Commander Reid Wiseman’s personal zenith on the first crewed mission to fly around the Moon in more than half a century came when his colleagues asked to name a lunar crater after his late wife, Carroll.
Fellow astronaut Jeremy Hansen made the request to Nasa mission control in Houston, describing how the “close-knit astronaut family” on the Artemis II voyage had “lost a loved one” in Carroll, a paediatric nurse who died of cancer in 2020.
“I think when Jeremy spelled Carroll’s name . . . for me, that is when I was overwhelmed with emotion and I looked over and Christina [Koch] was crying,” Wiseman reflected this week as all four crew members hurtled homeward, hoping for a smooth splashdown as scheduled off the coast of San Diego on Friday evening. “That was kind of the pinnacle moment of the mission for me.”