Artemis II blasted off into outer space last week, sending Reid Wiseman and his crew on a mission that will carry them 252,757 miles from Earth and around the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. Wiseman, the commander of the flight, is a U.S. Navy captain and NASA astronaut from Baltimore County, Maryland, whose path to the launch ran through Cockeysville, Dulaney High School and Johns Hopkins University.
The distance alone gives the mission its place in the history books. Artemis II is expected to go farther from Earth than Apollo 13, which reached 248,655 miles in 1970, and it marks the first time astronauts have traveled around the moon since the Apollo era. Wiseman said he is proud to carry that history with a home-state connection, adding: “I love getting to represent Maryland. We have quite a few astronauts from Maryland, and many of them are good friends of mine.”
That Maryland thread runs through the mission in more ways than one. Wiseman trained at the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Southern Maryland, and NASA selected him to begin astronaut training in 2009 while he was serving in the Navy. Christina Koch, another member of the Artemis II crew, is the first woman to leave Earth’s orbit and also has Maryland ties of her own, including time at the NASA Academy program at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, teaching at Montgomery County Community College and work at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
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Maryland’s role in the mission does not stop with the astronauts. The crew phones back to Earth through the NASA Near Space Network in Goddard, where experts help with communications and give instructions for the aircraft, and Lockheed Martin engineers based in Bethesda played a major role in developing the Orion crew module, the spacecraft carrying the astronauts on their journey. Along the way, the crew has also used part of the mission to name previously unnamed lunar craters, including one now called Carroll in honor of Wiseman’s late wife.
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Artemis II is more than a test flight. It is the return of U.S. astronauts to the moon’s neighborhood after more than half a century, and Wiseman is the Maryland-born commander at the center of it.
