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Comment by bfeist | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the share. I'm the author of the site and am happy to answer any questions.

Truly incredible work. The multitrack visualization is a really great UI, and it does wonders communicating just how much teamwork went into managing these missions. I had no idea all the mission control workstations were recorded, and how active they all were even when the crew was doing an unrelated task.

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.

Holy moly, thanks for the kudos and great suggestions, too. I'll work on the two-tone selected button tomorrow.

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!)

I know that "me-to" type comments are generally frowned upon here on HN but really do feel the need to pile on in this case: this is wicked cool.

Enthusiasm should not be dampened! So I say: Mee too!

Thank you for doing this; I hope you are able to take a couple of weeks of serious beach time and recharge yourself properly for the next one!

Yeah I was a little confused about how to go back to Master, too.

Agreed this site is mindblowing - thanks for all the hard work!

From my understanding, whenever you click on a track it switches to "Mission Control Audio" tab near the top. Clicking "Photography" takes you back to the master audio. Definitely a little confusing. The "photography" label should maybe be master track?

Thanks for the fresh eyes on this. Just added a "close" button on the mission control audio interface that pops you back to the photography tab and unmutes master audio.

I wholeheartedly agree with what everyone else is saying: "Truly incredible", "almost unbelievably great", "REALLY amazing", "unprecedented", "I love it", "the attention to detail is extraordinary", "an absolute masterpiece", "so awesome", "absolutely remarkable", "Incredible", etc...

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.

In the Information Age, value is chiefly derived from organization & presentation of information, rather than simply its availability.

This site is almost unbelievably great. Have you considered trying to contact the Smithsonian to see if they'd be interested in using it? I've never seen a more impressive interactive exhibit.

I have. They're not interested.

That's a shame (for them).

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/

Yes. I decided to no longer buy a domain name for each one after a cybersquatter swiped apollo11.org (like I have any money)

Who have you spoken to at SI? Don't let a pen pusher convince you that his view represents the organization

If you know the right people, please send them the URL

Stunning work, huge kudos to you, not just on concept but great execution/UI etc. My 14yo son is the most ridiculously keen space nut (the only teenager I know with a pdf of the Apollo manual on his phone) - he’s going to be very excited to see this.

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.

This is sadly typical from my own experience with institutions like that -- too many mini-kings and queens who are only interested in their own self-preservation and glory.

What is especially amazing, if you consider, that museums are all about exhibiting other people's work!

In defence of museums (who in my experience working with them for ~20 years) aren't like this at all - this is probably more a case of hitting up the wrong person at what is after all an enormous organisation...

This is REALLY amazing. Thank you for making this. The amount of data / information available at my fingertips on this one site is... unprecedented. And I even figured out how to use it!

Great to hear. I'm so close to it, at this point I have no idea if it's usable or confusing.

I found it obvious and intuitive, despite the multiple ways of navigating, and the attention to detail is extraordinary. Now I want that three layer seek on other video sites! I love that each photo - most of which I've never seen or knew existed - appears at the precise moment it was taken and you can click through to a full size.

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!

You'll probably enjoy https://apollo17.org then =)

No doubt, I plan to binge there later.

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. :(

I'm trying to come up with words to describe this that would be worthy of even saying. All I can say is I love it. I was born in 1973, but for those of you who don't remember the pre-internet edge, current books and movies weren't exactly a click away. It would take years for the encyclopedia sets and science books to be updated. So at the ages of 6-12, all of the materials about space were about the Apollo missions. My friends and I would just absorb anything and everything Apollo and moon related we could find as if it were currently happening. This whole real time experience takes me back to that place of trying to figure what time of day they lifted off, how fast they were traveling, how long it took to get into orbit, how long they were there, etc. All of that kind of thing, and here it is beautifully recreated with time, voices, and video. And point in time data to boot. It's just wonderful.

Do you have, or do you plan, any kind of write up on what all went into building this site? I know that I, for one, would love to know more about what it takes to pull off coordinating all these different media sources and on-screen effects and what-not.

Definitely. I'll be posting at benfeist.com in the coming days. I needed to get it out there first!

Hey Ben! This is so neat! I worked with Dr. Hansen on the audio digitization over on http://exploreapollo.org. Thanks for the link in the footer! I’ve been out of the loop on that project since graduating. Regardless, if you want to collaborate shoot me an email austin@austinpray.com

Apollo 11 was my formative experience, I was 5 years old and watched it live on TV in Australia as the images were received.

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.

Thank you. This is really incredible work. Is the source code available anywhere? I trust you’ll keep this online for the foreseeable future but this should be preserved and redundantly available in case anything happens.

Yes and no. You can find the Apollo17.org source code that this site has extended, here https://github.com/bfeist/Apollo17. That said, the media elements and photography and some of the other material isn't on github (too big).

Maybe archive.org can do something great with your site?

I have no questions just admiration. This is so awesome!

I can't begin to imagine how long it took you to build this... This is amazing, thank you kind sir.

You, Sir, have impressed me like no single person doing work on the web has ever before.

But I'm cheating though using the most interesting and engaging content in human history :)

I’m coming from the following point of view: it’s only clear in hindsight, but if someone had asked me “what’s the greatest experience one could build on the web?”, the answer would be “an interactive real time presentation of the Apollo 11 mission”.

This is an absolute masterpiece! virtual hat off to you sir

One issue! Sharing isn't using the OpenGraph metatags, likely because it's following:

  <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 root

Just did both. Thanks!

For a moment I felt as if I was with them in 1969, amazed by our achievements as humans and looking forward to our next steps. It was a nice, inspirational afternoon.

Thanks for this great website !

I can't imagine how complex the development of the UI must have been. Can you tell us a little bit about the technical implementation? What languages and frameworks you might have used, things that were particularly difficult?

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. :)

Yeah, it's nothing special. No trendy JS frameworks. The UI was pretty much just whatever I could think of in terms of layout, then a friend of mine helped to design it up a bit so it didn't look like a developer designed it. Wish I could say it was more involved that that, but it wasn't.

This is absolutely remarkable! I'm in awe of the whole thing, as is my father!

Thank you so much. This kind of effort means so much to the both of us.

Awesome website!

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

I was convinced this was an official NASA exhibit made for the 50-year anniversary. Fantastic work and much appreciated. My dad will be psyched; he was 17 at the time of the launches, and this fits in great in the recent tradition of "slow entertainment" that happens in real time over multiple days :)

It's the sort of thing I'd love to see NASA do for Skylab, Voyager, and other missions, where we used tune in for regular updates. It was all a huge free PR boost for the US - most of my generation were somewhat hooked on space going through school. Then there was all the associated programmes explaining how it all worked, the plan or the why, and the artist's impressions of space stations, manned Mars plans or Lunar bases. There's got to be a huge archive we've seen only snippets of - I never realised they kept every station's comms.

If it were official, I suspect I might be disappointed by the time it had got through multiple committees and large government contractors.

>It's the sort of thing I'd love to see NASA do for Skylab, Voyager,

I'd love to see the same treatment done for the Mars landings.

Thanks very much. I'm a NASA contractor now, so it it's partially a NASA project from that perspective. Can you post some examples of "slow entertainment"? I like that this website might be fitting a genre I didn't know existed.

It does indeed, in a spectacular way -- the other examples of this genre aren't interactive, and don't have nearly as much data. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_television, for a nice overview of the various TV-broadcast examples of this :)

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

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3Qn_GEPvNs

[2]: https://tv.nrk.no/serie/klokken-minutt-for-minutt

Just wanted to say thanks. This is a little piece of magic. That's what technology is for, I guess.

I'm running Firefox 67.0.2 on Linux Mint 19 (fully patched) and the site does not work. It sit waiting for the interface to fully load and the Youtube video pane shows the "three dots" image when Youtube cannot reach the audio. Nothing else loads but I do see the individual audio channel links - none work.

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.

Sure. Please post any errors in your console.

INIT: Loading index.js index.js:193:65 The resource at “https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js” was blocked because content blocking is enabled. 11 INIT: onYouTubeIframeAPIReady():creating player object index.js:193:65 $(this).data... help_overlay_manager.js:9:234 Object { helpOverlayManager: {…}, forceRight: true, forceBottom: true, overlayTarget: ".app", jsClass: "HelpOverlayManager" } help_overlay_manager.js:9:265 INIT: jQuery(function ($) index.js:193:65 INIT: splash image loaded index.js:193:65 Failed to execute ‘postMessage’ on ‘DOMWindow’: The target origin provided (‘https://www.youtube.xn--com-to0a) does not match the recipient window’s origin (‘https://apolloinrealtime.xn--org-to0a). 11 processPaperData(): done ajax.js:43:9 Failed to execute ‘postMessage’ on ‘DOMWindow’: The target origin provided (‘https://www.youtube.xn--com-to0a) does not match the recipient window’s origin (‘https://apolloinrealtime.xn--org-to0a). 11 APPREADY: Ajax loaded: 1 index.js:193:65 whatever index.js:193:65 INIT: onYouTubeIframeAPIReady():creating player object index.js:193:65 setApplicationReadyPoller(): Checking if App Ready index.js:193:65 APPREADY: populatePhotoGallery(): 2 index.js:193:65 Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/id. (Reason: CORS request did not succeed). Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/roboto/v18/KFOmCnqEu92Fr1Mu4mxK..... (Reason: CORS request did not succeed). Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/roboto/v18/KFOlCnqEu92Fr1MmEU9fB.... (Reason: CORS request did not succeed). Loading failed for the <script> with source “https://www.google.com/js/bg/vVB4qXRsC37Dg1P6FS82ZMhKPNReNJh.... KfRygQcR5uk:1:1 The resource at “https://static.doubleclick.net/instream/ad_status.js” was blocked because content blocking is enabled. 11 setApplicationReadyPoller(): Checking if App Ready index.js:193:65 APPREADY: onPlayerReady: 3 index.js:193:65 APPREADY: onPlayerReady: 4 index.js:193:65 setApplicationReadyPoller(): Checking if App Ready index.js:193:65 APPREADY = 4! App Ready! index.js:193:65 window resize index.js:204:108 TypeError: paper.view is null navigator.js:7:37 window resize index.js:204:108 TypeError: paper.view is null navigator.js:7:37 window resize index.js:204:108 TypeError: paper.view is null navigator.js:7:37 window resize index.js:204:108 TypeError: paper.view is null navigator.js:7:37

I'm no expert, but it looks like you have a virus hijacking your traffic. What's with the .xn--org urls? Or maybe it's just a super overzealous adblocker.

I'd like to report as of June 21st at 4pm CDT, the site now works beautifully in my Linux Mint/Firefox system. I've made no changes other than a Firefox update was automatically installed so whatever you did - THANKS!

This is tremendous.

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlFbX3SHbOk

No relation. That was a paid campaign by the JFK Library done by Martin Agency. The good old days of Flash :)

I was the primary producer on this at the agency that designed/developed it Domani Studios (Now defunct) if you have any questions.

Sensational work. Really. I don't have much more of a constructive comment to add, but sometimes I feel it's just necessary to say "well done". Brilliant.

Thanks so much for building this & making it available. I haven't been this excited about a website since the internet was brand new!

What exactly is the "sync to today's clock" thing doing - the same day of the month and time of day but in July 1969?

Yes. It's a way to drop in on today's time of day within the mission. During the actual anniversary in July, it will drop you in 50 years earlier to-the-second.

This is amazing! Is it possible to download all of the audio? This would be great background noise for sleeping or working.

Here you go: https://archive.org/details/nasaaudiocollection

Or if you want the trippy version: https://somafm.com/missioncontrol/

Is any of the Parkes Observatory (Australia) data available?

You can hear them on the COMM TECH and NETWORK audio loops.

Really awesome, how long did it take you to put together?

About 2 years. I did a similar site for Apollo 17 before this one (Apollo17.org), which took 6 years. This time I knew what I was doing and could just do it.

I just wanted to commend you and thank you for your great work - this is an absolute masterpiece!!!

I would love to contribute to this project if you ever release a crowdfunding campaign!

Incredible

Congratulations !!

thanks!

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