The Test Pilot Who Asked for the Chaplain
I had a whole different episode planned this week. Something tidy — outline written, notes ready, the whole thing teed up to record. Then on Tuesday I sat down with a cup of coffee, opened up the NASA livestream of the Artemis 2 post-mission press conference, and watched four people try to describe what they had just seen.
I closed my laptop. I deleted the outline.
This is what I want to talk about on Monday to Sunday this week — what happened at that press conference, why it broke me a little, and what I think it might mean for the rest of us, the eight billion ordinary people who are not going to space.
A NASA Press Conference That Lost Its Script
If you’ve ever watched a NASA press conference, you know the deal. Acronyms. Fuel-efficiency charts. Highly trained professionals giving compartmentalized, binary answers — success or failure, parameters met or not met. Space agencies are remarkably good at turning the most awe-inspiring activity humans have ever attempted into something that sounds like a quarterly earnings call.
The April 2026 Artemis 2 press conference was something else entirely. The script was gone. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — the first humans to travel to deep space in over fifty years — sat in front of cameras and tried to put words to a nine-day journey that included a total communications blackout on the far side of the moon. The mass of the moon physically blocks every radio wave from Earth. For a stretch of that mission, four people were severed from the other eight billion of us. Strapped inside a tin can. Hurtling through a void. Looking out a small window at the Earth as a fragile marble suspended in absolute darkness.
You can’t take a trip like that and come back unchanged. And they didn’t.
The Moment Reid Wiseman Went Looking for the Chaplain
The detail from the press conference I can’t stop turning over: Reid Wiseman, a Navy test pilot, a pragmatist whose entire career has been built on instrumentation and procedure, described watching a solar eclipse from 250,000 miles away. The mechanics of the solar system, with no anchor. When he got back to the recovery ship, this man — who says he isn’t religious — broke down in tears and sought out the ship’s chaplain.
He told reporters: “I don’t think humanity has evolved to the point of being able to comprehend what we’re looking at.”
I want to be careful with that sentence, because it’s doing a lot of work and it’s easy to flatten. He’s not saying he found God in space. He’s not saying any of us should. What he’s saying is that the human nervous system, the hardware we’ve been issued, was not built for what he saw. The mind hits a wall. And when our minds hit that wall, we instinctively reach for older frameworks — frameworks built precisely for the limits of human understanding.
Faith is one of those frameworks. It always has been.
Faith and Science as the Same Muscle
I’m not trying to smuggle in a sermon here. I’m noticing a pattern. A test pilot reaches the edge of what comprehension can hold, and the language available to him for what he’s feeling is a chaplain’s language. That’s not coincidence — that’s just what happens when humans encounter the immense.
I keep coming back to 1 Peter 2 — the passage about being built, stone by stone, into a spiritual house, and called “out of darkness into marvelous light.” Four strangers strapped into a capsule went into literal darkness, the kind humans had never experienced before, and came back describing themselves not as a crew but as an “us.” Victor Glover specifically said the mission stopped being about the four of them and became about us as a species. Listen to that pronoun shift. He came back from the moon talking about you and me.
You don’t have to read 1 Peter as scripture to read it as a record of an old human pattern. People go into the dark. They come out connected. The Apollo astronauts said similar things. The ISS astronauts say similar things. Now Artemis 2 has said similar things. Four different decades, four different missions, the same testimony every single time.
Transcendence and Plumbing, Side by Side
There’s a tension here, of course, and I want to name it. In John 14, the way to a “dwelling place” is through faith. For the astronauts, the way was a Space Launch System rocket and a capsule that had some very unglamorous plumbing issues along the way. One path is ethereal. The other involves fixing a clogged space toilet at 200,000 miles from Earth.
I love that detail, honestly. Because it tells you something true about being human, which is that even at the most transcendent edge of our species’ reach, somebody still had to deal with the toilet. Transcendence and plumbing, side by side, in the same nine days. That has always been the deal.
But I don’t think those two things — the spiritual journey and the engineered one — are as far apart as they sound. Ancient pilgrims walked. Modern astronauts ride controlled explosions. Both are looking for the way to where we are meant to dwell. Christina Koch talked about conquering the what-ifs through total trust — in her team, in her vehicle, in the work. That’s not a different impulse than faith. It’s the same muscle, pointed at a different horizon.
What This Means for the Rest of Us
Most of us are never going to space. The number of humans who have ever left low Earth orbit is astonishingly small, and the chances that you or I will be added to that list are basically zero. So in one sense, this is a story about people who are not us, doing things we cannot do.
But here’s what I think the press conference was actually telling us. Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen came back, and the first thing they did was try to get us to feel what they had felt. They didn’t come back guarding it. They didn’t come back as a closed elite. They came back as evangelists in the original sense — bringing news. And the news was: the marble is fragile, the dark is real, and we are smaller and more connected than you can possibly understand. They went so we could know that.
If just looking at the Earth from deep space was enough to break a test pilot’s composure and send him searching for a chaplain, what happens to the human soul when we actually take those keys? When we build permanent homes on other worlds and look up at that fragile marble every single night, how does becoming an interplanetary species rewire what we believe? What we worship? What we are?
I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t know if anybody does. But I think the answer probably starts the same way it started for Reid Wiseman on a recovery ship in the Pacific. Not with certainty. Not with doctrine. Just with a man, sitting down with a chaplain, saying out loud: I have seen something I cannot hold.
That’s where it starts. For all of us, eventually. Maybe not from a spacecraft. Maybe from a hospital room. Maybe from a conversation with your kid you weren’t ready for. Maybe from a single sentence in a book that knocks something loose. The vehicle is different. The moment is the same.
The full episode is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Something to sit with this week.