The New Yorker Radio Hour - Seeing the Dark Side of the Moon on NASA’s Artemis II Mission

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

In April, the four crew members of NASA’s Artemis II mission were the first humans to ever glimpse something that cannot be seen from Earth—the so-called dark side of the moon. The mission’s commander, the former Navy captain Reid Wiseman, is fifty years old, which also makes him the oldest person ever to travel beyond low Earth orbit. Wiseman sat down recently with the New Yorker contributor David W. Brown. They talked about the challenge of NASA returning to the moon after many decades, Wiseman’s struggle to parent his two daughters while training, and the strangeness and beauty of returning to Earth. “One thing that really did surprise me was how quickly Earth gets so small out the window,” Wiseman explains. “It’s like a fingernail, almost; the size of a quarter. It’s just impossibly tiny out there. There’s a little tiny super-bright crescent of an Earth.”  Further reading and listening:  “The Leader of NASA’s Artemis II Mission Is Still Moonstruck,” by David W. Brown “What Will the Artemis II Moon Mission Teach Us?,” by David W. Brown “A New Era of Moon Exploration Is Upon Us,” by David W. Brown   New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'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, and 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. Tell me about the moment you were selected for Artemis too. It sounds like it was as much a sobering moment as it was a joyful one.

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. It's about, we're 20 minutes into it, and we miss you. And 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. So 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, 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? I 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 this 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. we'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? That 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. But I would work hard, and then one daughter is in college, one daughter is 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, 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, you know, 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. I 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 just was not an option for me. But I think in the end, they gave all the way, 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. We 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 a sign 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. And 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 splash down? Is there a 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 to have space for that right now. That 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's 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, just 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. You just got to be ready for anything that is going to come at any moment. When that sort of situation arises in such a 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 is 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. Those 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, 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.

I 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, what 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. So 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 wanted to know those things so that we could feel those things when we're 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. We 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 ten minutes, do a quick debrief and then go to our big debrief. Invariably, our five to ten minute debrief would, we would get like a 20th of the way through them and we'd 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. So 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. And it made me so happy because it meant that we were using. 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. There'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's 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. 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. You 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 can start to see those marries, those dark seas on the moon start to slip off the right side. And we can 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 had trained. Oriental, Ome Crater, we start to see them in these images. And 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 find it 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 they're looking at a different side of it. It was, it was, I highly recommend it.

Reed Wiseman, commander of NASA's Artemis II mission to the moon. It's the New Yorker radio hour with more in a moment. When the capsule passed behind the moon, it lost contact with Earth for about 40 minutes. Can you describe that stretch of time? That stretch of time, I really wanted to be this, like, 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 crowsyed. 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. So I was free floating. I cut all the bags of maple cookies open. All four of us, just stopped for a second. We have 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 an 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.

We went two miles further than that. And I was just thinking on my head, like, we're pretty small spacecraft. That moon's pretty small out there. I wonder if two miles is going to be significant or not. Maybe we missed it by a little bit, and we're kind of going to be stuck out here for a while. But then I saw that number just tick back down. 219669 was the max in nautical miles. Then I saw 219668.

And I told the crew like, hey, we're headed home right now. We're on our way home. And they cheered a little bit. And then you get earth rise. So the way the crescent earth was, you didn't see like the roundness of Earth. You just saw these two little points coming up from behind the moon. Just two little points. And that was Earth's atmosphere starting to reach out from behind the moon.

And then you could see the crescent Earth start to come. And in the crescent Earth, you could see the mountains of the moon in that, view of the Earth. It was truly magnificent because there is no atmosphere on the moon, so it's crystal clear. And you could see these mountains of the moon and with the Earth behind it. And then the Earth was back. And then we looked down at our displays and we could see the Canberra radio site. So we knew we had a view of Australia. And we called down to Mission Control. And we were back in contact. And that's just a great feeling to be back from the far side of the moon and talking back to planet Earth.

Few people have ever experienced such existential isolation. And that must surely give one pause. I think it definitely gave us pause. Jeremy Hanson, I really like the way he says it, where he felt so small. And he's like, in that moment, when you're looking out into the universe, it's three-dimensional, and you are just,

you are in it. You're in the middle of the universe. You can feel the stars around you. And he said, I felt unbelievably small, Like small to the point of infinitesimally small, and yet at the same time, it was the deepest sense of power that I had on the whole mission. And it wasn't individual power. It was power that this whole planet of people had the courage to send us out there. And that is a very powerful feeling.

During Artemis II, you made history, having problems with Microsoft Outlook farther from Earth than any human being before. How do you handle that kind of legacy? Man, it taught me so much about integration of software. So in the end, I actually found out I had three Microsoft Outlooks, and one of them was working, but the two that were linked on desktop, which was what I was supposed to open from our training, neither one of those worked. So I really didn't want to become a meme on this mission. I was attributed to at least two memes, although one was incorrect.

It was not me putting in my passcode into my tablet after liftoff. It was Jeremy Hansen, 39339. But we chose that pin because that was our mom. That was our speed of reentry, 39 times speed of sound. So 39-39 was a good pass code. And it is quite a legacy. But if that is the thing that made people laugh during this mission, then we were highly successful.

You could be the best brain surgeon in the history of brain surgery. You could be the best fighter pilot in the history of aeronautics. And if you're both at a party and then an astronaut walks in, everyone's going to say, oh, there's an astronaut here. I do have a good friend who's a brain surgeon, and we joke about that all the time. I would hope people will come up interested that I'm an astronaut, and then they would very, very quickly realize I'm just like them. I'm a completely normal person who's been put in some extraordinary circumstance.

I've been very lucky, and that is what I hope they would see. We are all in this together. This has nothing to do with me, but if I can carry a few people along with me, that is what I want to do. The earth you left and the earth you found when you got back are two very different places. Your face is on magazines now. People think about your life and what you've done as a way to make sense of their own lives. How do you integrate your old self with this new reality? Sometimes you yearn for the old self, but my crew, we've done this together for sure.

Myself, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy, I was talking to Victor at the airport on Friday leaving Montreal, all and we ended up talking for about three hours pretty much straight. And it was like we cried a couple times, not out of sadness, out of joy. We had the hair on our arm standing up as we were talking. Like I told him, I think we slipped through the hands of God during that mission. And I mean, that just stopped him in his tracks. He completely agreed. There's just ways that we see the world right now that are that are totally different. We want to share everything and everybody wants, everybody wants for this journey. And that's, that is exhausting. It takes a lot, it takes a lot of commitment to continue to get out there and talk about the story when sometimes all you want

to do sit on your couch and just decompress for a minute. But coming back, the birds, I was just listening to the birds this morning. I walked into work and there was just humidity everywhere down the hallway because the air conditioner hadn't turned in on and building force out. And I was like, this is amazing. Look at all this humidity. I love all this. So I really, I still, there's a richness to being back to planet Earth that is pretty cool to be a part of. A crater discovered during the mission has been named for your late wife, Carol. How did your family respond to that? My kids did not know that was coming. And even I didn't know that was coming until two days before liftoff. So my crew, Christina Cook, had that idea. She talked to the science team.

They found a few eligible craters and we looked through them as a crew. And then on the second or third day of the mission, we could look out and see that crater. It was so bright. It's just barely on the near side, far side boundary. And we just thought that was exactly the right thing to do. And my two kids, they had come into mission control earlier that morning. I didn't even know they were coming in. They had come into mission control viewing room when we broke the distance record from Apollo 13. That was a moment that didn't mean that much to me. We were just flying our mission. It was just a number passing. But it meant a lot to them. And I thought that was really cool. Like they came in to watch their dad do something. This meant something to them. So now it's going to

mean something to me. And then Jeremy Hanson was giving a little talk about us breaking the Apollo 13 distance record, and I just kind of looked over at him. I think now it's kind of the right time. We can see Carl Crater right out, right out the window. We can see it easy. And Jeremy just went right into that speech. My goodness. And so at certain times of the moons transit around Earth, you can, we will be able to see this from Earth. And so we lost a loved one. Her name was Carol. If you want to find this, You look at Glushko, just to the northwest of that, at the same latitude as home, and it's a bright spot on the moon. All four of us were in tears and hugging it out, and that was the moment that I think our crew was forever bonded.

Even though that was something that was very deeply personal to me and could have been far less significant to them, it just shows you how bought in everyone was to everyone on that mission. What lessons do you hope people back on Earth took from that? I think the thing I would most want them to take away is we can go do great, large things together. We can collaborate. We can do those things. But I also want them to know that none of this happened by accident. It was tremendous investment across the board.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Reed Wiseman was a commander of the Artemis II mission to the moon, and you can find more from David W. Brown's interview with him, including video clips at New Yorker.com. And you can subscribe to The New Yorker there as well, New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick. Thanks so much for listening today. See you next time.

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