CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — First, there’s silence. It’s an anxious silence. Everyone on the beach has been waiting for hours, knowing that any small hiccup—a gust of wind, a raindrop, an out-of-place cloud—could send everybody home, having witnessed nothing. But as the clock ticked closer to the appointed time—in this case, 6:24 p.m.—everybody turned their faces toward the horizon. For minutes, we all stood, watching an empty sky, disappointment starting to seep in. Then I blinked, and blastoff.

You see the rocket before you can hear it. The fire shooting out of the ground looks otherworldly. Logically you know it’s a feat of engineering, but it seems like magic: The force lifting the nearly 6 million–pound machine into the air and propelling it higher and higher up until it disappears. All you can see by the end is the thick white jet stream it left behind. About 60 seconds later, the ground starts to shake.

I was standing on a beach more than 10 miles from the Kennedy Space Center, but I could still feel the roar of the engines as we had liftoff. This was the launch of Artemis II, the first NASA-crewed space mission to head toward the moon since the Apollo missions. The astronauts and their ship, which they’ve nicknamed “Integrity,” are headed for a 10-day journey through space, circling the moon one time before returning to Earth off of America’s West Coast. If all goes according to plan, they will go farther from Earth than any human has ever been before...