Experience the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing | Hacker News Reader

Experience the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing

firstmenonthemoon.com

257 pointswsieroci33 comments

Apollo Guidance Computer programmer Don Eyles analyzes the program alarms that could have aborted the landing:

http://www.doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer

The Don Eyles link above contains an interesting anecdote on communication/management in a consequential decisionmaking environment. We wrestle with similar trouble in the avalanche avoidance world; the wisdom of the group is more reliably accurate than the individual.

Interesting thoughtfood - thank you!

That was truly brilliantly presented. It's things like this that the Internet were invented for.

I agree! My girlfriend and I both found the experience incredibly emotional. It has been a long time since a website has gotten me misty eyed...

You can read and listen along manually to every lunar surface operation at http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/frame.html. This is dozens of hours of audio (unfortunately in 12ish-minute segments). The transcript is annotated with helpful things, too - interviews with the astronauts in question to gain more understanding of what was happening, technical explanations and photos to explain what a particular device is, etc. There are a scattered few video clips as well for the most visually interesting moments.

The companion Apollo Flight Journal covers the rest of the missions - but doesn't contain audio, and is missing 13, 14, and 17 (but has 7-10, which of course aren't in the surface journal). It's still full of interesting annotations though.

This is absolutely fantastic, but isn't it interesting that when submitted 159 days ago (in the interests of full disclosure - yes, by me) it got one comment and just 4 upvotes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4710201

Clearly this is an item of interest to the HN community, and equally clearly last time it was missed by so many people. So:

* Does this mean that HN is in some sense sub-optimal?

* Is this a problem?

* Is this a problem worth fixing?

It'd be interesting to know what other articles appeared on that day, it might be the case it was just bad timing or it got shadowed by a device release/big announcement.

Indeed, October 29 was an eventful day. Google announced the new Nexus lineup, Apple changed its management structure, and Microsoft introduced Windows Phone 8. Also: hurricane Sandy.

More news from that day: http://www.techmeme.com/121029/h1820

* HN is sub-optimal. Most things are. HN's still interesting and useful.

* I'd argue that this is a problem, but I'm not certain how to solve it. I submitted a story a few days ago (search xylose) that continued to pull upvotes even at positions 100-150, but missed the key early votes needed for viability.

One way to give stories greater life might be to enable viewing HN with multiple time-constants https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5495264

or to make upvotes from deep in the pile count more/change the effective submission time slightly.

* Yes, it's worth fixing/addressing, but HN's pretty cool as it is. The merciless and democratic power of the exponential suppression of stories guarantees that, if a story makes it, it's immediately interesting to the group. It does not guarantee that all interesting stories will live.

I am glad it was repeated. I missed it the first time around.

Maybe relevant, my only submission was of this, it got no attention at all: http://www.dfj.com/ApolloConstruction/Apollo_11_LM-5_Constru... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5005502)

Oh, wow. That was stunning. Heart in my mouth the entire time, I cannot imagine what it was like to watch that in real time.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apollo.html

Always worth a read for more context and 'Moonshot' is pretty good for Apollo 11.

If you can't get enough of this, let me recommend:

A Man on the Moon - http://www.amazon.com/Man-Moon-Voyages-Apollo-Astronauts/dp/...

And the HBO series based on it:

From the Earth to the Moon - http://www.amazon.com/From-Earth-Moon-Collectors-Edition/dp/...

And I'd recommend "Apollo - The Race To The Moon" by Murray & Cox. Unlike most books about the US space program, this deals with everything except the astronauts. I've read it so many times my copy is falling apart...

Thanks, I'll read that. "Flight" by Gene Kranz, is also an amazing book.

Appreciate the reminder from you and others re: books by/about Kranz. Back in the 60s (I was 16 when Apollo 11 landed) I would not have cared for his no-compromise/no-bullshit approach. These days, that's exactly what I would appreciate about him, since it was necessary.

At first I thought this was going to be some sort of flash game, That was incredible.

My main thought is the amount of stuff the astronauts had to deal with while the moon is looking mighty big in the windows.

It appears to be the very definition of a high stress environment.

The fact that Neil Armstrong's heart rate went up to 150 confirms that.

OK. That website made it feel like I live in The Future. I grew up in The Space Age (Project Mercury onward) and I still get chills whenever I see TV programs or movies about it. Now this site too.

We now have the technology to make this happen live, in color and high definition with a full view of the craft and the moon. Can't wait!

As someone not old enough to have seen this take place live, I did appreciate this presentation so much. Now one can only wonder when will our generation bare witness to us landing on Mars?

I really, really hope I get to see this before I die. Space travel is something that has lost it's cultural significance (for some valid reasons, Columbia, Challenger etc) but to have something that the whole world can come together and be a part of would be incredible. Almost how the Eco movement started when images of the pale blue dot were circulated, would love to see something similar.

I recently read "Failure is not an option" by Gene Kranz (FLIGHT on Apollo 11) so I thought this was pretty cool. Great book too: http://www.amazon.com/Failure-Not-Option-Mission-Control/dp/...

Finally! Conclusive proof that the moon landings were faked! It can be done on a computer!

edit: clearly sarcasm. I wonder, they've gone all the way till the Eagle has landed, why not go further and include Neil Armstrong's small step for man recording?

You'd have to wait 5 hours for that. He didn't just open the hatch and took a stroll :).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11#Landing

If it is fake we should be able to know it right ? i mean the team did leave some stuff on the moon , so why cant people just watch the moon with powerfull big telescope and look for clues ? if there are some gear on the moon then the landing was genuine.

tiny tiny tiny leftovers + distortion from atmosphere.

best bet is to fire a giant laser at the moon and hope you get a disproportionate number of photons back from the retro reflectors. That doesn't convince many of knuckledraggers though.

There are satellite images of the landers: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap020628.html

Having stuff on the moon does not prove humans went there. We could have just sent autonomous rovers, a couple of robots that made foot impressions, etc.

For those who believe in a conspiracy, even if we had visible dead bodies on the moon would not convince you that we managed to fly live people there, let alone have them come back. After all, it would be way simpler to just send a dead astronaut up there?

The 'Lunar Surface Journal' I link to earlier has audio starting at 102:15:02 for Apollo 11, (in fact, has the descent audio for several if not all of the missions). It continues through the EVA prep and the first excursion, etc.

You can't quite experience it in real time, as the occasional long comm break (10 minutes to several hours) are often not included in the mp3s. But you can get pretty durn close.

As mertd notes, though, it's several hours between touchdown and EVA.

The relevant pages would be 'The First Lunar Landing', 'Post-landing Activities', 'EVA Preparations' and of course 'One Small Step' from the bottom of http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11j.html. It can be difficult to navigate because of the sheer amount of extra pages that they have.

Buzz Aldrin will punch you in the face!

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronauts_Gone_Wild#section_...

A lot of great links shared in these comments... I'd like to mention a very interesting article on the near-disaster of Apollo 13: "Apollo 13, We Have a Solution" - http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/apollo-13-we...

Awesome. And I think a lot of you will enjoy this Neil deGrasse Tyson keynote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLzKjxglNyE

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