Christina Koch, a native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, has deep ties to Maryland, where she attended the NASA Academy program and taught at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel. She was accepted as a NASA astronaut in 2013 and traveled to the International Space Station in 2019 as part of Expeditions 59, 60 and 61. Koch also made history as one-half of the first all-female spacewalk on the ISS, marking a milestone alongside fellow NASA astronaut Jessica Meir. Her participation in the Artemis II mission around the moon made history when the team completed a successful lunar flyby, marking the first time since the 1970s that a manned mission was carried out. The mission also made headlines for breaking the distance record set by the Apollo 13 crew and naming one of two unnamed craters after the late wife of Reid Wiseman's wife, Carroll, who died from cancer in 2020.