"Apollo Never Saw This” | Artemis Commander on Crossing Behind the Moon

When Artemis 2 Commander Reid Wiseman and his crew crossed behind the far side of the Moon, they encountered something no human had seen before: lunar craters and massive impact basins illuminated in sunlight that the Apollo missions never witnessed. In this discussion—part of the Johns Hopkins University 150th Anniversary Next Conversations series at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C.—Wiseman sits down with Dr. Bobby Braun, head of the Space Exploration Sector at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Wiseman describes what it was really like traveling over 250,000 miles from Earth—farther than any human in history—and facing a 40-minute total communications blackout on the lunar far side. From watching Earth shrink to the size of a thumbnail to secretly arranging the naming of "Carol Crater" in honor of his late wife, Wiseman shares the raw reality, unexpected humor, and emotional weight of guiding humanity back to deep space.

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