One giant leap

April 13, 2014 10:54 AM

Experience the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing: This project is an online interactive featuring the Eagle lunar landing. The presentation includes original Apollo 11 spaceflight video footage, communication audio, mission control room conversations, text transcripts, and telemetry data, all synchronized into an integrated audio-visual experience.

Via. (There was one mention of this a year ago on MF.)

posted by growabrain (20 comments total)

Heart rate 150 when he was about to touch down
posted by growabrain at 10:57 AM on April 13, 2014 [5 favorites]

Can I be Cary Grant as I experience it?
posted by fairmettle at 10:58 AM on April 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

That entertained me quite a bit. More than I expected it to. Going to go watch Ron Howard's Apollo 13. Bye.
posted by Fizz at 11:06 AM on April 13, 2014

Here is NA right after coming back in
posted by growabrain at 11:06 AM on April 13, 2014

that was cool, thanks.
posted by aesop at 11:25 AM on April 13, 2014

That was so cool!
I never get tired of listening to the landing audio. I go right back to my 11-year-old self following the whole adventure. Excuse me...I think I have something in my eye...
posted by Thorzdad at 11:35 AM on April 13, 2014 [2 favorites]

Thought i'd give it a try and found it engrossing. Tremendous fun especially as I appear not to have grown up much since that day
posted by quarsan at 11:37 AM on April 13, 2014

Heros with slide rules and sextants and massive courage and doing it with way less computing power than in my cheap GPS.
posted by Freedomboy at 11:44 AM on April 13, 2014

Really great. That moment right before landing. I get a sort of "What the hell do we think we're doing out here?" and an "Oh my God, we're actually doing this!" at the same time.

My favorite overlooked moon landing film is Apollo 11, a TV movie released a year after Apollo 13. It doesn't have the budget of Howard's great film, but I remember it feeling much more gritty and real. So much so that I thought it must have been filmed in the 70s. I specifically remember noticing how much more (MUCH MORE) cigarette smoking there was than in the Howard film.
posted by LEGO Damashii at 2:04 PM on April 13, 2014

I had to take off my glasses and wipe my eyes this made me so emotional.
posted by pashdown at 3:52 PM on April 13, 2014

How many times have I heard that audio?

Doesn't matter. That was special. Thanks.
posted by Devonian at 4:37 PM on April 13, 2014

That was totally thrilling. Thanks very much for the post.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 6:45 PM on April 13, 2014

The Amazing Lunar Module: From Early Models to the Moon
posted by homunculus at 6:52 PM on April 13, 2014

What this drives home is how much crap is going on in Flight Control that the CAPCOM calmly filters out when communicating with the crew.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:34 PM on April 13, 2014 [1 favorite]

Thanks for this, really great post. I've heard bits and seen clips over the years but to have it all integrated is a nice touch.
posted by brism at 8:34 PM on April 13, 2014

That was amazing, kick-ass use of multimedia. Thanks for posting it!

(I did have to play it in IE, it didn't all work in Firefox.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:11 PM on April 13, 2014

Thanks for this. My dad's an old NASA guy and loved this.
posted by umberto at 9:49 PM on April 13, 2014

Ahh.

The end of this is a direct result of Howard Wilson Tindall, Jr., better know as Bill Tindall. Bill Tindall's procedure memos -- where he basically defined how we would land on the moon -- were written in such a distinct style that they were known as Tinallgrams. Google them up.

Tindall was also the person who notes that, once we landed on the Moon, there was a real problem with NASA's standard affirmative and negative responses, because once on the Moon, GO would mean it was okay to Stay, and NO GO meant leave.

You see the result of this memo here, where, after the landing, Gene Krantz polls his team, and they don't answer GO, they answer "STAy." If an immediate abort was needed, the call was "NO STAY."
posted by eriko at 4:07 PM on April 14, 2014 [2 favorites]

Yay that was great.
I'll share it with a friend who talks a lot about Kerbal Space Program.
It takes me back to watching the actual thing live on a grainy b/w tv in a dive bar in Italy.
posted by anadem at 9:41 PM on April 14, 2014

If you are listening to it with one speaker you are missing out. They were clever to pipe audio through the left and right speakers, respectively for the two groups, and it really enhances your sensation of the controlled hornets nest of activity. It gives me chills to think of all of these seriously bright and capable people all monitoring closely the landing. To think that they would have done this in simulations and practice maneuvers thousands of times in advance is astonishing.
posted by dgran at 7:53 AM on April 16, 2014