NASA astronaut shares emotional family selfie before lunar mission

By Dean Murray

He may be about to be blasted around the moon, but Reid Wiseman is still a dad.

The NASA astronaut proudly posed with two daughters, Ellie and Katherine, in front of the towering SLS (Space Launch System) rocket that could be launching on Wednesday, April 1.

Wiseman, commander of the Artemis II mission, lost his wife to cancer in 2020 and raised his teenage daughters while simultaneously training for the mission.

In the touching post he shared on Tuesday, he playfully wrote: "Dad, we can’t leave the rocket without a .5 together!!” I love these two ladies, and I’m boarding that rocket a very proud father."

A ".5" refers to a type of image captured using the ultra‑wide‑angle lens on a smartphone or camera, typically set at 0.5x zoom.

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NASA said on Monday: "The countdown for NASA’s Artemis II test flight is underway at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with members of the launch team arriving at their consoles inside the Rocco Petrone Launch Control Center.

"The onsite countdown clock started ticking down at 4:44 p.m. EDT to a targeted launch time of 6:24 p.m. on Wednesday, April 1."

Artemis II is the first crewed launch of NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and Orion spacecraft.

The test flight will take Commander Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialist Christina Koch from NASA, and Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen from the CSA (Canadian Space Agency), around the Moon and back to Earth.