Artemis II launch wows space lovers at Cradle of Aviation watch party

For Veeraj Sharma, seeing the live feed of NASA's Artemis II launch at the Cradle of Aviation Museum on Wednesday evening was a chance to witness a first in his young lifetime.

The 7-year-old watched with his parents, younger brother and about 100 others seated in the Uniondale museum's planetarium as a large screen showed the launch of NASA's first manned moon mission since 1972. The spacecraft Integrity, with four astronauts on board, will travel around the moon — 248,000 miles from Earth — but will not set down on the surface. The Integrity returns to Earth on April 10.

The NASA live feed from the Kennedy Space Center captured the moment, about 6:35 p.m., when the rocket emitted an orange blast and lifted off from a Cape Canaveral launchpad, leaving a trail of white smoke across the azure blue Florida sky as it soared toward space.

"It’s one of the rockets that’s going to make history and I really wanted to see a rocket launch," said Veeraj, who lives with his family in Manhattan, about a half hour after liftoff. "It was really, really fun."

Wednesday’s launch marked the first of several test flights before a new generation of astronauts sets foot on the moon’s surface. U.S. Navy Capt. Eugene A. Cernan was the last human to leave footprints on the moon.

Leading up to the launch, Andrew Parton, president of the Cradle of Aviation Museum, sounded optimistic about the future of space exploration. More missions, Parton said, including to Mars, could spur school-age Long Islanders to become explorers themselves by learning more about science and technology.

"This is the start of what we hope to be a very successful Artemis campaign," Parton told Newsday before the launch. "We're excited because the whole plan now is to actually build a moon base, which we'd go back to numerous times and use it as a launching pad to go to Mars."

While the Apollo missions to the moon were flown exclusively by white men, Space Shuttle missions included women and people of color. That was true of the seven-person crew killed when the Challenger exploded 40 years ago this past January. The Artemis crew continued that progress with the inclusion of the first Black person, Canadian and woman on a mission toward the moon. The historic firsts made several Long Islanders gathered at the Cradle of Aviation proud.

"Just to know this is a first for multicultural people, for women, that … empowered me," said Leslie Rodriguez, 43, of Uniondale. "But the excitement of seeing this … in a dome is awesome."

Long Island's contributions to space exploration live on as displays at the museum, as do the firsthand stories of Grumman employees who helped manufacture, test and assemble the lunar module in which Neil Armstrong and his fellow Apollo 11 astronauts became the first humans on the moon in July 1969.

Among the guests in Uniondale Wednesday evening was Alan Contessa, a thermal insulation technician who manufactured a sealant in Bethpage that protected the Apollo lunar module from the extreme heat from the sun and the extreme cold on the dark side of the moon. The Integrity launch was far less stressful for him, Contessa said, with a less urgent feel when compared with the 1960s space race.

"The environment was different then. ... We were in the Cold War, we were trying to beat the Russians, lots of things were at play." Contessa, 79, of St. James, recalled. "There isn't any of that now. It's more of a relaxed thing."

With AP