Four astronauts will venture farther from Earth than humans have ever gone before when NASA launches its Artemis II mission, led by Cockeysville native and mission commander Reid Wiseman.
A graduate of Dulaney High School (’93) and Johns Hopkins University (’06), the 50-year-old Wiseman will head the voyage traveling approximately 4,700 miles beyond the far side of the Moon — far enough away that the Moon will appear the size of a basketball held at arm’s length for the Artemis II crew. Their journey will shatter the current record of a 158-mile altitude from the lunar surface, set by the Apollo 13 mission in 1970.
Wiseman’s three fellow crew members — NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — will be the first Black person, the first woman, and the first non-American, respectively, to travel beyond low Earth orbit. Artemis II will also be the first crewed mission to the Moon in 54 years since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
But on the precipice of this historic moment, Wiseman has avoided imagining what the far side of the Moon will be like or pondering what it means to follow in the footsteps of previous mission commanders.
Instead, he told TIME magazine that he and his crew are focused on how their mission can aid future advancements in space exploration.
“I really think we are taking the next right step in a sustained lunar presence,” Wiseman said in the TIME article. “The important thing about being first is that there’s a second, third, fourth, and more.”
NASA officials told Baltimore Fishbowl that the Artemis II crew members were unavailable for interviews as they are in the final preparation stages ahead of launch.
However, those who know Wiseman described him as “a man of integrity” and “the right guy for this mission” in conversations with Baltimore Fishbowl.
“He’s just down to earth,” said Dulaney High School science department chair and teacher Steve Shaw, who acknowledged the irony of such a descriptor for a man soon to be flying through space.
But that sense of groundedness in a commander is just what a mission like Artemis II needs in order to succeed, Shaw said.
“He’s your neighbor that you just trust immensely,” he said. “Whenever you see an interview with him, he just exudes confidence without arrogance. You cheer for him.”
Growing up in Cockeysville’s Springdale neighborhood next to the Loch Raven Reservoir, Wiseman would see A-10 aircraft from Martin State Airport in Middle River fly over his family’s house, he told Baltimore magazine in a 2015 interview.
He also traced his interest in flight and space to seeing the Blue Angels at the Naval Academy near Annapolis, viewing a 747 aircraft transport a space shuttle over Towson, and watching news coverage of the tragic 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion from his school cafeteria.
After graduating from Dulaney, Wiseman earned his bachelor’s degree in computer and systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He later trained to be a pilot, was deployed twice to the Middle East, and attended the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School in Patuxent River, Maryland, to help test and evaluate aircraft.
Upon graduation from Hopkins, Wiseman was selected as one of nine members of the 20th NASA astronaut class in 2009 and completed his training in 2011. He served as Flight Engineer aboard the International Space Station for Expedition 41 in 2014 and served as chief of the astronaut office from 2020 through 2022, before being announced as the Artemis II mission commander in 2023.
But among his many accomplishments, Wiseman identifies his most gratifying experience as raising his two daughters, Ellie and Katherine, whom he had with his late wife, Carroll.
“Despite a long list of professional accolades, Reid considers his time as an only parent as his greatest challenge and the most rewarding phase of his life,” Wiseman’s NASA bio reads.
As a Johns Hopkins University graduate student studying to earn his master’s degree in systems engineering, Wiseman was “an exceptional performer,” said Christian Utara, one of Wiseman’s former Hopkins professors.
“He stood out…. He was very dedicated to his studies, and he was motivated to learn as much as he possibly could from the program, which is one of the things that motivates me as an instructor: to see a student that is interested in learning the material, not just getting a grade and getting a degree,” said Utara, who coordinates the Systems Engineering and Engineering Management master’s programs at Hopkins.
So when Utara turned on his television and saw Wiseman talking about the six months he spent aboard the International Space Station in 2014, he recognized his former student right away.
“After teaching thousands and thousands of students, I think it’s a testament to his dedication, to his learning, because it immediately came back to me. It didn’t take me more than a few seconds to figure out who he was,” Utara said.
Shaw first started working at Dulaney High School in 1992 during Wiseman’s senior year, so he never had the opportunity to teach the future astronaut. But leading up to his stay on the International Space Station (where he posted the first Vine from space), Wiseman reached out to Shaw to ask him to be his contact at Dulaney. The pair have been communicating ever since.
Coming home from the first day of school in 2014, Shaw heard his landline phone ringing and saw the caller ID read “US Gov.” It turned out to be the longest long-distance call he has ever received.
“He’s like, ‘Steve, it’s Reid…. I’m on a satellite phone. I’ve got about 15 minutes and then we’re out of range back behind the Earth. But how are you doing?’ These are the kinds of things he would do,” Shaw said.
Over their more than a decade of correspondence, Wiseman has recorded messages for Dulaney, sent photos from space, attended school assemblies and other events, and answered questions from the high school’s journalism class.
“He’s very gracious with his time for a guy who’s accomplished so much,” Shaw said.
Wiseman even met with Dulaney’s robotics team when they traveled to Houston for the World Championships.
“They were just smitten with him,” Shaw said. “He’s like a pied piper; people just are drawn to him. He’s got a natural excitement. He wants to be part of what we’re doing.”
And the admiration went both ways.
“You would have thought it was the role reversal,” Shaw said. “He was geeked out beyond anything you can imagine, so impressed with our students.”
The Artemis II astronauts will be the first humans to fly aboard NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft.
The SLS and Orion are expected to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida no earlier than March 2026. Once they do, the crew will fly two orbits of Earth, followed by a figure-eight pattern that will wrap around the moon before returning to Earth. The mission is expected to last about 10 days in total.
During an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” in 2023 with his fellow crew members, Wiseman explained how the Artemis II mission to the Moon will prepare humanity to go to Mars.
“[Astronauts have] been living and working on the International Space Station for about the last 24 years…. That was the first step in understanding humans off the planet,” Wiseman said. “The next step to getting to Mars is to go learn how to work around the Moon, get to deep space, get away from Earth, learn how to work on another celestial body. Once we have that nailed down, then we are going to Mars.”
NASA’s next mission, Artemis III, will have two of its four crew members spend about a week near the South Pole of the Moon, where they will look for ice in craters. Water they find could help fuel journeys to Mars. That mission is scheduled to launch by 2028.
The skills Wiseman developed in leadership, systems thinking, and critical thinking at Hopkins will serve him well on the Artemis II mission, Utara said.
Systems thinking, in particular, he explained is “your ability to examine a situation or a problem and, at the systems level, be able to examine quickly and make decisions. I definitely would expect that that is a skill that they need of a mission commander, but also just anybody in space if anything were to go wrong, to be able to calmly evaluate the situation as a whole and be able to identify a potential solution to a problem.”
At Dulaney, Wiseman played golf, was part of the drum line, and was a member of the Russian club. He also studied Russian as his foreign language course in high school, which Shaw said helped pave the way to where Wiseman is now.
“In order for him to be an astronaut, to go on the International Space Station, the U.S. no longer had a vehicle to get our astronauts there. At that point, they were relying on the Russians. To run the Soyuz part of the end of their capsule and their rockets, all the instructions are in Russian. So from kind of getting started in high school with a little bit of Russian and then continuing on with it, it afforded him the ability to do this,” Shaw said.
Both Wiseman’s college and high school alma maters will be rooting for him as he and the rest of his crew embark on their journey among the stars.
“We are all just incredibly motivated to see his personal success to be able to achieve the role of being the mission commander, which is a really big deal,” Utara said, “but also the fact that hopefully he’s taken away things from our program that has helped him to be more effective as a leader in these types of roles.”
“He’s got a wonderment about space,” Shaw said. “He can be very serious about the ramifications of what’s going on, yet he’s got the enjoyment and the inquisitiveness of a young kid. Like ‘Why go to space?’ ‘Why not?’ … There’s real joy there that I think comes out of him.”
