A Crater Named Carroll

What's happening

On Monday, April 6, 2026, the Artemis II crew flew 252,756 miles from Earth, breaking the distance record Apollo 13 set in 1970. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, are the farthest humans have ever traveled from the planet. Minutes after breaking the record, Hansen radioed Mission Control with a request. The crew had identified two fresh lunar craters during the flyby and wanted them named. One would honor their spacecraft, Integrity. The other would honor Carroll Taylor Wiseman, the late wife of Commander Reid Wiseman, who died of cancer in 2020 at age 46. "She was the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katie and Ellie," Hansen said, his voice breaking. "It's a bright spot on the moon. We would like to call it Carroll." Mission Control fell silent for nearly a minute before replying.

What the text says

Psalm 8:3-43When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have ordained;4what is man, that you think of him? What is the son of man, that you care for him?

Psalm 8 is one of the earliest known texts to address the disorientation of looking up. The psalmist, traditionally David, stands under the night sky and asks a question that almost every literature since has asked in some form: given the size of the heavens, why would any of this matter? The Hebrew word the psalm uses for "mindful" is zakar, to remember. It is the same verb used when God remembers Noah in the ark and when Hannah prays for a child. In Hebrew, to remember is an act that leans forward into the person remembered. It carries weight. The psalm does not resolve the tension between the vast and the intimate by shrinking the vastness. It widens the frame until both are held at once. The moon, the stars, the named individual, all within the attention of the same God. This is the logic the psalm wants the reader to feel. When you stand far enough out to see how small we are, you are also standing close enough to see that we are known.

The reflection

The Artemis crew did something very old when they named what they saw. Adam named the animals. Abraham named the wells. The psalmist said God calls the stars by name. Naming is how humans insist that a place, or a person, is not nothing. A grieving man traveled farther from home than anyone has ever been, and the first thing he asked was for a small bright spot on the moon to carry the name of his wife. The universe did not shrink her. The universe made room.