We watched the Artemis II launch, with the sound muted, on a laptop screen, while also watching Episode 3 of Starfleet Academy on the main screen.

<anecdote>

I first encountered Dr. Who when my family spent 1973-74 in England (I was 8). The the last episode of the season ended with Doctor #3 regenerating into #4... and then we returned to the US, where nobody even knew what "Daleks" were because, well, there was no way to see the show here. If it wasn't on TV, then you couldn't watch it. (No VHS, no regular international TV.)

...and then in 1980 or so, more or less out of nowhere, PBS started rerunning some then-older episodes, beginning with Doctor #4 -- so I finally got to see the next episode 6 years later.

Now, rewind a couple of years...

I remember being really, really disappointed when the Apollo program was cancelled in the mid-1970s -- after many formative years of having read and watched SF stories where we had Moon colonies and Mars outposts by the 1990s.

This was followed by decades of barely-perceptible forward movement. Nifty-sounding programs were repeatedly proposed, then stripped down, and finally cancelled before ever getting off the ground.

We finally managed to launch a (sorta kinda) reusable shuttle... but then Skylab was allowed to burn up ...and then one of the shuttles blew up. We made another space-station (definitely better than Skylab), but then another shuttle melted while landing and they understandably decided to stop doing shuttles, and it became kind of like having to look under the cushions for rockets to use for each new routine crew-rotation and it felt like we'd just kind of stopped looking up.

</anecdote>

Watching Artemis II zoop off entirely on schedule (on the first actual launch-attempt, as I understand it) -- intercutting multiple live HDTV views from the vehicle and transmitted over a world-wide computer network, no less (no fiddling with the TV antenna to get a clear signal) -- and knowing all the plans they have for future missions -- feels kind of like finally getting to see the next episode of space exploration, 50 years later.