The Callsign They Didn’t Mention
How one sentence missed the richest story in modern spaceflight
Last night, four astronauts splashed down in the Pacific after flying 700,237 miles around the Moon. A perfect bullseye, within a mile of target. The first crewed lunar mission in over fifty years.
This week, the Telegraph published a piece covering the Artemis II crew as they broke the Apollo 13 distance record and flew behind the far side of the Moon. Much of the coverage was good. Genuinely moving, in places.
Commander Wiseman naming a crater after his late wife Carroll, who died of cancer in 2020. He’s raising their daughters alone. When he learned they were watching from Mission Control, he made a heart with his hands and pointed to a bracelet they’d given him. Hansen choked up explaining the crater’s location — “at the same latitude as home.” Koch re-established contact after forty minutes of silence behind the far side of the Moon: “We are happy to say we copy.”
Love. Loss. Fatherhood. Crew bonds. The human texture of four people a quarter of a million miles from everyone they care about.
Then this sentence:
“As well as Commander Wiseman and Col Hansen, the crew includes Victor Glover, the pilot, who is the first black person to fly to the Moon, and Christina Koch, the first woman to do so.”
Read it again slowly. Wiseman gets a dead wife, two daughters, a heart made with his hands, a crater named in grief. Hansen gets quoted at length, photographed shaving before the flyby, his voice breaking on the word “family.”
Glover gets seven words: “the first black person to fly to the Moon.”
Koch gets six: “the first woman to do so.”
No family. No history. No personality. Not even a complete sentence each — they share a compound clause, tacked onto the end of someone else’s paragraph. Wiseman and Hansen are people. Glover and Koch are categories.
So who are they?
Victor Glover
Victor Glover is a US Navy Captain. He flew F/A-18 Hornets in combat during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He has 3,000 flight hours across more than 40 aircraft types. He has made over 400 carrier arrested landings — putting a fast jet onto a pitching deck, often at night, for years. He graduated from the Air Force Test Pilot School, one of the most competitive selections in military aviation. He holds three master’s degrees earned while still serving. He piloted the first operational SpaceX Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station, where he spent 168 days and completed four spacewalks.
His crewmate Wiseman — the mission commander — said he’d never met a human being with a memory like Glover’s. That Glover’s precision had made Wiseman himself a better astronaut.
His callsign is “Ike.” It stands for “I Know Everything.” A commanding officer gave it to him. It wasn’t ironic.
Glover’s grandfather served in the Air Force during the Korean War and faced obstacles that made it difficult for him to pursue a career in aviation. One generation later, his grandson is piloting a spacecraft around the Moon. Glover himself has spoken about this publicly. “I live in the America that sent me to space, and told my grandfather he couldn’t fly during the Korean conflict when he was enlisted,” he said. “We live in a very complicated country.”
Every Monday, on his way to work at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Glover listens to Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” — the 1970 spoken-word poem about poverty during Apollo. Not as protest. Not as grievance. As perspective. “That song reminds me that, at that time, that community, which is very similar to the community I grew up in, they didn’t feel heard,” he told reporters. And when someone suggested he should just stick to space, he replied: “Actually no. Remember who is doing space. People are.”
When pressed on whether the song was about race, Glover said something the Telegraph might have benefited from hearing: “It ain’t about racism. It’s about the human condition.”
That is who the Telegraph introduced as “the first black person to fly to the Moon.” A man who carries the full complexity of what his mission means — the pride and the protest, the achievement and the history — and who has thought about it more carefully and spoken about it more honestly than the article that reduced him to a label.
Christina Koch
Christina Koch holds dual bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering and physics, and a master’s in electrical engineering. She built instruments at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center that flew on multiple space science missions. She then spent a year at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station — a winter-over. Months of total darkness. Temperatures below minus seventy. While there, she served on the firefighting and search-and-rescue teams. She did further tours at Palmer Station in Antarctica and Summit Station in Greenland. She engineered instruments at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory for the Juno mission, which is currently orbiting Jupiter, and for the Van Allen Probes.
She spent 328 consecutive days on the ISS. Six spacewalks. Over 42 hours outside the station. She was the only engineer on the Artemis II crew, selected from over 6,100 applicants.
The Telegraph found none of this worth mentioning. The most interesting thing it could say about the woman who wintered at the South Pole and built hardware orbiting Jupiter was that she is, in fact, a woman.
The Problem
The problem isn’t that the article mentions race and gender. Those firsts are historically significant. They matter — deeply. They matter because Glover’s grandfather couldn’t fly, and now his grandson has flown further than any human being in history. They matter because the barriers that kept people out for decades have been overcome by individuals of extraordinary ability, and that overcoming should be named and honoured properly.
The problem is what happens when a demographic marker is the only thing you say about someone — while their colleagues get emotional depth, family context, quoted speech, and photographs. You haven’t celebrated diversity. You’ve enacted the very reduction you think you’re opposing. You’ve looked at a Navy Captain with 400 carrier landings and seen only a Black man. You’ve looked at a polar-wintering engineer whose instruments are exploring the solar system and seen only a woman.
The grammar tells its own story. Wiseman and Hansen are subjects — agents with feeling and interiority. Glover and Koch are subordinate clauses. Literally subordinated. The sentence structure does the marginalising that the words claim to resist.
And it strips them of something else entirely. Wiseman gets love — a dead wife, living daughters, a crater named in grief. Hansen gets brotherhood — his voice breaking for the crew. Glover and Koch get nothing relational at all. No family. No bonds. No human context. Just a label, floating.
Glover has four daughters. He said, before launch, “We are going for our families.” Koch, re-establishing contact after the far-side blackout, said: “We will always choose Earth, we will always choose each other.” These are people who articulated what the mission meant in terms of relationship and return. The article gave that depth to Wiseman and Hansen. It gave Glover and Koch a category each and moved on.
The intent was almost certainly celebratory. The effect was reductive.
What makes this sharper is that the Telegraph’s own splashdown coverage, written by a different journalist, managed perfectly well without any of this. Koch was first out of the capsule. Glover was right behind her. They were named, described in action, treated as crew members doing their jobs. No labels. No categories. No subordinate clauses. The same paper, the same crew, the same week — and one writer saw four astronauts while the other saw two people and two firsts.
The Missed Opportunity
But what stays with me isn’t the criticism. It’s the missed opportunity. Think about what was sitting there, waiting to be written.
A grandfather who was told he couldn’t fly because of the colour of his skin — and a grandson who just flew further from Earth than any human being in history, with a callsign that means “I Know Everything.” A pilot who listens to the protest poem about the Moon every Monday on his commute, not to forget where he came from but to remember who he’s flying for. A woman who spent a year at the South Pole in total darkness, serving on search-and-rescue teams, then built instruments currently orbiting Jupiter, then spent 328 days on the space station, then climbed into a capsule and flew around the Moon — and was first out the hatch when it splashed down.
A commander naming a crater after his dead wife at the exact moment the crew broke the distance record. A crew who chose “Integrity” as the name of their spacecraft — and then lived up to it.
That’s not an article. That’s a dozen articles. It’s one of the great human stories of our time, rich with history, complexity, sacrifice, and meaning. Every thread you pull reveals another. The material was all there — publicly available, on the record, waiting for someone to look past the surface and find what was underneath.
Instead: “the first black person to fly to the Moon, and Christina Koch, the first woman to do so.”
One sentence. Seven words for him. Six for her. And the richest story in modern spaceflight, left unwritten.
His callsign is “I Know Everything.” She wintered over at the South Pole. The Telegraph didn’t think either fact was worth a single word.