Caltech Names Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman as NASA JPL Deputy

What happened

Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) Former NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman joins Caltech and NASA JPL as Caltech associate vice president and JPL deputy director. Navy captain begins his new role at NASA’s center of excellence for robotics and deep space exploration and at Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA.

Wiseman joins JPL, NASA’s only federally funded research and development center, as the lab approaches its 90th anniversary since being founded by Caltech. Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman has been named Caltech associate vice president and deputy director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

“Reid has spent his career at the edge of what is possible, and he has the technical judgment, operational experience, and leadership to help push that edge farther,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. During the Artemis II test flight, Wiseman , Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen journeyed 695,081 miles on a lunar flyby that took them farther than any humans have ever traveled before.

After joining NASA’s astronaut corps in 2009, Wiseman went on to serve as flight engineer aboard the International Space Station for the 165-day Expedition 41 mission in 2014 and was a commander of NASA’s 21st Extreme Environment Mission Operations expedition, during which he lived for eight days in a habitat on the ocean floor in 2016.

As the agency’s chief astronaut from December 2020 to November 2022, Wiseman led NASA’s astronaut corps, overseeing crew flight readiness and crew safety for all NASA human spaceflight missions.