Lucky airplane passengers capture NASA's Artemis 2 moon launch from the sky

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I never thought I'd wish to be in the stuffy passenger seat of an airplane instead of in my cozy Brooklyn living room until today, April 2, 2026 — the day after NASA's Artemis 2 rocket launch.

I was mindlessly scrolling on TikTok, which isn't new. However, while doing so, in between overdramatic fan edits of Rocky from "Project Hail Mary," speculations about characters from "The Pitt" and their ideal snacks, heartbreaking animations of Shrek set to Radiohead songs and chess memes — bricks I'm unafraid to say I placed — one genre of content made me miss being in a cramped 30A window seat eating a tiny bag of Sun Chips.

It was the TikToks posted by the lucky ones who happened to be on an airplane while the Artemis 2 Space Launch System (SLS) rocket sent its four-person astronaut crew to space in an Orion spacecraft on a trip to the moon and back. I suppose the only worse scenario for me would be being on one of these planes and sitting on the wrong side. But jokes aside, these views are spectacular, and I needed to share them.

I mean, just with these first two videos, the scale of NASA's Artemis 2 mission is really brought into focus. It's surreal to see a rocket pierce through clouds, leaving behind a stratus-like trail of its own, and I hear that nothing prepares you for the unnatural appearance of a vehicle that keeps going up... and up... and up.

Even in the comments of the first video up there, posted by user Katie McCuistion, a comment with about 342,000 likes says the TikTok offers a "completely different perspective on how fast that rocket is." Meanwhile, another commenter, who says they work for NASA, writes the video made them cry.

Meanwhile, the second video — apparently taken on a flight from Atlanta to Puerto Rico — is captioned: "So incredibly impressive." Fascinatingly, in that second one, the exhaust plume of the rocket looks extremely high-definition against the water beyond Florida's coastline; the rocket launched from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39B on the state's iconic Space Coast. If you look closely, you can see other pads in the area as well.

Both of these videos, using songs from the movie "Interstellar," follow another theme I noticed on TikTok over the last few days.

The huge success of the film "Project Hail Mary" appears to have created a resurgence of public interest in space, with many users on social media expressing the sentiment that they were pumped for the Artemis 2 moon mission especially because of the film.

The blockbuster hit "Interstellar" seems to have had a similar impact on the public back when it was released in 2014, reigniting a public passion for space exploration, a desire to learn about about black hole intricacies or space station docking procedures, and just offering a general reminder to look toward the stars. Seeing otherworldly sequences on the big screen set to dreamy or anthem-like songs really does something to the soul.

What else is clear from the public's perception of Artemis 2 is that the concept of "going back to the moon" incites a sense of unity, and maybe even pride. Indeed, this is because of Artemis' parallel with the Apollo years — barring the obvious nuances — but I think it's also due to the inspiring backbone of this mission.

Its astronauts — NASA's Christina Koch, Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover as well as the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen — includes the first Black person, first non-American and first woman to go beyond low Earth orbit. Artemis 2 also marks the first time humans will travel to our planet's natural satellite since 1972 with Apollo 17. And actually, this mission will take humans farther from Earth than ever before because of the way the trajectory is set up.

The crew is set to take a 10-day trip around the moon and back (not entering lunar orbit, to be clear) in order to set the stage for the rest of the Artemis program. Artemis 1, which succeeded in 2022, launched an uncrewed Orion spacecraft to lunar orbit and back, which prepared the agency for Artemis 2. This mission's success would allow Artemis 3 to move forward in 2027, which will be another uncrewed tech demo during which docking with lunar landers will be tested in low Earth orbit. That'll be the final step before Artemis 4 goes forth, which will be another history-making event in 2028: A lunar landing.

Alas, in these airplane videos of the agency's SLS rocket taking the astronauts' Orion spacecraft to the final frontier, you're watching people who are watching four brave people head for the tides of Earth's very best friend. Airplanes themselves are an impressive feat we've become normalized to as a society, but planes and rockets sharing the same space such that passengers of both can see one another is still pretty mind-blowing. Hopefully, during the crew's splashdown on April 10, we'll get a few more TikToks to fawn over. (Actually, hopefully we'll be on those flights ourselves).

"Fifteen years of flying folks, praying I'd get to see something like this. You don't see this every day," the airline pilot said in the video posted just below. "They're going around the moon! I flew down to Florida I don't know how many times — half a dozen times — to see that space shuttle take off in my day. It always cancelled. And here, front-row seats. This is something you want to tell to your grandkids."