Seeing the Dark Side of the Moon on NASA’s Artemis II Mission

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3:01I'm David Remnick. Well, I think hands down the feel-good news of the year, edging out even the Knicks run to the NBA Finals, was the NASA mission to the moon. You don't have to be a space nut or have a fixation on setting up a colony on Mars to get a kick out of American astronauts flying across the so-called dark side of the moon. NASA is, to say the least, in tumult, which is a long story. But still, the four crew members of Artemis II were the first humans ever to glimpse what we can never see from Earth. And that was something. David W. Brown writes for The New Yorker about space exploration.

3:40and he sat down recently with NASA's Reed Wiseman, the commander of the mission. Wiseman was a test pilot and a Navy captain, and he's now 50, which makes him the oldest person ever to travel beyond low Earth orbit.

3:58Tell 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. At first, it was an embarrassing moment because my crew and I didn't even know that that was what was coming that day. So we had all these fake meetings on our calendar, and I just completely ignored this meeting with the chief astronaut because I thought it was about something totally different. And I was downtown in a medical appointment, and my boss sends me a text. He's like, hey, I really think you should be tying into this meeting right now. We're 20 minutes into it, and we miss you.

4:27And I saw Victor and Christina sitting there, and I was like, oh, no, I've completely missed this. And it turned out that they were both late as well because they saw these meetings. but you don't feel like you won the lotto. You don't feel like jumping for joy. All of a sudden you just feel like, whoa, this is going to be a lot of work. What did your selection mean for you as a single father of two daughters? How did you tell your family and how did they receive it? No kid wants their dad to go do that when they're their only parent. So I felt a bit selfish, but I also felt like this was a crew and a mission that would really be rewarding in the end.

5:02So once I talked to my kids about this is something I would like to go do, and I know it is going to be difficult for you, but they immediately reframed it. And the next day, my older daughter made moon cupcakes, and my younger daughter was all on board. The seventh day of the mission, of this mission, of Artemis II, I did a video chat with both of them. And that was the day where I could tell in the way they were looking at me and in the way they were talking to me that they understood why I said yes three years earlier to go and fly this mission. What did that years-long path from selection through liftoff look like?

5:33I mean, how does one learn to go to the moon? It was very, very challenging. But it was challenging for a bunch of reasons that probably on the surface don't come out. It was, we weren't 100 % sure if the nation was going to remain committed. But the nation was very committed and our political infrastructure was very committed in the end. NASA has gone to the moon. We did it in the 60s and 70s. And you face this question a lot of, why haven't we done it since? And why is it so hard? and why is this taking so long? But we were just locked in with the flight control team and the launch control team and just training with them, developing procedures with them, going out to where the hardware is made, going out to all the Lockheed Martin facilities in Denver and working on all of the mission systems development, the flight software development.

6:15We're just, we are heads down and we are working hard. At what point during the training do you realize, if ever, no, this is really going to happen? When the solid rocket motors lit. That is when we knew we were going to the moon right there. And that is a great feeling. We were very confident. We had spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C. We saw there was very strong bipartisan support for human space exploration, for going out to the moon, and for continuing on, getting to Mars. We knew the support was there. Help me understand or imagine how you fit training into the rest of your life. Is it 12 hours of moon emergency scenarios and then you're helping your kids with their math homework?

6:59That sounds about right. About a year prior to launch, April of last year, April of 2025, we started to just quiet. We called it quieting down our lives. So we stopped with a lot of the public appearances. I stopped saying yes to just about everything, travel. Even if friends were going and doing something, with very small exceptions, I started saying no to all of that. So we're working very hard here at the Johnson Space Center. Usually we're working about eight hours a day. It was a fairly respectful schedule. We usually had Saturday and Sunday off, although as we geared up towards the mission, we were generally working voluntarily on Sundays.

7:32But I would work hard, and then one daughter's in college, one daughter's a junior and a senior in high school. And I was just very open with them as well that a lot of times you're on your own, and if you need help, it's going to have to come from tutors, teachers, friends. It's just not going to come from home. And in some ways, I look at them now, and they are so much further along than they would have been if I was there nurturing them through this. So a little of that makes me feel guilty that I wasn't there, but I also am incredibly proud of them for the way they showed up and they turned to.

8:02I could not have done that as an only parent if they were six and eight. And for many years, I didn't fly in space because I was an only parent when they were younger, and it just was not an option for me. But I think in the end, they gave a lot of themselves to this mission. I'm very proud of them for doing that. Your first mission in 2014 took you to the International Space Station for six months, I believe. I'm curious, how does that experience, both preparing for it and then actually doing it, how does that compare with Artemis? It was totally different. Space Station has been up there now for 26 years.

8:39We know how to fly to the Space Station. We fly new crews all the time, but the training is very regimented. You know exactly what you're going to do. and there was very little like novel learning on how to operate that machine. For us on Artemis II, from the very first second we got assigned back in April of 2023, everything was new. We did not know how to put humans on board the spacecraft. We didn't know how to live and work. We didn't know how to operate as four people going and doing this. Sometimes it was the crew unraveling those mysteries going, hey, that worked for when we have six months in space, but that isn't going to work when we have 10 days.

9:12And of that, the first four are like jam-packed with work. So we need to do things differently. So we almost had to unlearn some of the things that we learned on the space station. But in the operational side, we really had to change some of the fundamentals of how we operate. When you're flying to the moon, are you working until exhaustion every day, until splashdown? Is there space for your mind to drift? I'm curious, what kind of things do you think about on the way to the moon? I do remember my mind drifting for the first time on the eighth day of flight. When we were getting close to getting home and I started thinking about seeing my kids, And then I immediately had to stop that and say, nope, you do not have space for that right now.

9:45That is, you do not have space for that in your brain. So I would block that out and just focus back on the mission. The first five days, we were waking up and truly working. Just survival is an overstatement, but we were working the entire time until bed. And we were usually getting to bed about an hour later than we had hoped. Everything, when you're in that tiny spacecraft with four people, you're all over each other. Like, I feel like I'm close to you right now. But three weeks ago, I would have asked why we're so far away. You're just, you are constantly in contact with other humans. Just everything that is easy, it becomes hard.

10:17Just making lunch, like how do four people all make their food, all trying to work through and under and over each other. And if one person is exercising, now nothing else can happen in the cabin. And you never know what that spacecraft is going to throw at you a few minutes down the road. We had a full-on fire emergency on our next to last day in space. It was a false alarm, but like that stopped everything. That stopped all the electrical power. It stopped all the ventilation. And we were just sitting there with an emergency tone going off with a completely stagnant aircraft. No airflow. It was heating up.

10:49Like, you just got to be ready for anything that is going to come at any moment. When that sort of situation arises in such an unforgiving environment, do you get nervous? Do you push that aside? How do you train to prepare for something like that aside from flip this switch, tell this person this thing? Yeah, you're all human. So there's moments of terror. I won't use the word panic because there's really no, we did not ever panic, but there's moments where you feel that adrenaline hit hard. But I think that as long as you understand these emotions, these feelings that your body is presenting, I think those help you perform.

11:23Those bring you up a level to your A game. But what we do in the astronaut office is we just, we have a lot of exposure to, I would almost say scaring ourselves. We fly airplanes, we fly helicopters, we mountain climb. We dive to the bottom of the ocean. We live underwater. I was really proud of the crew. The one time we had a real, that fire emergency, which is the only emergency we ever had, everybody went straight to their jobs. We went immediately to our training and started knocking out all the procedures that we needed to knock out to make sure the vehicle was safe and we were safe. Meanwhile, back on Earth, we all noticed how close the crew seemed and comfortable the crew seemed in just about any environment or any situation that seemed to be thrown at them.

12:06I know you'd spent years training together, but what surprised you about the team once you were all in space? Everything. We invested very heavily in each other in the three years leading up to this mission, and it was not always easy. We were not always friends. We were not always aligned. But those differences actually, I think, help us out. We have a team of operational psychologists here at the Johnson Space Center. They're usually there just for our, if we need them during training, we have like one or two meetings. We flipped that paradigm on its head and we had almost every other week, we would have a four hour session with them where they would just go through team building exercises.

12:44What is going on in your own brain? Where are you? How are you showing up for your crew? It was incredible. Those were some of the most difficult conversations I've had. Usually I'd have to leave and go for a walk because they're just, they're so exhausting. But by the end of those, we knew each other and we knew what made us happy and we knew what made us upset and we could show up for each other in different ways. We hired a poet to teach us poetry. We hired spiritual and cultural leaders to talk about the spiritual and cultural significance of the moon around the world. We all look up at that moon every single night.

13:13So what does it mean? What does it mean to somebody who's in Ghana or somebody who's in Spain or somebody who's in Australia? We want to know those things so that we could feel those things when we were out there. We did a tremendous, it's the thing I'm most proud of in this crew. We did a tremendous amount of investment in each other. What's an example of not being in alignment? Let's see, not being in alignment. We made a pact as a crew that we would always brief everything for five minutes, just us, just the crew. So at NASA, we have all these big briefings. But before we would go do something operational, like before we do training where you could actually hurt yourself or kill yourself, we would just come together for five minutes.

13:48We would talk about where we need to be, and we would go do it. And then at the end of the training, we would take five or 10 minutes, do a quick debrief, and then go to our big debrief. Invariably, our five to 10-minute debriefs, we would get like a 20th of the way through them, and it would be time for the big debrief. And we would like have these half-finished conversations that we really wanted to finish, but we can't. We got to go to the big debrief. And then you just felt this tension across the crew of, man, there was something very heavy here. Like, I did something that really upset you, but we haven't talked this thing all the way through.

14:16So those were kind of moments. I would say making decisions for each other without buy-in with each other was a huge one where we would feel a misalignment there. Tell me about the view from the window when one is flying to the moon. Well, for a lot of our mission, it was greasy smudges because our foreheads were all over those windows in our hands at all times. One of my favorite moments, we were waking up to do lunar flyby, and I called down to mission control, and I said, hey, how do I clean, like, grease off the windows? because as I looked on the side of the windows before we were going around the moon, they were just all covered.

14:47And it made me so happy because it meant that we were using these four windows. We actually had six windows. We were using them all, all the time. One thing that really did surprise me was how quickly Earth gets so small out the window. We dubbed it from about the second day on, we dubbed it tiny Earth because we didn't have any other way to really explain what the Earth was. But it was tiny and it was getting smaller every day. And it was getting, when we're out by the moon, the Earth was, it was so small. It's like a fingernail almost, like the size of a quarter. It's just impossibly tiny out there.

15:17There's a little tiny, super bright crescent of an Earth. And then the neat thing about the moon, even from like the second or third day, you know, when you're going out to the moon, you don't just aim at the moon and go to the moon. You aim way ahead of the moon because in four days the moon is going to continue to transit around the Earth and you're going to intercept the moon out there, much like watching somebody throw a football where the receiver is like running across the field and you've got to lead that person by a lot. Well, NASA led the moon by a lot when we were heading out there. So even from early on in the mission, the moon was still quite small out the window, but we could see it starting to look different.

15:51You know, we only see the front side of the moon here. It is gravitationally locked from planet Earth. But very early in that mission, we could start to see those mares, those dark seas on the moon start to slip off the right side. And we could start to see these basins, these craters on the far side that we had only ever studied. And it was neat. As four humans, we all were picking up on that. And then the first time we put a long lens, like a zoom lens, 400 millimeter on the moon. And we were able to start to see these things we would train. Orient Hall, Ohm Crater. We start to see them in these images.

16:21And we're like, oh my gosh, like we are seeing the far side of the moon. And we're still two days away from the moon. And then as you approach the moon, the day we did lunar flyby, we woke up. We were still 20 ,000 miles from the moon, which is pretty far. And I took off the window shade and I was frozen. I mean, frozen in the window to the point where Christina was like, hey, you're going to finish your checklist for the morning? activities because I just couldn't, I could not peel myself away. There's this whole moon is sitting out there and it looks different than the moon on Earth. It just looked different because we're looking at a different side of it.

16:49It was, it was, I highly recommend it.

16:56Reed Wiseman, commander of NASA's Artemis II mission to the moon. It's the New Yorker Radio Hour with more in a moment.

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19:24This is a moment of growing urgency. Families around the world are facing widening gaps in health care and nutrition. but solutions are within reach. Just 75 cents can provide treatment for neglected tropical diseases, and$2 can protect a child's sight and health. For a limited time, donations are being matched, helping expand that impact. Learn more at helenkellerintl.org. Radio Hour is supported by USA for UNHCR, the UN refugee agency. In Ukraine, Sudan, and around the world, war is tearing millions of families from their homes. Despite funding cuts, UNHCR continues to provide protection, shelter, and emergency relief to displaced families in more than 120 countries worldwide.

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20:22When the capsule passed behind the moon, it lost contact with Earth for about 40 minutes. About 40 minutes. Can you describe that stretch of time? That stretch of time, I really want it to be this grandiose stretch of time, but I will be completely honest. We were right back into the science, and we were doing exactly what we had trained. When we first watched Earth set, so Earth was coming down behind the moon, and you could see the little bits of the atmosphere of the crescent Earth start to hit the moon, and then you could watch the Earth just setting behind the moon. and then as the earth slips behind the moon, it's crazy to say, Jeremy had a bunch of maple cookies.

21:01So I was free floating. I cut all the bags of maple cookies open. All four of us just stopped for a second. We had maple cookies and then Victor and Christina were right back into science. They had a bunch of observations to do because when we go behind the moon, now we're seeing parts of the moon that have never been seen by human eyes. So they were not seen on Apollo due to lighting. They've been seen by satellite, but never by humans. So that was the most intense scientific part of that. One thing that I was doing, because that's also the farthest point away from Earth, and it went two miles past where the flight dynamics officers had said our maximum distance from Earth would be.