rest of your life. Is it about twelve hours of emergency scenarios, and then you help your kids with their math homework?
This seems fair. About a year before launch, in April 2025, we started to calm down our lives. We stopped many public appearances. Even if friends were going to do something, with very small exceptions, I started saying no. At Johnson Space Center, we worked about eight hours a day. It was a pretty respectful schedule. We usually had Saturdays and Sundays off, although as we prepared for the mission, we usually volunteered on Sundays. One girl is in college, one girl is in high school. I was very open with them: if you need help, it will have to come from tutors, from teachers, from friends. It just won’t come from us.
In some ways, they are much further along today than they would have been if I had been there, helping them through this. A little bit of that makes me feel guilty for not being there. I couldn’t have done that if they were six or eight years old. For many years, I didn’t fly into space because I was a single parent. It just wasn’t an option for me. I think that in the end, they gave a lot of themselves for this mission. I’m very proud of them for doing this.
