The Leader of NASA’s Artemis II Mission Is Still Moonstruck
Key takeaways
- Their mission, Artemis II, was a test run for future endeavors, including the construction of a NASA base on the lunar surface.
- Wiseman and I met at the Johnson Space Center, in Houston, Texas.
- Wiseman, his fellow crew members, and their NASA colleagues essentially had to write their own how-to manual for twenty-first-century lunar missions.
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’s commander, told me that the journey made him think about the Apollo astronauts of the nineteen-sixties. “I wonder if they were a little bit scared, because I’m a little bit scared,” he remembered thinking. “I bet they were.” NASA’s most powerful rocket hurled them more than a quarter-million miles into space—farther than anyone has travelled from Earth—and Earth’s gravity brought them home.
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’s 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.
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’s plans to return to the moon were cancelled owing to anemic budgets. “We weren’t a hundred-per-cent sure if the nation was going to remain committed,” he told me. “We spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C.” I asked him when he realized that the mission was a go. “When the solid-rocket motors lit,” he told me. “That was when we knew we were going to the moon.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.