NASA Astronaut Reid Wiseman Describes Artemis II Crew Training and Flight

He joined crew members Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen for the flight, which marked the first crewed lunar mission in decades. Wiseman said the selection required balancing mission demands with responsibilities as a single parent of two daughters.

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Training began in earnest in April 2025, when the crew reduced public appearances and worked eight-hour days at Johnson Space Center with most weekends off. Wiseman said one daughter was in college and the other in high school during this period, and he arranged external support for schoolwork.

He compared the regimented International Space Station training from his 2014 mission with the novel procedures required for Artemis II. The crew developed new methods for living and working in a four-person spacecraft over a ten-day flight.

Wiseman said the first five days involved continuous work that often extended an hour past planned bedtimes. Simple tasks such as preparing meals took longer than expected because only one activity could occur at a time in the confined cabin. On the eighth day, he said he stopped thoughts about returning home to maintain focus.

The crew handled multiple trajectory-correction burns, each preceded by alarms in most cases, and responded to a false fire alarm on the next-to-last day that shut down electrical power and ventilation. Wiseman said the daughters later understood the mission's significance during a video call on the seventh day of flight.