Mr. Schmemann, an Opinion writer, is a former Moscow, Bonn and Jerusalem bureau chief of The Times.

Like any great adventure, and especially one we can follow minute by minute, act by act, the flight of Artemis II, which is ending on Friday, has been gripping theater. That cramped cabin cluttered with hoses, equipment and bolts, the glimpses of a small, blue-and-white Earth in the distance, the astronaut Christina Koch’s floating hair, the sense that a new era of grand and perilous space exploration has begun — all make for a feeling of wonder and exultation at a time we badly need it.

But try as I might, I cannot resist the voice that keeps whispering, Yes, but we’ve been there before. I am of a generation (read: old) for which the first landing on the moon in July 1969 was a life-changing event with a far different import. Until Apollo 11, the notion of people stepping out onto a celestial body had existed only in Jules Verne novels or Marvel cartoons. “Fly Me to the Moon” was a Frank Sinatra love song, and home computers had not appeared. It’s hard — impossible, really — to reprise that extraordinary event 57 years and generations of technological advances later.

I can still feel the wonder staring up at the pockmarked moon on a hot, dry summer night in Oklahoma, trying to comprehend that there were actually two guys up there. The renowned news anchor Walter Cronkite recalled how he couldn’t find words to describe it: “I think all I said was, ‘Wow! Jeez!’ Not exactly immortal. Well, I was nothing if not human.” It’s still hard to find the words.

The context was so radically different. The elaborate computing required to reach the moon seemed almost mystically ingenious. I was being trained in Fort Sill at the time on an early military computer, a thing called a Field Artillery Digital Automatic Computer, or FADAC, that weighed about 200 pounds and required a dedicated generator to plot artillery targeting. Today, it could probably be replaced with an iPad, and even an ordinary car has at least 30 onboard computers. True, shooting people into space was not new — Yuri Gagarin’s first spaceflight came eight years before Apollo 11 — but nothing could really prepare the world for seeing men actually standing on the moon, with the little marble-like Earth in the background.

In his dramatic lead story for The Times about the first moon landing, under the huge banner headline “MEN WALK ON MOON,” the science writer John Noble Wilford described the sense of incredulity many felt: “People back on Earth found the black-and-white television pictures of the bug-shaped lunar module and the men tramping about it so sharp and clear as to seem unreal, more like a toy and toylike figures than human beings on the most daring and far-reaching expedition thus far undertaken.” (Conspiracy theories claiming that NASA faked some or all of the six crewed Apollo moon landings between 1969 and 1972 still circulate.)

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Serge Schmemann joined The Times in 1980 and worked as the bureau chief in Moscow, Bonn and Jerusalem and at the United Nations. He was editorial page editor of The International Herald Tribune in Paris from 2003 to 2013.

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