Experience the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing | Hacker News Reader

Experience the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing

firstmenonthemoon.com

250 pointsmarvinborner50 comments

Do yourself a favor and look up moon landing 4k on youtube. There’s some amazing immersive stuff now: https://youtu.be/boFZ3cAws20

There’s also a few amazing first person videos from space walks on the ISS: https://youtu.be/AmrrSfiMxGA

The footage from Artemis is gonna be incredible.

Also highly recommend this “are we going?” Talk on engineering issues in Artemis: https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU Which is where I learned about this report from NASA called “What Made Apollo a Success”: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720005243/downloads/19...

Thanks!

I liked reading this extensive accunt of all apollo missions and what each accomplished --

A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts Andrew Chaikin https://www.amazon.in/Man-Moon-Voyages-Apollo-Astronauts/dp/...

I wish there was an "annotated verison" or enthusiast discussion forum that corss-linked footage like this to the corresponding passages in the book so we can live it more fully

The Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, and the accompanying Apollo Flight Journal, are transcripts of the audio recordings, with accompanying audio/video, and annotations from post mission briefings, and interviews with the astronauts in the 1990s. There is an overwhelming amount of detail. Dave Scott of Apollo 15 was a particularly enthusiastic participant in this, but not the only one. It really is a tremendous resource for Apollo. https://www.nasa.gov/history/alsj/ https://www.nasa.gov/history/afj/

> amazing [...] space walks

The upcoming Polaris Dawn spacewalk will be live streamed. Its cameras were said to be a priority. It's on day 3. Launch is currently waiting on reentry weather.

Huh, Falcon 9 was ungrounded earlier today... so they might actually be waiting on weather again though they haven't said that since last night while they were still grounded by the FAA due to the loss of a first stage during landing.

Meanwhile SpaceX just tweeted "Targeting back-to-back Falcon 9 launches tonight from California and Florida → http://spacex.com/launches/" while that URL says "Upcoming: August 28, 2024 Polaris Dawn, August 31, 2024 Starlink" and following links shows that both of those missions are supposed to launch from Florida. So I'm incredibly unclear on what (if anything) they are launching tonight.

All together, F- communication from SpaceX right now.

[1] https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1829694994703331393

I would like to add that everyone should check the incredible documentary "For All Mankind" scored by Brian Eno.

http://apolloinrealtime.org also quite good.

"Failure is not an Option" is a fascinating read to get a lot of background from a first hand perspective. E.g. Go/No-Go became Stay/No-Stay after the landing to avoid confusion (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/141499.Failure_is_Not_an...)

The first video with the Apollo 16 rover traverse got me curious about how far they went.

I found this web page which has a great way to visualise it, with their tracks overlaid on famous places on Earth: https://www.nasa.gov/history/alsj/TraverseMapsEarth.html

The one in the video is the orange line crossing Sydney Harbour Bridge with Smoky mountain ahead of them and to their right.

Another chance to recommend a book that I learnt about from HN: I highly recommend the book, Sunburst and Luminary; http://www.sunburstandluminary.com/SLhome.html

A technical pleasure and also very good glimpse into the Apollo team - working together, to land on the moon. It is a fun easy read, written by the fellow in charge of programming the guidance computer on the lunar lander. It is also a great snapshot of that time in history, the excitement of Apollo, and with the frustration of the Vietnam war going on, some protests, etc. Just a hint - the main programmer, was an English major, and his use of the right words, were a key factor in the success of of creating an efficient and effective computer language

Agree - it's also a superb account of hacking, in the older, positive sense of the word

Along with this, take time and listen to the BBC Series "13 minutes to the moon" https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p083t547 which goes into detail behind everything that happened during those 13 minutes. I was truly amazed by the backstory and the youth of everybody in the control room. As I recall, Gene Kranz (in his mid 30s in 1969) was the oldest person in the room.

Awesome to see this. One of my favorite songs to listen to that can get a pumped up feeling is Go! by Public Service Broadcasting where they use the voices from here in the song. I knew the source was Apollo landing, and it's cool to listen to the words from their origination.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHIo6qwJarI

Gives me the chills, sooo good.

I love the calm communications. The feeling of everything possible thought out.

Regarding moon landing videos, I also enjoyed the "story" of the computer on board which is told in this great presentation [1]: Light Years Ahead | The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer by Robert Wills. Definitely worth a watch if you fancy the moon landing.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1J2RMorJXM

So thought out, feels like watching a kubrick film

Buzz did have a bit of urgency in his voice regarding the 1202 alarm :)

That was a very good presentation. Thanks for posting. I probably would never come across otherwise

I love it... that's a great way to present it.

Man, those folks were impressive to be juggling all that information and have the communications processes in place manage it all... and calmly. (Steely-eyed missile men, indeed.)

I was born a month after they landed, and while growing up, the Apollo program was the inspiration for becoming an engineer.

This is such an amazing engineering achievement, especially if you consider the technology available at the time (computers!) — I'm worried that we are unable to produce such wonderful work anymore. And that most of the effort seems to get invested into useless crap like adtech.

If we spent 4% of GDP on a moon landing, we could easily do it again. Or if NASA just had a clear goal to pursue and wasn’t pushed around by Congress all the time.

Nothing, bar none: No human endeavor has paid itself back, including the computer you are reading this on, more than the American Space Program.

Let's push around Congress to get the simple problems fixed so that we can concentrate on the Problems that are hard.

"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

John F. Kennedy Address at Rice University - Sept. 12, 1962.

That would be more than the annual military budget. Phew!

There's no Soviet Union to light a fire under your feet.

We’re going to be racing the Chinese to mars pretty soon, assuming we’re all not fighting terminators.

I still can't listen to these recordings without getting so emotional that I produce some actual tears.

I love it.

On a related note, Nvidia virtually recreated the Apollo 11 lunar landing site [1]. They wanted to show that the illumination of Buzz Aldrin in a photo of him exiting the moon lander was indeed as expected and not a hoax. The reason Aldrin appeared so perfectly illuminated was not a studio light but the space suit of Neil Armstrong, who took the photo!

[1] https://www.cnet.com/science/nvidias-new-gpu-sinks-moon-land...

Nice.

I was a little kid back when all this happened and like many other kids I was totally caught up in the space and moon missions. I remember watching a lot of launches and seeing the updates on the evening news with my parents.

We tuned to the nightly news regularly back then. Special reports following events in the space program were important so we tuned in to catch them. Some days this type of news felt like the only good news on the TV broadcast since we had the war in Vietnam, anti-war protests all over the country, racial issues, assassinations of various political leaders, etc. I could feel the effects of these events on my parents and other adults. I had good parents and so the lessons I took from this period have served me well in how I work with other people. Maybe it's like Willie Nelson sang when he said to "Remember the good times. They're smaller in number and easier to recall. Don't spend so much time on the bad times, their staggering numbers will be heavy as lead on your mind."

I still remember the excitement and dread of watching this unfold, not knowing whether they could stick the landing and the immense joy when they confirmed that they were on the moon. My parents made sure to gather all of us so we could watch things like this as they unfolded. Somewhere in a box I have a recording of some events like this - the moon landing and moon walk, Nixon's resignation, etc.

I'm glad these guys took the time to sync all of this dialog with the video feed. That brings it all back.

I'm a bit older now though I still felt the excitement of watching the first men land on the moon and hearing the confirmation that they made it.

This is fantastic. I really appreciate how the two audio loops take advantage of stereo and are on separate channels. Much more immersive this way.

It's a great multimedia experience, there have been other discussions [0] on it in the past as well.

I'd nominate 9/11 in Realtime [1] as another exemplary project.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5503225

1: https://911realtime.org/

Excuse me, but if you're ever called upon to enumerate badass solid individuals, remember Gene Kranz.

Do you put him ahead of Neil Armstrong? History does, and always will, but I'm not sure that's a clear choice.

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Kranz

Not to take away from Kranz, who was an incredible man, but Armstrong was on another plane.

On Apollo 11, he was 100,000 miles from Earth, with bad navigation and the (fly by wire) computer blaring errors into his ear, and had to manually fly to a better area and land with seconds of fuel left.

He wouldn't have been put in that position though if he hadn't come through in a lot of other tricky situations though too. In particular Gemini 8 where the thrusters malfunctioned, and he had to troubleshoot the problem while being spun at 50 rpm.

Was? He's still alive!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Kranz

> Armstrong was on another plane

Different rocket, actually. eyyyyy!

Armstrong was also quite good at handling the Lunar Module Research Vehicle. A flying machine that was notoriously difficult to fly. Even though he had a close call when he had to eject out it during one training flight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Landing_Research_Vehicle...

Kranz, while an important character in the Apollo saga, wasn’t even an astronaut.

I don’t know what history puts him “ahead” of Neil. Or even ahead of the other greats like Grissom.

With Apollo 11 source code publicly available, maybe someone will add a "debugger" panel that steps through each line of code during landing?