I’ve never cared about NASA. I’ve never followed launches, never watched the livestreams, never paid attention when something landed on Mars. Space stuff just wasn’t for me. The moon was the moon; it was always there, and I didn’t think about it. So I cannot account for why I clicked on the Artemis II clip when it showed up on my feed a few weeks ago. But I did, and I haven’t stopped thinking or talking about it ever since.
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Artemis II was NASA’s first crewed mission to the moon since 1972. The four astronauts went around the moon and came back. At their farthest point, they were 252,756 miles from Earth, the farthest any human has ever been.
The crew was Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen. They launched on April 1, 2026, and came back to Earth on April 10.
That part of the story isn’t really what got me, though.
On day six of the mission, the crew radioed mission control and said they wanted to propose names for the two craters they’d seen. The first suggestion was “Integrity,” named after their spacecraft. For the second idea, Hansen took the mic because Wiseman couldn’t get the words out himself.
Hansen’s voice broke when he said, “We lost a loved one, her name was Carroll, the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katey and Ellie.” He called the crater a “bright spot on the moon.” Then he said, “We would like to call it Carroll.” And then he spelled her name: C A R R O L L.
Carroll Taylor Wiseman was Wiseman’s wife. She was a pediatric nurse practitioner who died of cancer in 2020 at 46, after a five-year battle. They had two daughters together.
The other three crew members had decided to do this before the mission launched, and they told Wiseman before liftoff. Wiseman later said that it was the most beautiful thing he had ever heard in his life. When Hansen said her name, the four of them pulled into a hug, floating in zero gravity. Mission control was quiet for almost a full minute, and then they responded: “Integrity and Carroll Crater, loud and clear.”
I listened to this three times, and I cried all three times.
I’m a teenager. I think most people my age don’t really believe in love anymore. We’ve grown up online, where every relationship is a red flag and every breakup is a podcast. Marriage is a financial decision, devotion is corny, caring too much about someone is embarrassing, and cheating is normalized.
And then there’s Reid Wiseman.
He lost his wife four years ago, and he’s been raising his two daughters alone. When Wiseman was offered command of this mission, his daughters were the ones who pushed him to take it. His older daughter made moon cupcakes the morning after he told them. He said in interviews that he wanted his kids to know you can lose everything and still keep going.
His three crewmates knew all of this. So before they even left Earth, they decided they were going to put his wife’s name on the moon. They didn’t tell him until right before the launch, and they waited to do it until the exact moment the mission broke a 50-year-old record, because they wanted that moment to belong to her too.
@cmaulidaa “to the MOON and back” 🥹 real if he wanted to he would🚀 #NASA #reidwiseman #ARTEMIS #astronaut #moon ♬ original sound – K – G
That’s not a trend. That’s not a soft launch. It’s just love, the kind I honestly thought wasn’t around anymore, at least not the way people on my feed talk about relationships. The internet right now is mostly hate, wars, and cynicism. Seeing any type of real positive emotion on the news is rare, and I didn’t realize how tired I was of all that until I heard a Canadian astronaut cry on a livestream about his friend’s wife.
The crater isn’t officially named yet; the proposal still has to go through the International Astronomical Union, which defines celestial nomenclature in space. But once it does, Carroll will be there forever, longer than the internet.
A woman who isn’t here anymore is going to have a piece of the moon named after her, because her husband loved her so much that his coworkers wanted to do something for him.
I think that this matters; it changes the way you can talk about love when you’ve grown up assuming it doesn’t really exist outside of movies. Real people still do this; it’s not gone.
It’s up there. A bright spot on the moon, and you can see it from Earth.
