Astronaut Reid Wiseman Thinks We're Going to Be OK

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "Astronaut Reid Wiseman Thinks We're Going to Be OK"

Podcast: Humans
Host: Hank Green
Guest: Reid Wiseman, Artemis II Mission Commander
Date: July 30, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this inspiring episode, host Hank Green interviews NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, the commander of the historic Artemis II mission—the first crewed trip to the moon in over half a century. Their conversation dives into the wonder and reality of human spaceflight, the significance of the moon in our shared imagination, the engineering and emotion behind Artemis II, the value of cooperation and diversity in high-stakes teams, and the deeply human need for curiosity, perspective, and hope. Wiseman recounts breathtaking moments from the mission, including his viral photographs of Earth and a profound solar eclipse seen from lunar orbit, and shares candid reflections on leadership, loss, risk, being a single parent, and why he’s optimistic about humanity’s future.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Meaning of the Moon (01:53)

• The moon as a universal connection point—a cosmic "original television/Instagram."
• Quote [01:53]: “Everyone on Earth looks at the moon… And it’s something that to me personally connects you to family, it connects you to relatives, it connects you to friends around this planet.” — Reid Wiseman

2. Artemis II Launch: The Reality of Leaving Earth (03:26 – 06:55)

• The nerves and anticipation on launch day: odds of launch, the technical choreography, and personal anecdotes from the ride atop the SLS rocket.
• Smooth ascent compared to previous generations; first views of Earth and the moon from space.
• Crew camaraderie: Jeremy Hansen’s ice-breaking humor during ascent (“This is so cool.” [04:33])
• Impact of seeing Earth in the window for the first time: “That’s the last time I paid attention to the spaceship…” — Reid Wiseman [06:47]

3. Managing Fear and the Focus of Collective Achievement (07:10 – 10:08)

• Fear as a background presence, tacit readiness for emergencies, and the transition from “ready to abort” to “we’re really going to the moon.”
• The mission as a focus for global attention, facilitating optimism and shared pride.
• The importance of togetherness, even among a small visible crew representing the efforts of thousands.

4. Human Differences, Team Dynamics, and Communication (10:08 – 15:35)

• International collaboration and embracing team diversity (spiritual, political, cultural).
• Open dialogue on controversial topics leads to stronger teams.
• Astronaut psychological training: “active followership” and fluid leadership roles.
• Deliberate, hard work invested in building trust and resilience among the four-person Artemis II crew.
• Quote [15:35]: “We put in a tremendous amount of effort. …There were a few other things in each one of us that we would like to have improved. And we just decided—we’re just going to meet each other where we are. And when we got into space together, it was truly gold.” — Reid Wiseman

5. Curiosity as a Core Human Strength (17:57 – 19:56)

• “Ask Hank” segment: Wiseman probes Green’s view on curiosity.
• Curiosity’s emotional and practical value; helps bridge divides and enriches connection.
• Quote [18:24]: “It’s the best human emotion on par with love... If I’m not curious about them, they’re never going to be curious about me.” — Hank Green

6. Formative Life Experiences & Leadership (19:56 – 22:52)

• Wiseman’s upbringing: boundaries, trust, handling bullying, using empathy instead of strength.
• Ongoing self-work, self-improvement, and investing in one’s own growth—even at age 50.

7. Being Far from Earth: Perspective in Deep Space (23:02 – 28:11)

• The ISS as “intimate with Earth,” Artemis II as true separation—Earth the size of a basketball from 38,000 miles away.
• Unique orbital mechanics and the iconic “Hello World” photo: the Earth, illuminated by moonglow, city lights, auroras, and even satellites.
• Accidental creation of viral time-lapse and the naming of the image (“The Cosmic Shoreline” inspired by Carl Sagan).
• Moment [31:27]: Wiseman marvels at others’ creativity turning his photos into science/art: “People are hungry and people are brilliant and they saw this and saw the potential…”

8. Space Photography & “Cosmic Shoreline” (28:11 – 33:30)

• Technical details: how the images were taken, floating in microgravity, and challenges with spacecraft windows.
• The unexpected power of public collaboration to tell the story (“never intended to be a time lapse”).
• “The coolest thing I’ve ever photographed… And then it turns out the best was all of them together.” — Hank Green [33:30]

9. Are We Rare in the Universe? (33:34 – 34:53)

• Reflections on the uniqueness of life and civilization.
• “It may be that we’re pretty weird.” — Hank Green

10. The Purpose of Space Exploration & Savoring Progress (35:07 – 38:33)

• Artemis II as a test flight, but also a symbol: importance of savoring success amidst a problem-focused world.
• Psychology tip: “What are you savoring today?” helps overcome fatigue.
• Progress, innovation, and collective focus pull society forward—akin to moonshots and civil rights movements.

11. On “Being Late” to the Moon, and Facing Risk (38:33 – 42:34)

• The myth of “lateness”—“We weren’t late now. We were way early then.”
• Real dangers: technical risk, history of astronaut fatalities, and accepting fear as a passenger.
• Public sharing: feeling required to “give back” to taxpayers through transparency and media.
• Quote [42:38]: “If I don’t share it in every possible way, I feel like I’ve let the people down a little bit.” — Reid Wiseman

12. The Human Side of Going Viral (42:58 – 47:28)

• Awareness (and anxiety) about becoming a meme: representing diversity in the “focal point” of humanity.
• Raw emotional moments: laughter in zero gravity, giggling in space, sharing vulnerability and joy with millions.

13. Parenthood, Loss, and Motivation to Fly (48:07 – 53:27)

• Becoming a single parent after wife’s death; navigating risk with children at home.
• Balancing personal ambition and parental responsibility: “It is very selfish to want to go do this… but if I pulled back, I wouldn’t be the person I want my kids to see.”
• Influence of role models (e.g., George Bush anecdote, supportive late wife).

14. Service, Duty, and the Joy of Comradeship (53:27 – 56:49)

• NASA as a continuation of service; not about money, but shared experience and meaning.
• Lasting bonds of trust and “willingness to take oneself out to keep others alive.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On differences: “If we can’t talk about those differences... we made each other better by talking across those differences.” — Wiseman [10:41]
• On team culture: “Active followership… we’re fluid in that way all the time.” — Wiseman [13:33]
• On “Cosmic Shoreline” photo: “I can go home right now. I don’t think any human’s ever taken this picture ever before.” — Wiseman [27:11]
• On savoring:
  • “What are you savoring today? … If I’m going down the wrong path, I can just step back and go, what am I savoring?” — Wiseman [36:57]
• On risk and leadership: “If something goes wrong, we are definitely doomed. And you don’t dwell on it—you just respect that that feeling is there.” — Wiseman [39:11]
• On sharing the journey: “I feel like there is something required in sharing this journey.” — Wiseman [42:38]
• On laughter in space: “Sometimes we were laughing at each other, sometimes we were laughing together… There was a lot of laughter.” — Wiseman [47:55]
• On only-parenting: “I want them to feel safe and secure again. But making the decision, I watched Interstellar like two years before and almost called… It was too emotional for me.” — Wiseman [48:48]
• On the value of hard work: “Great things take really hard work… Behind that, it’s just countless days, months, years, half a lifetime of tremendously hard work, skill, and risk-taking, people that are willing to step out a little bit…” — Wiseman [77:19]
• Message of hope: “We are definitely going to make it. Do not give up. We are going to make it.” — Wiseman (Lightning round, 58:37)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Moon as connector, personal meaning: [01:53]
• First-hand launch/spaceflight experience: [03:26] – [06:55]
• Crew dynamics and diversity: [10:08] – [15:35]
• Active followership in NASA teams: [13:33]
• Curiosity and empathy: [17:57] – [19:56]
• Earth from deep space, the viral photo: [23:16] – [28:49]
• The “Cosmic Shoreline” and accidental time lapse: [31:27] – [33:30]
• On feeling rare in the universe: [33:34] – [34:53]
• Savoring progress, not just problems: [36:42] – [38:33]
• On why Apollo wasn’t “late”—it was impossibly early: [38:33] – [39:11]
• On risk in space missions: [39:11] – [42:34]
• Going viral, being careful as public-facing astronaut: [42:58] – [47:28]
• Parenthood, wife’s passing, motivation to fly: [48:07] – [53:27]
• Lightning round (fun rapid-fire questions): [56:50] – [58:43]
• Solar eclipse behind the moon: [59:38] – [64:20]
• On feeling spiritual but not religious post-mission: [72:50] – [75:53]
• Final reflections—what Reid wants the world to know: [77:10] – [78:18]

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Noteworthy Final Takeaways

On What the World Should Know (77:10)

• Communication is crucial, especially across differences.
• Earth is a magnificent, rare gift—if we could all feel lucky to be here, even briefly, we’d be better for it.
• Great things require hard work and risk—behind every remarkable achievement is tremendous human effort.

Closing Message (58:37)

“We are definitely going to make it. Do not give up. We are going to make it.” — Reid Wiseman

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Tone & Style

The episode is heartfelt, candid, and frequently humorous—alternating between awe-inspiring descriptions, nerdy technical asides, raw admissions of fear and loss, and a palpable sense of curiosity and optimism. Wiseman and Green both exude humility, warmth, and a commitment to sharing the human side of spaceflight.

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This episode is a wide-angle snapshot of what it means to be a human reaching beyond our planet—to confront fear, embrace difference, savor fleeting moments, and build hope for our future together.

Transcript

[Hank Green]

This is humans. Humans. Humans.

[Reid Wiseman]

Humans.

[Hank Green]

Humans. Humans, Humans. I'm Hank Green. I have never had a harder time writing an introduction to one of these episodes. People who follow me on YouTube will know that I was obsessed with the Artemis 2 mission and in particular the photographs that we received from it. I made a whole, like, Internet tool that organized the photos by what camera was used to take them, exactly when they were taken, and where the astronauts were in space when those photographs were captured. It got a fair amount of attention on the Internet, it was on Reddit, it was on a bunch of places. And then a couple of days later, I got a message on Instagram and it said, we need to talk. It was from Artemis 2 Mission Commander Reid Wiseman. You will be unsurprised to hear I was interested in talking, and so we are. Reid Wiseman, Baltimore kid, Navy fighter pilot, test pilot. Selected as a NASA astronaut in 2009. He spent 165 days on the International Space Station 2014, where he got a little famous online for sharing some of the raw rookie eyed wonder of spaceflight. In 2020, his wife Carol died of cancer, leaving him an only parent of his two daughters. Seven months later, he became chief astronaut, which is the top job in the astronaut corps. And it is one that grounds you because you are the person assigning everyone else's flights. Two years after that, he gave up that title for a chance, not a guarantee, at flying again. Well, it worked. This April, Reid was the commander of Artemis 2, the first crewed mission to the moon in over 50 years. He's one of four people who have been farthest from the Earth. He's also a guy who will, it turns out, slide into your DMs. Reid Wiseman, what is it about the moon?

[Reid Wiseman]

I think the moon to me is just about everyone on Earth looks at the moon. They all see the moon, they all dream about the moon. And it's something that to me personally connects you to family, it connects you to relatives, it connects you to friends around this planet. I spent a lot of time in the military, a lot of time away from home, and I would know if I was looking at that moon, my brother was looking at that moon, or my kids were looking at that moon. And I think it just ties you all together. It's like the original tv, it's the original Instagram, it's the thing that we can all just look at. We all see it the exact same

[Hank Green]

way, except in Australia, where it's upside down.

[Reid Wiseman]

I went to New Zealand two years ago and the first Thing I did, I wish my kids were here. The first thing I did when I got on the airplane is look at the moon and go, yep, it's upside down.

[Hank Green]

That's so weird. So it turns out it is a pretty weird astronomical situation that we are in. Our moon is very big. It's tidally locked. It was probably formed by this gigantic impactor a very long time ago that sort of split Earth into two. It seems to be made of a lot of Earth crust. So that's why we think that is the case. It potentially had an impact on the, you know, entire life system of Earth by creating our tides, which are a pretty big deal. Ever present, friend, always in the sky. So sometimes we point a rocket at it or substantially ahead of it so that they will meet together. And then we put four people on the top of that rocket. Can you, to start out here, tell me what it's like when they strap you into this giant candle and are like, okay, this might happen today. And you don't know for sure it's going to happen today, but it might happen today.

[Reid Wiseman]

No one was as surprised as the four of us that we lifted off that day. Eleven minutes into the window, the first time we had ever been on board that rocket fully fueled. We had a couple practices before then, but the crew had never made it on in these wet dress rehearsals. So this was the first time we got on. And I had prepared all of my family and friends that were going to be at Kennedy Space center that I really think it's 50, 50 that we'll launch on the first try. I think we're going to get behind timeline and something is going to prevent us from flying. But we didn't. I mean, NASA knocked it out of the park. And we went 11 minutes into the window, we went. We have four liquid engines, RS25s. When the four liquid engines start, they come up to speed. Everything just looked good on board the vehicle. You could hear a little rumble, couldn't really feel too much from that. But then those two big white heritage space shuttles, solid rocket boosters, light off, and you're just going 8.8 million pounds of weight. We were at liftoff and we got going in a hurry. It takes six and a half seconds to clear the tower. And that's one of the more dangerous parts of the mission, is getting clear of the launch gantry there. And six and a half seconds is a long time at £9 million riding uphill there. But it went quick and it was so smooth. Apollo astronauts talked about lateral Oscillations. Shuttle astronauts talk about all the bumpy feeling with the solid rockets. But for us, I think we were just on such a massive rocket. It was smooth all the way up. One other thing I'll just share at the beginning here, and I know we'll get into more detail later. Jeremy Hansen, he was the only rookie on the crew. He's such a deadpan, funny human being. We were a minute and a half into flight, and we still really couldn't see outside yet because we had our launch abort system covering the windows. But Jeremy just goes, this is so cool. And it, like, it broke the ice for all of it. It was perfect.

[Hank Green]

I mean, to have that be your first time in space. Amazing and smooth, but I imagine heavy and a long time under acceleration.

[Reid Wiseman]

About nine, nine and a half minutes under acceleration. And the acceleration under the solids. The solids last a little over two minutes. And that's. You're about three, three and a half times Earth's gravity there. So I weigh closing in on £200, some like £600 there. Your arms feel heavy, but the feeling is good because as long as you feel heavy, you know the engines are running and you're going the right direction.

[Hank Green]

You're just getting hugged.

[Reid Wiseman]

Yeah, yeah. And then the solid rocket motors were kind of winding down. And we were starting to feel like we were hanging in the straps because the G had come down to about a half a G. And when the solids come off, that's a loud evolution inside. But there's really no change when those two solid rocket motors come off. And then about three minutes into flight is, for us, is probably one of the neatest events. That's when our launch abort system detaches. Cause we're through the atmosphere now. And now we can get off of the core stage of our booster if we need to in an emergency. So when that launch abort system comes off, there's solid rocket motors in there that explosive bolts fire. It actually flies away off the top of the spacecraft. There's a lot of fire out the window. It kind of goes right by your window as you explode, accelerate past it. But now Victor Glover and I have these four huge windows. And we're looking out. We're only about 100,000ft. So we're about three times higher than airliners fly. So we're pretty far up, but not crazy far up. And you can look out just barely curvature of the Earth, the black of space. It was crystal clear. Like such high contrast. Absolutely gorgeous. And then moments later, the moon just rises above the horizon and we're pointed straight at it. That was just absolutely unbelievable. And Victor jokes, he's like, that's the last time read paid attention to the spaceship, because from then on in the mission, I was looking outside.

[Hank Green]

Just smearing your face against a window. Absolutely understandable. Is there a moment where you're like, these are the times that are the scariest parts of the mission, or are you just not really thinking about scary stuff until and unless something starts to look a little concerning?

[Reid Wiseman]

I like the way you asked that question. So first, a little bit of fear is always there. I think on launch day, we were so at peace, the four of us. We were so ready for this. We were ready to take whatever was going to come our way. But the whole mission, I would feel a little tiny bit of latent fear. I had never had panic. Anytime I would hear an emergency tone, come on. I could feel my heart skip a beat. I could tell I was gained up. But overall, just that fear wasn't there. I think the thing that was more prevalent to me was especially the first two days of the mission as we're kind of building speed and getting away from Earth was. I always felt like the next thing we could do would be go home if we had an emergency. So I was always really, really ready to go home and. And a little bit ready to go to the moon. And I kind of just kept that philosophy going until we were definitely going to the moon. And then I would let those things start to drop off the backside.

[Hank Green]

Right, right. In the beginning, there were aborts that did not involve going to the moon 100%. And then there were aborts that did involve going to the moon.

[Reid Wiseman]

And sometimes when you're going to the moon, your best abort, like Apollo 13, is to go to the moon. You'll get home faster if you continue to the moon.

[Hank Green]

Oof.

[Reid Wiseman]

I love it. I love it. It's just what we just did was so cool.

[Hank Green]

Yeah. And it's so interesting because I definitely feel in my job that sometimes I'm bringing people along on a journey, whether that's raising money for a hospital in Sierra Leone or starting up a new business or weird thing, because we have to feel these things where we're together doing a thing. But man, to be that focus and to be like the human, these four human focuses. Because, of course, it's much easier for us to pay attention to individual humans than to all of the millions of hours of human labor that has gone into Artemis missions so far and will go into future ones as well. You become the focus of all of those people's work and also the focus of all of us. Coming on this journey with you as something that humans are doing, not that four people are doing.

[Reid Wiseman]

I love that. And I didn't know when we were rolling up to launch, I just didn't know if people would tune in. I just didn't know if there was an appetite for that. And there was.

[Hank Green]

I didn't either.

[Reid Wiseman]

We've been so thankful to, specifically to content creators who actually showed up and made this into something that really connected, and it connected with people who are 90 years old equally as much as it connected with people who are five, six, seven, young teenagers. The people that have just run up and given us hugs or just said thank you for reminding us to dream. And it's been all around the world. It is so uplifting. It just reminds you of if humans come together and do something that is really unique, There is a huge appetite out there for that togetherness. There is.

[Hank Green]

And it's very hard to find because, of course, the things that are easiest to pay attention to are almost always the fights that we're having. That's just how we are. That's why it's so important to do big, amazing, crazy things. Even if it is only four people who are really doing it, we're all kind of doing it.

[Reid Wiseman]

I mean, this was a global effort for sure. The NASA teams that controlled that rocket, international teams that put together parts of this. But it just showed me that people around the world are hungry for a reason to unite. With World cup soccer going on right now, it kind of feels the same way. You see people from all these different cultures coming together, blending together, having a lot of fun, rooting for their teams. And to me, that same hunger is out there. It kind of makes me really. Actually, this might sound a little counterintuitive. I'm trying to really embrace everyone's differences. The thing I'm trying to not embrace is if we can't talk about those differences, My three crewmates that I flew with, Victor, Christina, Jeremy, we have significant differences. We have different spiritual beliefs. We have different political views. We have different ways that we look at society. But those differences, when we would let ourselves talk and communicate across these differences, we pulled all of each other up. We didn't ignore anybody's thoughts, anybody's viewpoints. We just talked through all of that, and we made each other better by talking across those differences.

[Hank Green]

I want to get back to the mission in a second, but we're talking about this. So I want to keep going on it. There's something interesting about astronauts where we talk about their politics and they don't talk about their politics either. And I've seen a little bit of it. And of course, once you leave the core, you can do whatever you want. Am I imagining this or is this like, internally? Is there advice on this front?

[Reid Wiseman]

I'll tell you, we're humans, and if we go out on a social engagement and people want to engage on those sorts of discussions, we will definitely engage on those sorts of discussions. At the end of the day, our goal is what we're doing. We're not doing it for the right or the left. We're not doing it for a us versus overseas nation. We're really trying to do this to push humanity farther. And in order to do that, we all have to come together. So at the end of the day, we all try to respect each other to the very core. But it's like a family dinner table. I mean, one of the ways to crush a family dinner conversation, it's usually religion, politics, or social events. And so we definitely try to honor that. And, you know, we do a pretty good job of it.

[Hank Green]

I think so. And it also feels a little like though I've seen, you know, I watched a lot of astronaut interviews preparing for this, and it seems. Seems like some people are like, I want to get some politics out of this guy. But in general, I see, you know, we just want to enjoy an amazing thing together. And that feels really good. It also feels good to know that, you know, there's a diversity of political perspectives up there on the way to the moon. But a thing I do want to ask you about. I've been lucky enough to meet a number of astronauts in my life. You're weird in a very interesting way.

[Reid Wiseman]

Perfect.

[Hank Green]

Every one of you I've talked to, you know, a lot of ambitious people have, like, very interesting quirks. And I assume you have to be somewhat ambitious to be an astronaut. But the astronaut quirk is like, really normal feeling. You feel like really normal people who exude two things, stability and, like, evenness and capability. And like, I don't find that even when I talk to, like, really, like, high level doctors, they're sort of like a little neurotic oftentimes and also like, filled to the brim with opinions that they wanted you to know about. In my conversations with astronauts, there's just a lot of, like, I don't know, there's just this evenness that I don't see in normal people, it seems like that's a lot of what's being selected for by the process.

[Reid Wiseman]

This is why I wanted to talk to you because you are going to talk about things that nobody else ever talks about. I'm probably going to end up getting myself in trouble. But I've thought a lot about what you're talking about here and I don't think we select for that. I think we try to, but I think at the end of the day, what ends up happening is humans are all experiential learners and we have all put ourselves into this position where we are in extreme life or death situations. We're very uncomfortable being or we're very comfortable being uncomfortable. We fly around in jets. Most of us are rock climbers or hikers or campers. I've lived under the water for eight days off the coast of Florida in full saturation. Like we just do these weird things and I think by doing those, we start to realize the things that really, really matter in a small team are leadership. But more importantly even than leadership is active followership. So we're so good at just blending. Like, I'm in charge right now because I understand what's going on and I know if I just set a course, everyone's going to follow in behind. But if I start going off course, I know somebody's going to come from behind me and say, stop, that's dangerous. We need to go this way and here's why. And then all of a sudden I go into a followership role and I'm now supporting that person. And we're fluid in that way all the time. And I think because we have gone and done these things, we've just gotten very skilled at that one particular team.

[Hank Green]

Dynamic, skill, active followership is a term I've never heard before. Immediately landed. I immediately knew what you meant. I've experienced that as well. And it's a great feeling to have that flexibility of leadership. The crew, the four of you. I think that one of the things people really enjoyed watching was just that you all clearly care a ton about each other and have a dynamic and it was a little like watching a boring but high stakes sitcom. And I just want to hear about how you guys developed that relationship and you know, did you ever have to be a check on each other's ambitions or like, how did you build that crew?

[Reid Wiseman]

What an amazing question. I really try to stress that it was hard work. I think anything that comes off anything that is well done, anything that is, is worth doing, is worth putting in Effort. And we put in a tremendous amount of effort. We have a small team of operational psychologists here at NASA and usually they'll give you a few briefings before you go fly, and they'll do a few little team dynamic things. But we reached out to them early on and said, like, we need strong investment. We were four very senior astronauts. I won't say there is power struggle, but it was just our balance wasn't great and we weren't always the best of friends. But what we did do over the three years that we were together is we really invested in each other. And when it came time to be in space together, you saw the product of all of that hard work. We really. I can only really remember two or maybe three moments of even brief friction on that mission. 252,000 miles away, 10 day mission in a tiny spacecraft, and to only know of like two or three very brief moments of friction. We really worked hard at that. We would always state our intentions. We would always give a tremendous amount of grace. No one is waking up trying to hurt me today. Everyone is trying to do the right thing. So if someone is getting under my skin, the best thing I can do is just ask why. We also spent a lot of time just meeting each other where we were. Like, I have a lot of quirks, like you said, all astronauts are quirky people. I have a lot of quirks. And so we spent a lot of time getting to know each other. But then as we were approaching the mission, especially in the last two or three months, we just started to accept each other for who we were. We had done a tremendous amount of feedback, a lot of work, but there were a few other things in each one of us that we would like to have improved. And we just decided we're just going to meet each other where we are. And when we got into space together, it was truly gold. It was a time in my life that I will never forget. I think the coolest lens that we have looked at this about a week after we came back from the moon, we were all together and I looked at Victor, Christina, and Jeremy and I said, guys, I don't know how you all feel, but I truly have zero regrets right now. I have zero regrets from liftoff until splashdown. And all of them agreed that's what you want, man. It was just so powerful.

[Hank Green]

That's great. All right, I want to ask you. We're going to get to the photography. I'm very excited to talk to you about that. But first, our first little segment here. Ask Hank, a question.

[Reid Wiseman]

Oh, I didn't think I would have a question for you. But now spending a little bit of time with you and I just see the way you think. You have a tremendous curiosity, and it's not just about one subject. You're curious about everything. And my dad. My dad had a few simple rules when we were kids growing up. And one of them was be curious about the world around you. And he tried to instill that into his two children, me and my older brother. So talk to me about this curiosity that you carry with you.

[Hank Green]

It's the best human emotion on par with love. The thing about it is it's one of the human things, you know, with love, you find the people and you are loyal to them and you hold them with curiosity. It lets you reach out, it lets you go somewhere else. Being curious about somebody who you don't like is hard, but so rewarding. And also how it all works. Like, if I'm not curious about the mind of a person who thinks that climate change doesn't exist, or who thinks that the moon landing was fake, if I'm not curious, at least a little curious about where that comes from, I will never be able to help someone, not get to that point if they're halfway there or start to help somebody, maybe see a little bit of excitement or interest in my perspective. If I'm not curious about them, they're never going to be curious about me. It's a really rewarding one to indulge in. It's a muscle you can grow. You could stretch it. And if you know more, you become more curious is a thing that I've noticed. Now, if I hear a fact, I have a bunch of related facts where I'm like, wait a second, that doesn't make quite as much sense when it comes to this thing over here. Why would an astronaut. They must be ambitious. But they seem so calm and even. That's a strange tension in the world. Like that kind of stuff. It's so good.

[Reid Wiseman]

I love that.

[Hank Green]

And I think that if you can indulge in it, and your dad is absolutely right to instill that in you. And one of the questions that I that I have on my list is, who helped you become a human? So maybe we should talk about that.

[Reid Wiseman]

Wow, that's deep. My mom and dad definitely, they gave me boundaries without controlling. So they let me earned their trust. And if I violated their trust, they would bring me back in and then I would re earn that trust. I think that that was a very important part of growing up not to over control, but to give boundaries and keep people in line. I've succeeded and failed at that with my own kids, but I think about that a lot. I'm a younger brother. My brother is five years older than me. I'm a pretty skinny guy. He's a ripped guy. Tough brotherly love definitely helped develop me. And then I also think something that was actually quite formative to me is I was a little kid and in high school, I was a tiny human being. I think everybody in high school gets bullied. I think even people that like, when you're getting bullied, you're like, well, that person never gets bullied, but I bet they get bullied too. Like that.

[Hank Green]

In some ways. Yeah.

[Reid Wiseman]

I don't know what's going on there, but. But I think that really taught me. I was never a kid that was going to be able to use muscle or strength to get my way. So I had to use my brain and reading people, reading emotion to understand, okay, they're in a space where I could talk to them. They're not in a space where I can talk to them. I'll come back later. And I started to develop that. I'm overselling it a little bit, but I think I started to develop that in high school where I had to just think of different ways to work through problems to get to the space that I wanted to get to.

[Hank Green]

And also a certain amount of that astronaut comfort with discomfort. If you got to go to that school where the bad thing happens, you figure out how to go to that school where the bad thing happens. I'm familiar with this.

[Reid Wiseman]

That's interesting.

[Hank Green]

This was high school Baltimore.

[Reid Wiseman]

This was high school north of Baltimore. Delaney High School. Great high school. A neat part of Baltimore. You know, you have to leave your hometown to understand the beauty. I say the same thing. I had to leave Earth to look back and really understand the beauty of Earth. But where I grew up, it's a little town called Cockeysville, Maryland. It's kind of right on the border of suburbs or change into farmland up north of Baltimore. It's gorgeous. Rolling green hills, forests, horse farms. Really beautiful place.

[Hank Green]

I find that having been bullied, I carry it everywhere.

[Reid Wiseman]

Wow.

[Hank Green]

I don't know if I would be anything like I am. The amount of time that I spend trying to make sure people like me, I'm like, is this just like a middle school thing? Am I just still trying to be safe from, like, physical assault? And I don't think that's the only thing going on. I think I'm ambitious for lots of

[Reid Wiseman]

reasons, but I don't know, I'm 50 years old now. I'm spending way more time now investing in me than I've ever spent before in my life. And I was driving in here this afternoon listening to a podcast on people pleasing because I feel like I just say yes a lot and I need to start saying no. I do say no a lot. So I don't think I'm really that far over. But Christina Cook was like, you should listen to this podcast. This will be good for you. And it has been good. It reminds me that you always should be investing in yourself because 50 year old me is way different than 20 year old me.

[Hank Green]

Yeah, I can resonate with that for sure. Okay, so last we left you in this spacecraft, you are now orbiting the Earth.

[Reid Wiseman]

Yep.

[Hank Green]

A thing to understand is that the International Space Station, the Space shuttle, they all orbit the Earth quite low. You know, in general, the view you get from the ISS is pretty much half of the sky is Earth and pretty much half of the sky is space.

[Reid Wiseman]

I think that's fair.

[Hank Green]

That's good to know that I didn't

[Reid Wiseman]

mess that up in front view. It's like when you're on the International Space Station, I say it's very intimate with Earth because you are, you're 250 miles up. It's black sky, all above black. And then the Earth, you see the curvature, you see the atmosphere, but you're like right there. And so you're really kind of in it. You're flying through the northern lights and southern lights. You're right over thunderstorms and hurricanes. You could see forest fires, you could see sandstorms blowing dust across the Atlantic Ocean. That's so cool. You know, you're just like, you're right in it, you know. But when I was up there on my first mission, I felt like I was so high, like an eagle on the highest perch looking down at Earth. On Artemis 2, we were gone. I mean, we were gone.

[Hank Green]

I feel like you did some orbits and then you had like one big orbit of Earth where you got far away and you came back close again. Is that right?

[Reid Wiseman]

Very good. Before the mission, I used to say, we're only doing three orbits of Earth. Okay, so on our first orbit, coming off of the launch pad at Kennedy Space center, we had what's called an apogee. Our highest point in that orbit of 1200 nautical miles, roughly five times the altitude of the International Space Station. Great view. Wasn't as high as I thought it would look like. It looked about like the space station, but from there, we come down to a perigee, which is our lowest point on the other side of Earth at 100 miles. So now we've just been five or that, five times the international Space Station altitude. Now we're underneath the space station on the bottom side of the Earth, and we're screaming. I mean, it looked like we were just skimming the atmosphere, because we were just skimming the atmosphere. And then from there, we go out to 38,000 miles on our second orbit of Earth. And this orbit is going to take 24 hours to complete because we're going so far away. And the cool part on this, our second orbit, is no humans had ever done that orbit. Yes, humans went to the Moon and Apollo, but we have never done a highly elliptic orbit with a human spacecraft quite like this one. So we lit our engines and we go out to 38,000 miles. And we took a little nap in that journey. Victor did some manual spacecraft piloting. And then at the top of that, at our apogee, 38,000 miles, mission control pointed the spacecraft back at Earth. And we got to look at Earth out the window. And it was like that big. I mean, it was like smaller than a basketball. Wow, you're just like. We are so far away. And then from that, though, Hank, we go from 38,000 all the way screaming back down to, again, 100 miles. So 38,000 miles down to 100, and we were screaming, Jeremy Hansen on the way, and he was in control of the spacecraft. As we're coming in towards 100 miles, and the Earth is, like, growing. You could just watch it growing from closing down on Earth so quick. And Jeremy turns around to me, he goes, I think we're going to smack right into the center of Earth. Because there was no relative motion. It was just growing so fast out the window. Then we do the magical burn that every astronaut desires, which is tli, translunar injection. And that is the burn that is gonna take us off to the moon. So in 100 miles, just barely skimming above the atmosphere, it almost felt like you reach out and touch the Earth, touch the clouds. We did our translunar ejection, and now we're heading out to the moon. And just a few, like, maybe an hour after we lit the engines on that burn, Mission control again turned us back around at Earth. And I don't know, in my brain, I expected to see the Earth, like, from space station, like to see this really crisp horizon. They turned us around at Earth. And Earth was in shadow. The sun was behind the Earth. The Moon was lighting up the entire Earth. And Earth was that big out the window. Christina Cook was right next to me, and she's just like, look at all the lightning. I mean, look at all the light. It was lightning everywhere. And then as our eyes start to adjust, you start to see the Sahara Desert. You start to see Africa. Then I was like, oh, they're straight to Gibraltar. You could see the Med. You could see Spain, Portugal. You couldn't quite see France and England. They were just over the horizon. And South America is in the photos I took there. But we couldn't see it from space. You could start to make out city lights around Africa. And then as our eyes adjusted a little bit longer, you see Northern lights, Southern lights. And I was pulling out my iPhone. I was trying to take pictures. There was so much glare. I just couldn't get it anywhere. Finally, Victor, I think it was Victor, tosses me the Nikon. I think I had the 35 mil lens on, and I just. I started cranking the ISO and cranking the ISO, and then, boom, I got that picture. And I know you have seen those pictures, and I have. And when I got that picture, I looked at the little viewfinder on the Nikon, that little back screen, and I just turned to my crew. I'm like, I can go home right now. I don't think any human's ever taken this picture ever before. And we were all looking at it. We're like, northern lights, southern lights. Oh, my gosh, that picture was nuts. And then we didn't have much time in that attitude. So we held that Nikon up to the window and just went, click, click, click. As many pictures as we could get. And then the Internet took all those. They turned them into time lapses. And then that is why I'm sitting here talking to you. Because the data that is pulled out of that series of pictures just blew my mind.

[Hank Green]

So that photo was the big sort of like, hello, world image that we got of the dark side of the Earth being lit up by the moon with. You could see the city lights. You could see lightning. And one of the things you can see, I think, is you can see in the ocean the reflection of the

[Reid Wiseman]

moon, which I thought was glare in the spacecraft. I was trying to move, like, you gotta think about this Nikon up against the window. And I'm trying to block it with my body, like, just trying to block out all this glare. Cause we did have the window shrouds up and, you know, I was trying everything and I was just so fed up with that glare. And then I think you or someone online was like, it's the moonglow. I was like, oh, my gosh.

[Hank Green]

When you wrote to me, you said, it is the mood reflected through the earth. I never thought about that. And then you said the reason there's a stack of 30 pictures is because

[Reid Wiseman]

I was trying to get the glare to go away.

[Hank Green]

So many pictures from the exact same angle. And were you. Was there a tripod involved here at all?

[Reid Wiseman]

No. A lot of times what we will do is our big windows. We have four of them that are this big, but they're not optically pure. You know, they're made to keep us alive and let us look outside. So there's multiple layers of plexiglass and they're not optically pure. So if you want to get the best picture out of those windows and you smash the lens up against the window so that it's. There's no angle, no obliqueness at all. And then you shoot right through that. So that is just getting that. That camera as tight against that window, it's got a rubber ring on it. So you don't damage the window, but you get the camera as tight on the window as you can and then just start nailing those pictures.

[Hank Green]

So that held it in place, which allowed this to be turned into this time lapse.

[Reid Wiseman]

Plus we're floating, so the camera's weightless, so it's not like it's hard. You don't get fatigued from that?

[Hank Green]

Well, yeah, I guess. But like, you don't want to push her. You float away.

[Reid Wiseman]

Yeah, you're usually blocking against the back of the, like the headrest or something. You can wedge yourself in there and then get a really nice picture.

[Hank Green]

Nice, nice. So turning this into a time lapse, you could see the lightning. You can see the northern lights moving around. You can see like, you can see some of the movement of the spacecraft because the Earth is actually changing. It's getting a little smaller and shifting a little. And then the other thing you could see, I imagine you couldn't see this with your naked eye, is satellites catching the sun, which you would never have noticed this with. They just look like stars with a single image. But after the time lapse was made, I think that this is a very important image, this movie that people made from your photos. And I asked my audience, cause I was like, you know, these great images, they get named. There's like the pale blue dot, there's Earthrise. And so I asked my audience, you know, what would we call this one? Because I couldn't come up with a good name. And someone suggested the Cosmic Shoreline, which is from a Carl Sagan quote. Carl Sagan said, the surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. And I was like, yeah, exactly. Because that's really what it looks like. It's like, here is this. And to see the planet alive with city lights, to see it alive with the geology and the atmosphere and like all of this thing going on, but also to see it alive with this, you know, our communication systems that we now use, it really feels sci fi. It really feels like we're part of something very odd and cool. And I have spent a lot of time with this image. What did it feel like when you first saw it turned into a movie?

[Reid Wiseman]

Oh, that. I just. I was so thankful. I was so thankful that someone online. I never would have thought to take these. This group of images that was never intended to be a time lapse. But people are hungry and people are brilliant and they saw this and they saw the potential. I don't know that somebody was looking at that and going, I wonder what data I can pull out. I think somebody was looking at it and go, I wonder what it would look like as a time lapse. I think it's going to be beautiful. And then the more I look at that little short time lapse first I'm kicking myself that I had to take four or five hundred images at a time lapse. The fact that you could watch, I mean, those images are seconds apart and you could see the Earth getting smaller. And when you pointed out starlink satellites, what we suspect is just a trail of starlinks around that one corner. I just, I mean, we spent so much time thinking about, is there life out there? Just imagine if you were another organization looking back at Earth and you're looking at all this richness going on around this planet. I mean, I used to think the atmosphere was beautiful, the ocean is beautiful, the clouds are beautiful. Now I think, like all of it is. All of that is beautiful. I just can't even imagine being another species looking back at Earth, seeing these lights moving across the surface and just you just be blown away or you would go, wow, there's such children down there. That's so adorable. But I just think you'd be so blown away. And it gives scientists to yet another way to think about how can we look for life out there? Like, what are we missing? What are things that we haven't thought about. There's so much science in that stack of images. It just. I love it. I love that somebody took the time to do that because they were curious.

[Hank Green]

Yeah. And you, like, you had no idea you were doing it. And here's this thing that you accidentally

[Reid Wiseman]

made no intention of that being a time lapse, but thank goodness it is. Yeah.

[Hank Green]

You said that as you came away from the window. You said to the crew, I will not take a better image on this

[Reid Wiseman]

mission or my life. That was the coolest thing I've ever photographed.

[Hank Green]

And then it turns out that you did take a better image, which is all of them together.

[Reid Wiseman]

Ah, thank you.

[Hank Green]

Which is a metaphor for something. It does seem like we're probably pretty rare. You know, things like this, things like what we're doing right now are probably pretty rare in the galaxy. Otherwise we would have more signs.

[Reid Wiseman]

I think so, too. I really think so, too.

[Hank Green]

It may be. And I think that, you know, maybe even in our lives, we'll find that life, you know, like, living chemistry, the chemistry that, like, wants and, like, does stuff, might not be that rare, but it's worth saying that it took four and a half billion years of Earth to get to, you know, like, zoom calls and satellites and stuff, and also, like, light bulbs or, you know, any of the things that humans have made. And it took, like, 4 billion years of life to get there. And that's a long time for a planet to remain stable. That's a substantial portion of the life of the universe, and it's certainly a substantial portion of the time that the universe has had all of the sort of necessary ingredients for life. So it may be that we're pretty weird. And so if some other thing did come by and saw those satellites glinting in the sun would be like, oh, man, wow. Here's another place where it happened. I don't know. It's cool.

[Reid Wiseman]

So cool. I just loved sitting on that. I love sitting with that. Just let that sit for a minute.

[Hank Green]

Yeah. Of course, the primary mission of Artemis 2 was testing as a test flight. It's also, you know, there's science being done. I think at one point, you pumped all of the air out of the capsule. Is this correct?

[Reid Wiseman]

Some of it. We got down to 10.2 psi, so we're 14.7 here on Earth. We did get down to 10.2. We didn't pump it all out. Jeremy would have to, liked, loved us to have pumped all the air out, because then we would have been on a spacewalk, but we didn't quite go that far.

[Hank Green]

Okay. But, yeah, you suited up and did the emergency procedures. You tested a bunch of stuff. You exercised the exercise machines. You made sure the toilet worked and then fixed it when it broke. But my job, what I think about so much, is what helps people pay attention to things. Why do we pay attention to anything? And how do we pay attention? Of course, we need to pay attention to the problems. And some of the problems we're not great at paying attention to. I wish that they were a little more salient than they are. But I also think that we need to focus on. The great things that we do, the things that we've discovered, the cooperation that has led closer and closer to understanding what reality is really like, and that allows us to do great things, and it also allows us to alleviate great suffering. And it's very easy to not pay attention to that stuff because it's not a problem. The bridge didn't fall down. Great. That wasn't supposed to happen. So when I think about a lot of the work that y' all did, and I agree, I did not know if people would pay attention, but they did. I just think it's important for us to figure out the ways to get people to align themselves towards something like the World cup or like the Artemis mission. Like, we need to do these things so that we can be focused on something that isn't just the rifts.

[Reid Wiseman]

I don't know why that's easier, but it is easier. One thing that our operational psychologist, they gave us a drill when we were deep in the training, we were getting pretty beat down. I mean, we were tired. There was more delays. We were having heat shield issues. And it just seemed like, man, we're working really hard. We're not sure that this mission's ever going to go. And this operation psychiatrist, Jim Pagano, he just said, I'm going to give you guys one word, and I want you to think about just one time every day. And that word is going to be savor. What are you savoring today? Just pick one thing now, Hank. I can, at any point in the day, if I'm going down the wrong path, I can just step back and go, what am I savoring? And that ties to me. That ties into exactly what you were just saying of it really makes the news when it's an ugly story. It really makes the news when it's an ugly story. It seldom makes the news when it's a good story. But every newscast usually ends with, like, a puppy dog that's running up to the camera, you know, and so it's like every news story does end with that one thing that you're savoring. And I do think about. You've given me the mic for a second, so I'll continue to wax a bit. But I do think about all the problems in the world, and I do want to fix all those problems in the world. But the way. Maybe it's a capitalist brain, but one of the best ways to fix all these problems is progress, innovation, new ideas, new creative thinking and pulling us from forward. And maybe, I mean, what SpaceX has done in the last few years is kind of part of that. You're developing something so grand and so new that you're just pulling people out of a problem set and pulling them down. And I think you could do the same with civil rights movements. You could do the same with world hunger. There are times when the dam breaks open and there's a whole new ideology that just pulls us out of a problem set. And that's kind of what I'm trying to think about right now. Like, what are we going for? What is our big thing that we're trying to pull? Not solve a problem, but just pull us because we solve some totally different innovation.

[Hank Green]

This is a great point, and it ties into something I wanted to ask you because it occurred to me while I was watching the Artemis II mission. It has felt for a while, like, why couldn't we get back to the moon? We're just so disorganized. We're so messed up. Nothing works anymore. We were able to do this in 1969. Why can't we do it in 2025?

[Reid Wiseman]

Why not now?

[Hank Green]

Like, it's ridiculous. Watching you and having recently been to Johnson Space center and seen, you know, the inside of the Saturn V was like, I don't think we're late now.

[Reid Wiseman]

I think we were very early then. Way early.

[Hank Green]

That did not make sense. We should not have done that.

[Reid Wiseman]

Hank. I've said to so many people, as we're going about past about 180,000 miles, where I started to be like, okay, we are so far away from Earth right now. If something goes wrong, we are definitely doomed. And you don't dwell on it. You just respect that. That feeling is there. And I turned to my crew. I'm like, I bet the Apollo guys were pretty scared, too, because they were doing it for the first time in the 1960s, and they didn't talk about it, but they had to have felt some fear. Oh, yeah.

[Hank Green]

Had to have. Certainly the Apollo 13 crew felt a

[Reid Wiseman]

lot of fear, definitely.

[Hank Green]

But, I mean, there were lots of individual moments, but then, of course, just being strapped onto that thing. And of course, they'd also just all lost a number of their colleagues.

[Reid Wiseman]

Yep. Apollo 1. Yeah, it's huge. And they lost a few of their colleagues in. In aviation incidents all around that same time as well. So it was a risky time to be in that business, for sure. It still is, but it for sure was then. Yeah.

[Hank Green]

Yeah. I mean, that's happened. That's happened to you, I think. Have you lost colleagues in test flight work?

[Reid Wiseman]

Primary place I lost colleagues was in training, in flight school training. That is a very unforgiving environment there when you're first learning to cut your teeth on. On aviation. And then in my early days in flying military aircraft off of aircraft carriers. Lost two good friends out there. And we've been. I mean, knock on wood. And we've been doing pretty well here for the last few years, and. And it's been a pretty good run.

[Hank Green]

Yeah, I mean, there's. We're better at stuff. There's a good culture there at NASA, but there's. There's no way to not have this be. To eliminate risk in these kinds of situations.

[Reid Wiseman]

You cannot eliminate. We were. I mean, £9 million was sitting on that launch pad, and when we hit the atmosphere on entry, we were doing six miles every second on the way home. Six miles a second.

[Hank Green]

I was scared, and I wasn't in the thing. I was like, should we watch it with Orin? Katherine was like, oh, yeah, it's gonna be fine.

[Reid Wiseman]

It's gonna be fine. My kids were in the viewing room in mission Control, and I was like, I'd actually rather them be scrolling on the Internet sitting there watching this. But it did work out. And then. And then once it works, you're just so proud. You're just so exhilarated, and you just such a. Like seeing all the Watch parties. One of the coolest parts, Hank, after we landed is when I finally got connected back to the Internet. And I took a couple days just to chill, but it started to trickle in, like all these launch videos and, you know, launch videos to Princess Purple Rain. I'm crying my eyes out watching these things and the splashdown parties. And then I don't really need the AI Dance videos of my crew as we're going around the moon. But even that stuff was funny. So, you know, just. I got to relive it in such a magical way through the eyes of all these people. Oh. One of the funniest pictures. Some lady posted a picture of us going uphill on the rocket, so there's all the smoke and fire coming out the bottom. And she said something like, I can't board a commercial airliner without Xanax. And these four people willingly boarded this rocket. And I'm looking at that, just cracking up. Like it's so relatable. We have a time where everybody can talk about how they're seeing the world and people can digest it or not digest. So even, even with all the ills of social media, the Internet, it really can be powerful and it can bring a lot of people a lot of joy.

[Hank Green]

You're not a stranger to social media.

[Reid Wiseman]

I really do feel. I already told you, I feel like I got a people pleaser problem here. The American taxpayers have given me a tremendous gift and if I don't share it in every possible way, I feel like I've let the people down a little bit. And so I do feel like there is something required in sharing this journey.

[Hank Green]

You talked a little bit about, like not wanting to be a meme. There's this moment early in the mission when, when you report to mission control. There's two Microsoft Outlooks on my computer and neither one of them is working good. Comfortable. Everybody's had that feeling before. And you said, if that's the thing that I get memed for good, no shade to Microsoft is that feeling of I'm worried about getting memed. Is that a feeling sort of in retrospect or were you thinking about. Because you're going to be on camera this whole time, people are going to be looking at you and we're going to take whatever we like. People are going to take what they take from the people. You know, it's just how we, how we are.

[Reid Wiseman]

I can tell you for sure in this, Victor, Christine and Jeremy, they just didn't share this fear that I had. But I would, I would look at it through that lens a little bit. And I don't know if it was because, forgive me if this answer is just a little bit off track, but I don't know if it was because of my role as commander, which I really wear. Shared this mission 100%. I mean, if you ask them, we shared this mission 100% to a fault. We shared this mission, but I didn't want. We had one Canadian on board. We had one woman on board. Victor Glover is the first African American, first black astronaut to go around the moon. I don't look at them that way. Like I. We're all for astronauts. But I also, in the back of my head was like, I don't want one of us to be singled out. I'm the old white dude, you know, I just don't want one of us to be singled out in that way. That. That to me, was more of what I was a bit cautious about. And then, like, you don't know me well, but I really like to speak my mind, I like to joke around, I like to goof off a little bit. I'm serious when I need to be. But I think I was at risk of potentially doing something that could negatively impact my three crewmates when I meant it in a humorous way. And it just didn't come across that way. So you just gotta understand, yes, this mission had risk, and yes, you have to respect where we were in the machine. You got to respect the machinery, you got to respect the people, but you also have to respect this agency, this nation, this international community, have worked for this moment for coming up on two decades, and we have to respect that as well.

[Hank Green]

Yeah, and you never know what people are going to take from it. It could be a scary Internet out there, I'm sure well aware. That makes perfect sense to me that you would feel that. And you become this, like, focal point for humanity. And we all, like, as we've been talking about, you know, we have this collective experience, and you got to experience our collective experience of the mission and what that felt like to you. We're all having this, and it's just crazy to, like, be a human. That has to be the focus of that for some period of time, and it will wane, but, like, it's, you know, it's gotta be pretty intense. And you're mostly training to run a spacecraft. That's what you mostly train for. You also get media training, I'm sure. But the job isn't to be the focus of all of humanity's attention. The job is to make sure that all of these parts of the spacecraft work. But you also have to do that

[Reid Wiseman]

other thing to what you just said. I really want to try to relate this a little bit. We never felt like that during the mission. We never felt like we were under a microscope. In fact, to be honest, we didn't even know a lot of that video was going out to the general public. Really, we did not know. We just thought it was going down to mission control. The only reason that a lot of that imagery came out is because we realized a shortcoming in our onboard video. And mission control figured out a way to connect a GoPro into the downlink. And so I put a GoPro in my pressure suit pocket that we got approved through the system at the very last minute. So I flew that. All that video came from a GoPro that I stuck in my pocket in my pressure suit that we flew up because we just. We didn't have an internal cabin camera. It was just an oversight.

[Hank Green]

Wasn't part of the mission. That was. That was just. You did that?

[Reid Wiseman]

Well, it was the team. Once we got that camera aboard, mission control figured out how to feed that through our 4K encoder down to mission control. And they're like, yeah, it'll be really good for us. It'd be really helpful for us in mission control to see you all on board. And I'm like, yeah, that would be great. Well, turns out 8 billion other people were watching us on board, watching Victor shower, watching us eat. But we never felt like we were under that microscope. We were truly just best friends doing the mission and getting along really, really well.

[Hank Green]

Well, I'm glad, because otherwise we'd all be watching.

[Reid Wiseman]

Touche. Some of the coolest moments that I've seen are when you can see us, like, downloading pictures onto our computers and you, like, point something. You can see us all cheer and then get right back into work. I just. I really love those moments. They're very raw, human emotional moments. Yeah.

[Hank Green]

One of the things that you said was that in space, when you're giggling with laughter, your laughter. Tears stay in your eyes.

[Reid Wiseman]

Yep.

[Hank Green]

And I just love the idea that you're up there giggling with laughter.

[Reid Wiseman]

Oh, we had a lot. Sometimes we were laughing at each other, Sometimes we were laughing together at something else. But there was a. There was a lot of grace and there was a lot. A lot of laughter. I mean, we really did laugh quite a bit.

[Hank Green]

In an interview you did with a New Yorker, you said on day seven and the mission, you had this video chat with your daughters, and you said, that was the day they understood why I said yes to this mission. Yes. That made me think, I think you might be the first only parent to go to space. You're certainly the first only parent to go beyond low Earth orbit. That introduces a level of risk that is beyond, you know, the average risk that's being taken.

[Reid Wiseman]

What is wrong with me?

[Hank Green]

So my question is, what is wrong with you? You said that they understood why you decided to go. And I. I wanted to ask you why. Why did you go?

[Reid Wiseman]

It is very selfish, and it is very selfish to want to go do this. And then As a human, we are great at rationalizing. Like, we can just rationalize everything. So I would. I would talk to my kids and say, there's 8 billion people on this planet and them have an opportunity to go do this. How could I say no to that? That's a rationalization. I also am going to tie this back. I had the opportunity to talk to former President George Bush at one point, and I asked him, like, how did you decide to run for office when you had two daughters and you knew it would just be so disruptive to their lives and it would just maybe change them for the better, but maybe not change for the better. And he said, you know what? Because I've always wanted to serve, and I've always had this distant dream, and I saw the opportunity, and I knew that I would be a better parent and a better role model if I did this than if I pulled back from this. And I would never want them to resent me for pulling back from something that I valued. And so for me, when my late wife was getting sick, I really wanted to leave here. We don't have family here. I wanted to get around family. I wanted to go back home. But she was adamant that we not do that. She knew, I love this job. I love coming to work every day. I work at the greatest place that a human could work at. The culture here is spectacular. Not every day is good. We do way too much. Way too much PowerPoint here. But overall, it is. It is a great. Nothing against Microsoft, but it's a great place to work. She just didn't want me to leave, that she didn't want her kids to leave their friends or where they're growing up in the school system here. And so I also felt. I felt like it was the right thing to go fly into space one more time to honor that we had stayed here. And then I really thought that my kids. I did not want to leave them orphaned. That was probably my number one thought as we were going past the moon was all, I want to do is hug my kids. I want them to feel safe and secure again. But making the decision, I watched Interstellar like two years before we launched. And I almost called the chief astronaut and said, take me off. It was too emotional for me. It was just too emotional. So, anyway, I know we're deep in the emotion right now, but at the end of the day, I just. The opportunity was there. I was very honored. I felt like I knew that this mission was not going to be about leadership. This mission was going to be about Togetherness. And I just felt like I understood that aspect of it. I'm not trying to be arrogant normally. Whenever somebody says that, say, just stop talking. So I'll just stop talking.

[Hank Green]

I don't know, man. There's. I don't know if you know, but I went through my own cancer journey. I was diagnosed when my son was 6. And you know, when it was, when we were not sure what the heck was going on, when we knew that I had cancer, but we didn't know I'd been staged. I didn't know anything about my prognosis, you know, that, like seeing, you know, my wife have to turn into the strong one and then me turn into the strong one and do that. You did that shared leadership stuff. I thought I might be worried about missing the future and not seeing as much of the human story as I could or my businesses. I just wanted to make sure that my son had a dad and six was a great time for him for me to be diagnosed with cancer because he didn't get it all the way. Whereas now he's nine. I think he did it a lot more. But I think that if he'd been, you know, a teenager, if he'd been on his way to college, I think that, like, you know, to some extent, like, I did the big part of the thing, you know, I got you through childhood. So I understand, like, wanting to maybe take a step back and not fly for a while.

[Reid Wiseman]

There was no option for me to fly, and there was a few opportunities in there and there just. There was no capacity even doing the chief job. I was way out over my skis. It was. That was a tough time, I think, because I was just. I was in such a tough spot in my life when I was a chief astronaut that it allowed me to lean really hard on some young astronauts who were up and coming in the office. Christina Cook was one of them. Drew Morgan was another. Em McLean. Like this group that had just finished their first spaceflights and they were hungry to lead. And I really leaned on them heavily in their middle management jobs. And it made, in a weird way, it taught me a really valuable leadership lesson of, of just point them in a direction and set them free. General Stanley Crystal has a phrase, eyes on, hands off. Like, just let them go lead because these are super capable people. And I saw how effective that was. It really helped me in this mission to understand what leadership can really look like.

[Hank Green]

The military. So I have very peripheral contact with the military, just friends and family. There's something very interesting about it to me, where, you know, I don't know what it is, but the multiple of like income between the person who's just enlisted in the top five star generals is a lot less than you'd find at the average US Company for sure. And then astronauts making good money, but not like the kind of money where that's commensurate. Where if you had this level of fame as some other thing, you probably would be making a lot more money. There's something here that matters a lot more than money, which is, that's not surprising. But there's something here that matters a lot more than money. And it's interesting that it exists inside of this ultimate American institution of the military. Whereas America is also sort of this ultimate capitalist place. Maybe not we could get more and maybe we will. That there is this institution that is really about duty and it is about the legacy and it is about the story and it is about representing something that is much bigger than you. It is interesting that NASA to me appears to also hold onto that ethos without being something that is about war and defense, for sure.

[Reid Wiseman]

When I applied to NASA in 2009, I think the thing I was most excited about here was it's still service. You're still doing it out of love for the mission. But the mission is not combat. The mission is exploration. That, that in itself was the number one reason that I, I wanted to come to this organization. And in the military, I don't even think it's right to talk about. I mean, we have to pay people because currency is just kind of the. You kind of got to live. Yeah. And. But in the military, I just, I don't. I guess some people do go in the military for the money. You know, they probably grew up real, real tough lives and they go into that for that stability of finance.

[Hank Green]

Stability.

[Reid Wiseman]

But in the end, what you find in is, it's the experience, it's. It's getting to see the world. It's getting to grow your horizons. It's getting to understand what it is like to serve alongside men and women who you truly, you truly know. There might come a time where you have to take yourself out to keep them alive. And that is unbelievably powerful. And it, it just, I just, it's. It is an incredible place to spend some time.

[Hank Green]

Do you miss that?

[Reid Wiseman]

I miss. You get. It's hard to say because I get such good comradeship here. We have such close relationships. But when I really look at who I keep in touch with in my life, it's those first officers and first enlisted men and women that I worked with, the folks who were in my first fighter squadron in VF31, those are the people that I'm still to this day, like, the most bonded to outside of the folks I live with here in Houston. That's a formative part of your life. You're all in your early 20s, you're getting out there for the first time and you're doing something absolutely enormous. When you look back, it's like I was 23 years old flying fighter jets off of aircraft carriers. Like, first, how did my mom let me do that? But then how did the United States government and the people trust me with that? Yeah, I had no business.

[Hank Green]

All right, a lightning round.

[Reid Wiseman]

It's time for the lightning round.

[Hank Green]

Are you ready?

[Reid Wiseman]

Yes, sir.

[Hank Green]

Orion or F14?

[Reid Wiseman]

F14. Take that, Orion.

[Hank Green]

David Bowie's Starman or Elton John's Rocket Man?

[Reid Wiseman]

I'll go Starman.

[Hank Green]

What's the ISS smell like?

[Reid Wiseman]

Clean, surprisingly.

[Hank Green]

Oh, that's not what I've heard. That's great. What's harder, a spacewalk or landing an F14 on an aircraft?

[Reid Wiseman]

Spacewalk is so hard. It's just so hard. You didn't even have to hear the second thing.

[Hank Green]

Gravity or no gravity?

[Reid Wiseman]

Oh, no gravity.

[Hank Green]

100% best thing about space?

[Reid Wiseman]

No gravity.

[Hank Green]

Worst thing about space, no gravity.

[Reid Wiseman]

It's the weirdest thing about space.

[Hank Green]

That's for sure. For sure. Favorite space meal.

[Reid Wiseman]

Oh, I really love sweet and sour pork. And if you could finish that up with a chocolate pudding cake at the end, Chef's kiss.

[Hank Green]

Did the Artemis crew listen to music? If so, what was on rotation?

[Reid Wiseman]

Okay, so we did. Around the sixth or seventh day, Victor Glover found a speaker and rewired it to plug it into my little computer. And then we go to pull up music. And we thought we were gonna be able to pick songs, but we had been uploaded one long, like 18 hour, singular MP3 song. So we would just go to different spots and hit play and we would get whatever we got. That's awesome.

[Hank Green]

Would you rather walk on the moon or on Mars?

[Reid Wiseman]

Oh, Mars.

[Hank Green]

Are there aliens?

[Reid Wiseman]

100%.

[Hank Green]

Somewhere.

[Reid Wiseman]

Somewhere.

[Hank Green]

Do you have a secret skill?

[Reid Wiseman]

Ooh, I do. I really like to cook. I really do like to just take mixed ingredients and create something that is both beautiful and delicious. That is something I love to do.

[Hank Green]

Are we going to make it?

[Reid Wiseman]

We are definitely going to make it. Do not give up. We are going to make it.

[Hank Green]

So let's go back to the moon. So you're headed out to the moon. Am I correct that without this April 1st launch date, there are a number of occurrences that would not have occurred? A number of good opportunities for photography and science that wouldn't have occurred.

[Reid Wiseman]

I don't know if hello world would have occurred.

[Hank Green]

Wow. Because it wouldn't have been the perfect, like, sunless Earth.

[Reid Wiseman]

And I did not know that that moment was even coming. We were not expecting that. Just mission control all of a sudden said, hey, we're gonna point you back at Earth for an Earth viewing opportunity. We didn't even know what that was going to be. Yes. We did not know that.

[Hank Green]

This is all I would be trying to figure out. I'd be like, in the thing being like, oh, if we launch April 1st, we're gonna get this. And we were gonna get this over. Yeah, but that's not what your jobs are, Hank.

[Reid Wiseman]

Just remember, we are underachievers. So we were.

[Hank Green]

Yeah, that's what I always think about astronauts.

[Reid Wiseman]

So April 1st also gave us. Which you're probably getting to, but April 1st gave us a very unique opportunity, which is not only did we get that solar eclipse with Earth, but we got a solar eclipse as we passed the far side of the moon. And that turned into, I think, the most pure and raw human moment of visual interest in the whole mission. That was not something we expected. We knew we were going to see it and we had seen it in training, so we were prepared for what we thought it would look like. But when we were there in three dimensionality, there was a very spiritual side to that, a side that was very difficult to comprehend as a human. That gave us all pause and true astonishment.

[Hank Green]

So what are you seeing in this moment?

[Reid Wiseman]

So we just give me a little grace here to set the stage. But I'm on the 400 millimeter long lens. I'm doing solar corona imagery on the Z9. My crewmates have on the truly, the little paper solar eclipse glasses that NASA sends out everywhere that the science centers have save weight. We were, we packed them at the last second. We put them in our private medical kits so that we could get them on the vehicle. Our flight docs, flight surgeons, put them in these little kits for us because this solar eclipse was just not part of our plan. So Victor, Christina, Jeremy have these glasses on. And Jeremy's doing overall photography. Christina and Victor are just kind of managing the cabin, watching this. And as the sun goes behind the moon now, you know, think a solar eclipse on Earth, the sun is about the same diameter as the disk of the moon. That's just Crazy that that works out. Yeah. But I think we are about 30. The sun was about 32 or 35 times smaller than the moon. So it's this little tiny sun, like that big is just escaping behind the moon. Right.

[Hank Green]

Because the moon's so big, I'm taking

[Reid Wiseman]

pictures of the corona. And as I'm taking pictures of the corona, the sun is now behind the moon. I can see the corona. And I could just hear my crewmates gasping. Oh, my God, you gotta see this. This is unbelievable. I never imagined it to look like this. Like there's just. There's a. An absence in the middle of the universe right now. And so after about three minutes, Christina comes. It's like, Reed, just trust me. You gotta get off the camera. Like, you gotta just go look. So I come off from behind the Z9 and I look around the cabin. Jeremy's looking out one window. Christina's now on the Z9 taking long lens pictures. And Victor is up in the docking tunnel above me. But he looks at. He's like, reed, you gotta come up and look at this. I'm like, no, no, no, Just stay there and look at it. Like, I just want you to continue to see this. He's like, no, you gotta come look at this. And so I go up. This docking hatch window is like this big, but it's on the oblique. So you can kind of get your head up in there and kind of look through this. This hole like that. And I look through it and I turned right to Victor and I just go. I don't think my brain has evolved to the point where I can process what I am looking at. I'm telling you, Hank, it was the most foreign thing. Like Victor said, we just went sci fi. Christina has said in post flight that she could look at it for about 15 seconds, but then she would have to look away because it was so hard to process. We were looking at so out the window. Just imagine it's like this matte black sphere, three dimensional. It looked completely CGI fake, but it's just right outside your window. And then there's a white halo all the way around it. And you can see stars through that halo. You can see the line of planets. You're like in the middle of the galaxy. But in the center of that image, you can't see anything because it's the moon being blocked out by the sun. And then as we start going on a little bit longer, the left edge of the moon, you could just start to see some craters. And it had the tiniest Little tinge of blue to it on the left side of the Moon. And that was because the sunlight is now bouncing off of Earth. Earth and coming and highlighting just a sliver of the left side of the moon with Earthshine. And that whole thing was just. We will never be able to share the beauty, the gravity, and the incomprehensibility of that moment with anyone else on Earth. It was just. It was truly breathtaking, spectacular, awe inspiring. Like every.

[Hank Green]

Yeah, there's no good words.

[Reid Wiseman]

There's nothing.

[Hank Green]

We've used them all up.

[Reid Wiseman]

There's nothing. Yeah, there's nothing. And even looking at those pictures that you look at, there's one that they took from a GoPro on the solar array, and you could see part of the spacecraft and you could see that eclipsed moon. That picture is very, very special. In fact, the background of my cell phone is the eclipsed moon because that was the moment for me, the visual moment that was the most special. Please go see it if you ever get a chance. Please, please go. So it's worth all the risk.

[Hank Green]

I heard you talking about a moment when you're at your most distant from the Earth. And it was like when the numbers should start to go down and then the number went up.

[Reid Wiseman]

Our flight dynamics had passed us. Our maximum distance from the Earth in nautical miles would be 219,667. 209,667 in nautical miles. So when we were at our furthest distance, really on the far side, we're looking down out the window, you can see the terminator to the Moon. We're almost losing the Moon because the sunlight is disappearing. So, Victor, Christina, we're doing lunar science observations right there. And I was just watching the data on the displays and I saw 219667. And I thought, this is a great time to grab my phone and do a video of when it goes back down 219666. Like, that would be a cool. Social media will love that. Like, this will be a cool moment. And so I'm filming and it goes 219668. I'm like, not 666. It went up another mile. And I'm like, huh, that's weird. And now we're like, so far away from Earth, the numbers are going up pretty slow. So it took about another minute or two. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to start a new video because it's going to go 219667 now, and we're going to be going home and it goes 219669. And that was where I was just like, I think they messed up. And I think we're gonna go a little too far. And I don't think we're ever gonna go home. It's such a tiny spacecraft, and you're far enough from the moon that there's not a ton of gravity pulling you back. Of course you're gonna get back to Earth at some point, but it could be weeks or months away. But I'm like, man, this is just terrible. And then a few minutes later, I see it go 21966 and just clicked down. And I told the crew, hey, we're going home. And everybody went, woo hoo. And then right back into the work.

[Hank Green]

But you hadn't been like, hey, everybody,

[Reid Wiseman]

I think we're going. I'm definitely a little worried.

[Hank Green]

Yeah, keep that one to yourself until you're sure.

[Reid Wiseman]

And then the next day we did return trajectory correction burn number one. And no one ever said that we were off course. So I was like, all right, we'll let this one go.

[Hank Green]

I mean, that's a lot of significant figures to get that perfect. So I wouldn't be too worried about it.

[Reid Wiseman]

We were good.

[Hank Green]

You were good. Another question. Do you know who was farthest away from Earth when Integrity was farthest away from Earth?

[Reid Wiseman]

He refuted this. We just talked about this yesterday. It had to have been Jeremy Hansen, because Christina and Victor were both at Windows conducting science. They both had cameras, they both had their notebooks. So the windows were pointed at the moon, which means that the back end of the spacecraft was the first way I was looking at the displays, watching the telemetry for the distance. So Jeremy, by default, then. Jeremy must have been.

[Hank Green]

You didn't wrestle him out of the way.

[Reid Wiseman]

We let Canada win. I mean, I can't believe we did that. We didn't think this through.

[Hank Green]

And then you headed home. Was there a scariest part of the journey home?

[Reid Wiseman]

Oh, there were a few acute moments of fear during this mission. But I would say there was two things on the way home that I didn't love. The first one was we had a little. A little leak in our fuel system on the spacecraft. On our oxidizer side, we had helium pressure that was leaking across a series of valves. So they had closed a primary valve up above it. We were safe. We were totally safe. But at some point in doing that, mission Control and us, we got a little bit out of sync and we got the vehicle in a little bit of a configuration that we didn't expect. So going into one of our return trajectory correction burns, which they're not the most important, but they're important you can recover if you miss one. But I was getting a little worried. We had a couple warnings pop up that were unexpected, and I was worried we were out of config to get this vehicle home. And that was the first time I realized. A little shameful here, but that was the first time I realized how hard our teams on the ground were working from April 1st all the way until April 7th, 8, 9, to get us home safe. And I could really feel their stress and fatigue at home making sure this spacecraft was keeping us alive. I gathered the crew after that, and I said, hey, I took some guilt on that myself, some blame. And we talked through it and said, let's just not forget in these last three days, we aren't going home. Right now, we're 180,000 miles from home, and we're in a really dangerous spot. It was a re caging moment for us and a re caging moment, I think, for the ground teams. I haven't talked to them in particular about that. So I think that that ended up being a good thing, that we were a little out of config for that return trajectory correction burn, because I think it helped us. And then the day before we came home, we were studying our entry procedures. I remember we were in the back of the spacecraft. All four of us were lined up studying our entry procedures. No one was at the displays because we were having a little conference. And we heard our one and only emergency tone of the whole mission. And there's really only two things that can trip an emergency tone. One of them is fire, and one of them is depressurization. And we weren't feeling our ears pop at all. So I went straight to the displays. I already knew what it was gonna say. And it was a fire alarm. And with that, the vehicle automation shuts down all ventilation, all power to try to take those two legs out of the fire triangle. And we didn't see smoke, we didn't smell smoke. So then the next level of fear, there is something is overcurrent or burning behind the panels. And that would be pretty bad, potentially catastrophic for us. So heart rate was elevated, fear was elevated. Not terror, just not comfortable with that. And we talked to mission control after a minute or two, and I asked them specifically, do you see anything that's gone off scale, high current wise? And they said, no, everything looks good for us. We went around. Jeremy and Christina were Off, like smelling, truly smelling everywhere, every panel. Victor and I were back at the displays, working with the automation on the machine, the computer system to try to get the vehicle in a safe configuration. And over a few minutes we realized it was a false alarm. It was a false detection of smoke, probably some particulate through the smoke detection system. And we worked to repower the spacecraft. The most uncomfortable part of that, because we had no ventilation, no cooling, no power, is it started to warm up rapidly inside the spacecraft. You know, we're just sitting out there roasting in sunlight 300 degrees above zero and you could feel it getting warm in there. It was uncomfortable. We knew we were safe, but it was uncomfortable. Yeah. Oh yeah. And then after that we hit the atmosphere at like Mach 39 and it was a big ball of fire and all that.

[Hank Green]

Pretty scary. But as planned.

[Reid Wiseman]

As planned. Better than planned. Better than planned. That was awesome.

[Hank Green]

There are those moments where you're out of contact. Are those special or disconcerting at all?

[Reid Wiseman]

You know, a lot of people talk about losing contact with Earth on the far side of the moon. That was a 45 minute LOS loss of signal. But throughout this mission we're communicating through the Deep Space Network. And there's three receiver sites on planet Earth. As Earth rotates, you're switching between Canberra, Spain and US for the big receiving dishes. Australia, Spain, us. And so as the Earth is rotating, there were periods of time where we would go two or three hours without communications with Houston. And we had trained for that. And our displays were very good at telling us when we're about to lose calm, why we have lost calm, and when we will reacquire. And so I actually looked at those. They're peaceful. And you just know during those times that you have to make the decisions. There's also six minutes of plasma com blackout on re entry. And that for me was a little more higher, gain higher intensity because there's just so much dynamic activity in that vehicle that Victor and I, we are the two people at the controls at that moment in time. And we, I think you're just hyper analyzing. Do I need to take over? Do I need to take over? Do I need to take over? And every time that do loop was just coming up. Nope, nope, nope. And you're just, you're letting the machine go. But we were hyper vigilant and ready to take over in a split second.

[Hank Green]

And then you just splash down. Is that the highest G moment in the entry?

[Reid Wiseman]

Entry was 13 minutes long. And we first hit four times Earth's gravity And then we backed off for a while to two times Earth's gravity, which was kind of really cool because you're looking out the back of the spacecraft. There's this huge plasma funnel behind you. You're just. It's like as bright as the sun, but for six minutes, you're just. You're just chilling at two GS, just letting the friction of the atmosphere slow you down. And then at the end, you dive back into four GS for a little while. So we could see in our. In our. In our computer that we were gonna hit four and then come back down to two for a long time and then back up to four, and then we're in the atmosphere coming in. I loved it. I loved it.

[Hank Green]

You've said that you're not a religious person. I'm also not a religious person. After landing, you said that you broke down in tears upon seeing the Navy Chaplain's cross. So I'm not religious. At the same time, I like. I get this to some extent. Like, that's not a foreign thought to me that that is how I would feel upon seeing a symbol like that. Have you gotten your mind around that moment anymore in the time that has passed?

[Reid Wiseman]

I'm going to think about this for the rest of my life, I think. I definitely. I've always. I definitely feel spiritually connected, like to the universe, to the people, to this planet. There's something for sure that's there. And I think each one of us walks our own journey, and I think every one of those journeys should be respected. And some of the people that I most respect and admire are my deeply religious friends who have always honored my walk that I am on. And to me, Victor Glover is one of those people. He is a man of true faith. He expresses it with eloquence. And he honors me as a human sitting right next to him at all times. So that's part of the story. So that I have tremendous respect for. And then when we got back to the ship, I've served in the Navy. I know what it's like to be on a Navy ship. And some of my. Some of my favorite moments at sea are every night before you go to bed at sea, the chaplain on a Navy ship will come on and he does a prayer that usually is fairly Christian based because the US but it's also. It tries to be inclusive. And I used to love evening prayer on the ship. I just saw. It was a nice moment. It was a nice moment of quietness. It was a nice moment to reflect on the day. And we were sitting in this really weird environment, these four medical beds in the medical bay of the. Of the USS John P. Murtha, and there's nurses and doctors everywhere, and some people are taking our blood. I'm getting an iv, and I just looked up and I'm like, is there a chaplain on board this ship? Because I think it'd be great to see him right now. And there was, and I did not. I just wanted this person. I didn't know if it was a man or woman at that time. It turns out it was a man. I just wanted this person to be around me for a minute because I just felt like this person's so calming. It's always the feeling I had when I was in the Navy, when I was around the chaplain, I just felt calm. And so that man, like, comes through the little, you know, the little curtains in a medical and walks in there, and I just looked up at him and I just. I just started crying. I just thought, victor knows what we just went through, Christina knows what we just went through, and Jeremy knows what we just went through. But on this ship, that's probably the only. The only guy that can relate to the four of us right now. That's probably the only person who has such a deep faith that they can maybe even peel back a little bit of the lid on what the four of us just went through, what we just experienced together, what we just saw in the cosmos together. And that was a very powerful moment for me.

[Hank Green]

I really appreciate you. I mean, taking this risk, but also bringing those pictures back for us, bringing these thoughts back for us. This podcast, the idea is we're all in the weeds all the time, and we need to be in the weeds a lot. We need to figure out how to put dinner on the table. We need to figure out how to take care of the problems that we have and have the arguments we need to have. But I also really think that we need to zoom out sometimes. And that does not have to be literal like it was for you, but we need to take. Just get a few hundred feet up there and be like, what is going on? And, like, what am I a part of? And it's a long history of humanity, and it's all entangled, and it's all, like. It's unclear to what extent anybody gets to make decisions at all. And how much are we a collective and how much are we individuals? It's all tricky. And I really. There are these moments where I feel like I am a human that is part of a humanity, and they feel really nice. So thank you.

[Reid Wiseman]

I love that.

[Hank Green]

Love that it feels in some ways like an inhuman thing to go to the moon. But it cannot feel that way when we've been watching you and your crew do it, because it is so human.

[Reid Wiseman]

Thank you.

[Hank Green]

I have a final question for you, which is if there's anything that you've learned from this work that you wish everyone on Earth knew, what would it be?

[Reid Wiseman]

Well, it can't be just one thing. We do have to be able to communicate. We gotta be able to talk through our differences. Everybody should understand that this Earth is magnificent. Christina Cook, I think, said it the best when she said, when I looked back at Earth, I just felt lucky. If everybody could just feel that for a second to just feel like, we are so lucky to have this gift. And then the last thing I'll leave you with, Hank, is I've really come to the realization at the end of all this, the great things take really hard work. And I think we spent a lot of time thinking, how can I get rich quick? Or how can, you know, how can I make this splash? How can I do this thing? Because you see these really good people that are doing it and they make it look easy. I promise you. Behind that, it's just countless days, months, years, half a lifetime of tremendously hard work, skill, and risk taking, people that are willing to step out a little bit, step out of their comfort zone. And so I just. Hard work, it really matters and it really does pay off.

[Hank Green]

Thank you so much for having this conversation with me and also for going to the moon.

[Reid Wiseman]

My honor, Hank. Thank you.

[Hank Green]

Thanks to all the humans who helped make this episode. Morgan Levy is the show's supervising producer, and Greg Rippon is our engineer. Peyton Mitchell manages our social media. Andrew Huang composed the music, and James Barnard designed the artwork. You can and should follow us wherever

[Reid Wiseman]

you listen to podcasts. Let's do it one more time.