The father who went the farthest from home

After a successful lunar odyssey that lasted 10 days, NASA’s Artemis II mission crew returned home and literally made waves in Pacific Ocean on Saturday.

However, for commander Reid Wiseman, who led the mission to the moon, the real journey is about to begin only now, once he returns home to his daughters.

The spacecraft and the crew on board, which included Commander Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, travelled 252,756 miles (4,06,771 km), the farthest distance from Earth that mankind has ever gone.

In terms of distance, scope, and ambition, the mission has been as historic as it was challenging.

But for the 50-year-old NASA astronaut from Baltimore, the United States, the toughest part not preparing, embarking, or making that risky journey; it was being away from the one mission that matters more than any lunar expedition: being a single father to his two daughters, Ellie (20) and Katey (17).

Wiseman’s wife, Carroll Taylor, a registered paediatric nurse from Texas, lost her five-year battle with breast cancer in May 2020.

It understandably changed the trajectory of the entire family’s lives. Friends of the family recalled that while Wiseman, who was a US Navy pilot then, stepped back from active flight duty to care for his sick life partner, Carroll, who continued to encourage him to focus on his mission.

The astronaut confessed that losing his wife to cancer and becoming a single parent to his daughters was one of the toughest and life-changing moments in his journey.

As the Artemis II mission wrapped up its odyssey to the moon to test life support, navigation, etc., which set a milestone for human exploration, the real human element of the journey was defined by a single moment when the exploration team, including Glover, Koch, and Hansen, emotionally declared that they wished to name the brightest crater on the moon after Carroll.

To understand Commander Weisman’s love for his daughters, one just needs to go through his social media page.

In one post, which came at a time when everyone at NASA was scrambling to make sure everything was in shipshape before the lunar expedition, he shared a picture. It was a pack of homemade cookies that was snuck into his luggage by his daughters. The cookie pack was addressed to ‘DAD’ with a smiley on it.

While anxiety and nervousness ruled the room, the single dad was overwhelmed with love on seeing the pack of baked goods that were ready to travel with him to the Moon.

“My heart can’t take it,” he said in the post.

As the days to his mission drew near, Wiseman admitted he was concerned for his daughters’ future.

For, he was about to embark on the longest and most important journey of his life, one from which he could not make any promises about his safe return.

He took Ellie and Katey out for a walk. As they ambled on, he explained what would happen to them in case of an emergency, where the important documents were kept, and whom they should contact in case of any unfortunate incidents during the mission.

He noted that the enthusiasm and encouragement his daughters showed towards his expedition was the only thing that gave him the courage to take the giant leap for the sake of mankind.

“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,” reads NASA’s bio about Wiseman.

Here is a dad who puts family above all else, even if he happens to be the man who commanded a mission to the Moon that took humankind the farthest from Earth on a historic lunar flyby; one for whom his daughters mean the whole world.