Apollo 11 in Real Time
apolloinrealtime.org
apolloinrealtime.org
How he simply couldn’t even begin to fathom something like the internet being a thing when he was in his 20s.
Makes me wonder what I can’t imagine now that I might see in my lifetime.
Probably I'm wrong and it'll be something else
- In the time of Napoleon France already had an operational telegraph service. That was even before the electricity could be used for it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_telegraph
- The first transatlantic telegraph cable became operational in 1858, that was 160 years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable
"reducing the communication time between North America and Europe from ten days – the time it took to deliver a message by ship – to a matter of minutes."
So even then the people were absolutely able to understand the "internet." Not in the terms of the infrastructure, but in the terms of the effect. In the terms of infrastructure, even the people of today who don't directly work on that mostly use some simplifications, if they are even aware of the technical details of what is actually involved:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
The "series of tubes" (from 2006) is just one of possible analogies, which can even be good enough for some scenarios (e.g. when discussing the throughput being limited by the capacity of the installed cables).
I'd argue the availability of information, and certainly information that isn't curated by a single source, is a pretty fundamental discontinuity.
Even in Ben Franklin’s time his paper was only one of at least four in Philadelphia.
That being said, the general concept of knowledge in earlier sci-fi does seem curiously impoverished--everything worth knowing often can be held within the brain single computer/robot/polymath, or quickly established by proceeding axiomatically from a few observations.
I can't begin to imagine how long it took you to build this... This is amazing, thank you kind sir.
<meta property="og:url" content="https://apolloinrealtime.org/" />
And the root doesn't have any of the OG metatags. Quick fix: 1) change og:url to include /11/ or 2) add the OG metadata to the rootOr if you want the trippy version: https://somafm.com/missioncontrol/
Your URL structure suggests you may be planning to do this for other Apollo missions, is that in the cards?
Edit: I see you've done this for Apollo 17 already on a different URL: https://apollo17.org/
I’m ex Head of Web at the Science Museum (London) and now run a company that works exclusively with museums. I’ll ping a few people: I know the curator of Space at SciM but also lots of museum web people. Just possible someone will know someone at the Smithsonian.
You managed a work of art. I am deeply impressed. The web needs more sites like this. This is what the web should be. I hope you have the bandwidth for when the BBC or similar inevitably find it. :)
My very hazy memories of watching the launch and landing in 69 (honestly probably of Apollo 17 in 72 - they've mostly all merged together in the memory now), here in the UK, are recreated wonderfully!
Bloody well done!
Apollo 11 is one of those early memories that is a lot of "I remember that I used to remember", and retain some fragments of. Later missions, and Apollo 17 especially I have a much more coherent picture of yet aren't quite fully separate from each other, and remember some of the programmes explaining all about the Lunar Rover etc. And the programmes about the space stations, and lunar bases... If only. :(
Thank you so much. This kind of effort means so much to the both of us.
Some small thoughts: when a desk is selected it would be great to deselect it by clicking it again to go back to the master audio. And it would also be great to have the selected button highlight when signal is/isn’t present - perhaps a lighter blue color? That way a user can build an intuition about what a lit button/region that they’re not listening to means.
Oh, and it would be fascinating to see a statistical comparison of channel activity in Apollo 11 vs. 13 :)
Honestly this is mind blowing. Your site deserves national attention, display on major news networks, millions reliving the behind-the-scenes teamwork that led to IMO the greatest human accomplishment in history. Huge kudos.
I have almost all of the Apollo 13 mission control audio as well. That's the next project (but I want to take a breather for at least a day!)
Agreed this site is mindblowing - thanks for all the hard work!
In a comment you mentioned not having much money. I would highly recommend taking a day or two to set up a Kickstarter or similar for your next release (even if you would do other missions for free anyway). Also consider Patreon or similar. Allow people to give something, even if it's a small amount.
While the pieces (audio, video, photos) have been "available" for some time, you probably don't realize how much value you are adding to multiple lives by making them "accessible" in this way.
Is this any relation to wechoosethemoon.org from a few years back (2009)?
The site is still there but needs flash, there's a YouTube video of the site here:
If it were official, I suspect I might be disappointed by the time it had got through multiple committees and large government contractors.
I'd love to see the same treatment done for the Mars landings.
My experience is just from the Norwegian Broadcasting Company, e.g. with "The Bergen Line minute by minute" [0] which is around 7 hours, or "A coastal voyage from Bergen to Kirkenes" [1] which is 134 hours. These were both sent on national TV in Norway. IMHO not nearly as interesting as the Apollo missions, but something you could have on as background scenery during a day or week at work, at a social gathering or something like that.
The silliest example I've seen was a bunch of students who built a live-updated clock for 24 hours, out of a sort of plywood template. They lined up in front of a camera at the Bergen train station (20 meters behind the camera at the start of video 0, incidentally) and worked in shifts for the 24 hours that the broadcast lasted. [2] (Unsure if the link is available internationally).
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7VYVjR_nwE
Apollo 11 (and space in general) is why I got into computing (I was never going to be an astronaut), this website is truly outstanding.
I did try your Apollo17.org site and it works beautifully in the same Firefox browser. And if I run Google Chrome, your Apollo 11 site works perfectly. Just not in Firefox.
I am running similar extensions in both browsers and I did disable Ublock Origin in Firefox but that had no effect. Apollo17.org in Firefox works fine with Ublock Origin enabled and I also run Ublock Origin in Chrome.
I'm willing to help out with debugging if you like.
Thanks for this great website !
Edit: looks like the client is hand-written with jQuery. I guess the next time someone makes a joke about jQuery you can send them this site. :D
Edit2: Just to preempt it, let's not have a debate about the state of JS frameworks here, there are enough of those already. :)
I have two remarks about the speed units displayed on the dashboard:
• Why is the Mach number showed while out of the atmosphere? It depends on the local speed of sound which is not really definable there
• Why is the speed not shown International System units? As a Kerbal enthusiast, I would love to see metres per second
This is what the Internet was supposed to be! What we get 99.9999999999 percent of the time is ad-promoted garbage that is as bad IMO as watching mindless tv.
Your site is that 0.0000000001 percent that truly transcends and brings back hope that we can take the Internet back and make it something truly great.
What a great experience for the enthusiast and a great aid to education.
Do you have any sort of donation link? I'd love for other missions to be archived in a similar manner.
Note to others: On mobile it's interesting but only has audio. I had to look at the desktop version to understand why everyone was so amazed about the site.
I've been listening to the audio and a few seconds after the 171:04:22 mark, on the CAPCOM channel we can hear the voice of a woman that seems completely out of place. She seems to be saying "Howdy". Anybody knows where this voice comes from?
I hope I live to see a crewed launch with Mars as the destination.
This definitely belongs in the Smithsonian on display with it's own interactive kiosk.
One thing of note is that there's no server-side services in this architecture. The browser does all of the work itself. Kind of remarkable when you think about it.
Also, I realized that the new hotness to me is already legacy to some. “Redux is the new jQuery”, they say (when talking about Relay or Apollo v2).
You made it actually happen, that is very special even if the code is a huge mess.
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/Apollo_11_TV_Tapes_Report.p...
Well, actually…
I think I have only one or two VHS tapes, being the equivalent of /tmp. yes "have"; I still have all the tapes I recorded neatly organized and mothballed in boxes, and except for that two particular tapes I can not recall of overwriting any other.