After more than a week of record-setting space travel, the Artemis II crew is back on Earth, and a Baltimore County high school celebrated one of its own.
Hundreds piled into Dulaney High School’s auditorium for a “splashdown party” Friday night to watch mission commander Reid Wiseman — a 1993 graduate from Cockeysville — return.
The party started at 7 p.m., but cars began filling the parking lot around 6:30 p.m. to watch the broadcast that aired on a projector in the auditorium.
The crowd erupted into cheers following the blackout, when the crew splashed down and anytime broadcasters mentioned the name of Wiseman, the former golfer and Russian Club member who was one of them.
A line in the foyer for pictures of the life-size Wiseman swelled.
Matthew Ayd was among the first to get his photo, although the 2024 Dulaney High School alumnus has a selfie with the actual Wiseman. In 2023, Ayd was among a group of students that competed in the FIRST Robotics World Championship in Houston. What stood out about the NASA astronaut to Ayd was his selflessness.
“Even though he’s an astronaut, and he did talk about that some, he was more interested in what we were doing,” said Ayd, who’s studying mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Wiseman even left a voicemail to the students’ teacher, Steve Shaw, proclaiming how impressed he was by them. Ayd said he’d love to be an astronaut if given the opportunity. And, with another Dulaney alumnus like him commanding a record-breaking mission to the moon, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched.
“It’s just cool to see where the students from Dulaney get to go,” Ayd said.
NASA officials say the Orion spacecraft reached the atmosphere southeast of Hawaii around 8 p.m. after a communications blackout for about six minutes. Orion then deployed the parachutes needed for the crew to land safely.
Millions watched as NASA livestreamed the landing on its YouTube page.
The Dulaney High School alumni who wrangled their young kids to witness the historic moment grabbed sheets for them from the coloring station, which Ndamona Wheeler, 18, was manning.
She was one of the only students from her class who signed up to volunteer, mostly because she liked helping, but it also gave her a front-row seat to history.
“It’s an aspirational thing,” Wheeler said of seeing someone who walked the same halls as her take a mission to the moon.
Wiseman’s encouragement and advice on how students should handle and learn from failure was especially important to her as she navigated calculus and physics courses simultaneously.
“It did take a lot of work to get into AP Physics,” Wheeler said. She’s one of about six women in her class of roughly 20.
While the world met Wiseman as the NASA astronaut commanding Artemis II, Adam Crowley, 50, met him as a freshman at Dulaney High School.
As Crowley tells it, though, not much has changed about the man, and that’s what makes this record-setting moment so special.
“It’s absolutely mind-boggling, but he’s the person you’d want to do it,” Crowley said. “He’s just at the highest level of excellence, but he’s brought such pure joy and excitement to the experience.”
Crowley added there is something special about “seeing your friend on top of that rocket.”
The Senevirathna family has no connections to Dulaney High School or Wiseman, but they’re new to the neighborhood and have a 5-year-old who’s interested in space.
Whereas other kids watch cartoons, Tebon Senevirathna watches videos about space, math, science and technology, his mother, Lakshika Senevirathna, said.
She and her husband brought Tebon to witness a fellow county boy’s historic moment.
“The main idea is to let him do what he likes. Whenever we notice he’s into something, we let him do it,” Chamath Senevirathna, Tebon’s father, said.
Watching the splashdown Friday, the boy asked many questions, including if he could go to the moon himself. His parents let him know he’s got a ways to go.
First, enrollment in a science, technology, engineering and mathematics magnet school next year. Then, when the time comes, enrollment at Dulaney High School.
“This is his school,” Lakshika Senevirathna said.
The Artemis II crew took off from Florida on April 1, fulfilling Wiseman’s 83-year-old father’s wish to see him in space. By April 6, the Artemis II crew had traveled farther from Earth than any humans before them — 252,756 miles.
That day, crew members recommended names for two craters on the moon: Integrity, the crew’s name for its spacecraft, and Carroll, for Wiseman’s wife, who died of cancer in May 2020.
A Virginia Beach native, Carroll Wiseman spent time in Maryland working as a school nurse at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, according to her obituary in The Virginian-Pilot. She and Reid Wiseman, who have two daughters, were living in Texas at the time of her death.
“It’s a bright spot on the moon, and we would like to call it Carroll,” mission specialist Jeremy Hansen said.
The moment moved crew members to tears before they floated to embrace one another.
Along with Wiseman and Hansen, others aboard Integrity are pilot Victor Glover and mission specialist Christina Koch, who spent time in Maryland in the 2000s working at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt and sailing with the Goddard Sailing Association and the Severn Sailing Association.
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