Julia Lowe has been on a lifelong mission to see a rocket launch.
Lowe, 41, from Tacoma, traveled with her family to Cape Canaveral, Fla., in November to fulfill that dream, hoping to watch the launch of NASA’s Escapade spacecraft. But the launch was scrubbed just four minutes before takeoff.
Lowe’s 4-year-old son, Cary Willett, took the disappointment better than she did, she joked.
On Wednesday, Lowe and Willett joined more than 1,200 people at the Museum of Flight in Seattle to watch NASA’s historic Artemis II rocket launch.
The mission took off as planned Wednesday afternoon, sending four astronauts to circle the moon. If all goes well, those astronauts — commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen — will be the first to leave Earth orbit in more than 50 years, and travel farther from Earth than humans have ever before.
During the 10-day mission, the astronauts will leave Earth orbit, circle the moon and then splash down in the Pacific Ocean. Artemis II is the second mission in a series of launches designed to land humans on the lunar surface and study how to one day use the moon as a pit stop on the way to Mars. NASA aims to land humans on the moon as soon as 2028.
To mark the occasion, the Museum of Flight hosted a celebratory watch party. It was one of four sites that partnered with NASA to livestream the country’s excitement as the rocket prepared for takeoff.
The museum set up three projectors to display NASA’s live coverage of the rocket launch from Cape Canaveral, and packed its auditorium with Seattle space enthusiasts. It handed out Artemis II posters and signs that read #SeattleMoonCrew.
Attendees sported NASA hats and T-shirts, and a few, including Lowe’s 4-year-old, donned astronaut suits.
Lowe said she has loved space since she was a child and Willett naturally took an interest in it as he grew up.
Lowe wasn’t particularly stoked about going to the moon again. For her, the beauty of space exploration is about what humanity can do when “we’re uniting around progress.”
“It’s nice to know what’s possible when we all actually try,” she said. It’s about “the wonder of pushing boundaries.”
Other attendees, though, were thrilled that the U.S. would be returning to the moon.
Aiesha Morrison, from Seattle's Northgate neighborhood, didn’t believe the conspiracy theories that humans hadn’t actually landed on the moon. Still, she couldn’t always avoid going down the rabbit hole, just out of curiosity. Now, seeing it with her own eyes, is hard to beat.
Morrison has a background in environmental science and was particularly interested in NASA’s recent announcement that it planned to build a moon base. That introduced new, interesting challenges related to “terraforming,” or the idea of creating a living environment on another celestial body, Morrison explained.
On top of that, “there’s a lot of firsts on this flight as far as diversity,” Morrison said.
The Artemis II mission marks the first time a woman, Koch, a Black person, Glover, and a non-American, Hansen from Canada, will travel with NASA out of Earth orbit.
Chris Sembroski, a former astronaut who now works at Tukwila-based satellite company Starfish Space, said Wednesday he went to high school with Koch in Durham, N.C. He remembered her as “the person on campus that you knew was going to go on to do big things.”
Sembroski has traveled to space before but only for three days, “just short enough to want to spend several more days in space,” he said.
Now, Artemis II “is going to go to the far side of the moon to see things the human eyes have never seen,” Sembroski said.
Some people who attended Wednesday's watch party at the Museum of Flight stumbled into the event, but were pleasantly surprised.
Adam Estes, a graduate student at California State University, Fullerton, came to visit the museum during his spring break. He has made it his mission to visit aerospace and aviation museums around the country.
It was just a coincidence that his visit overlapped with the Artemis launch but now that he’s here, “it’s just incredible,” he said ahead of the launch.
Estes, a history major, was particularly excited about the idea of witnessing history. He’s also looking forward to the images and video of the lunar surface that come from this mission.
Arianna Rodriguez brought her two daughters to the museum Wednesday after the family didn’t make it through every exhibit on an earlier visit last week. The event celebrating the Artemis moonshot was a surprise — and particularly impactful for Rodriguez’s 6-year-old daughter, who once wanted to be an astronaut.
Her 6-year-old is more interested in painting these days, but that didn’t dampen her excitement about the rocket launch.
Representatives from some of the companies involved in Artemis set up booths at the Museum of Flight. Forty-one Washington companies have a hand in the program. Boeing makes the Space Launch System rocket that took off on Wednesday.
The crowd at the museum gathered two hours before the launch window opened on Wednesday. They played trivia, practiced cheering and held a collective breath as NASA personnel ran through checklists to make sure everything was ready to go.
They cheered as NASA secured a “go” from all the different teams required for liftoff and cheered louder when the rocket blasted off. They gasped when, after launch, the solid rocket boosters separated from the rocket, marking a successful milestone in its journey to space.
The whole experience is “history in the making,” Rodriguez said.
Morrison agreed. “It’s pretty cool to actually see us go back to the moon.”
© 2026 The Seattle Times. Visit www.seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
