
Apollo 11 in Real Time - rosser
https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/
======
hirundo
I was six years old during Apollo 11 and have just fragmentary memories of it.
One is of my grandfather tearing up at the lunar landing and saying "when I
grew up I used to carry flint and steel to start a fire" ... which would have
been in the 1890s. If he grasped what he was seeing I think he'd be about as
future shocked by the internet as exemplified by this link.

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sharkweek
My dad even talks about that - he’s in his late sixties and has been pretty
blue collar careered his whole life.

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.

~~~
copperx
Probably over a million JS frameworks. I could never fathom such a language in
my youth, let alone so many solutions to the same problem.

~~~
52-6F-62
The future is now, my friend.

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

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btown
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.

~~~
bfeist
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!)

~~~
lisper
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.

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

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mykowebhn
Bravo to you! Thank you for doing this!

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.

~~~
bfeist
Thanks so much. It's been suggested to me countless times that I put
promotions on the site or (gasp) enable monetization on the YouTube video
portion of the site. Nope. Like you, I dream of the Internet being a better
place--the place it was in 1997 but with modern technology.

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sigspec
My god this is truly an incredible accomplishment.

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.

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philjohn
If you'd like a deep dive into Apollo 11 I can recommend the podcast "13
Minutes to the Moon". It's 5 episodes in so far and gripping my attention.

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kzrdude
Extraordinary, it's true.

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.

~~~
bfeist
I couldn't think of another way to make mobile work at all. It's asking a lot
of the browser

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gouggoug
Amazing website.

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?

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bfeist
Sounds like someone's secretary. All phone calls from console were recorded.
This is one of those.

~~~
bfeist
BTW, you can generate links to any channel at any time by clicking the little
link button when the mission control audio console is open. Here's the moment
in question:
[https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/?t=171:04:09&ch=14](https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/?t=171:04:09&ch=14)

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ridgeguy
Thanks for this, it's extraordinary. Brings back such exciting memories from
that time.

I hope I live to see a crewed launch with Mars as the destination.

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JakaJancar
See also
[https://www.firstmenonthemoon.com](https://www.firstmenonthemoon.com)

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bojanvidanovic
This is one of the coolest things I saw on the internet! Really amazing!

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whois
This is so cool! I've just been sitting here listening for a while now.

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jregane
This is so great! Thank you. Just a little confused by the real time counter
being set a month in advance.

~~~
bfeist
When it's not during the anniversary 9-day period, it pick the closest time it
can and uses today's time of day.

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matchagaucho
The individual console and telemetry feeds redefines how to appreciate the
technical effort involved with this mission.

This definitely belongs in the Smithsonian on display with it's own
interactive kiosk.

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pepijndevos
For some reason my dad can't get in. The cursor is just a (/) when you mouse
over the join now button. Is the site overloaded? Is something wrong on his
end?

~~~
bfeist
Tell him to turn off ad block or antivirus. If he's unable to load in the
mission data files through ajax the site will just hang on the splash screen.

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progman32
If you enjoyed this,
[http://apollo13realtime.org](http://apollo13realtime.org) might be of
interest to you as well.

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zipperhead
I'm just leaving this on in the background on the home theater PC, and
switching back to it from the Roku to check in on things. Truly amazing.

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th0ma5
This is of course especially designed for this multi track set, but it is a
pretty good way to navigate multiple audio sources.

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mgraczyk
This is an impressive, immersive experience. Any plans to write about the
software or share parts of it?

~~~
bfeist
It's a bit of a messy bedroom. Ideally, I'd get some real software devs
involved to rewrite it using a modern framework. This is just a pile of JS and
some JQuery.

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.

~~~
copperx
Whoa. The fist thing I thought was "damn, if this is what React can do I want
a piece of that action and need to start learning it ASAP."

~~~
GrumpyNl
Isnt it great , you can accomplish all this, without react, just old J Query.
Hats of to creator of the site.

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baconhigh
See also; this twitter account is tweeting Apollo missions as they happened in
real time, 50 years ago:

[https://twitter.com/apollo_50th](https://twitter.com/apollo_50th)

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tychomaz
But where is the telemetry data? Oh it got all erased. Every single tape.
Whoops.

~~~
jazzyjackson
According to NASA there was a magnetic tape shortage. What, you've never taped
over a VHS before? xD

[https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/Apollo_11_TV_Tapes_Report.p...](https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/Apollo_11_TV_Tapes_Report.pdf)

~~~
datenwolf
> What, you've never taped over a VHS before?

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.

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kelsolaar
Fantastic work, this is very enjoyable and was instantly bookmarked!

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h1fra
One of the most impressive website I've seen. Bravo <3

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rcardo11
My 16gb 3.2 GHz MacBook Pro is on fire reproducing this. 50 years ago they
went to the moon and back with far less resources.

~~~
bfeist
It definitely pushes the browser to its limit. Suggest cleaning your head sink
though, it's not that bad.

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nagyf
Any chance of opensourcing the code?

~~~
raimue
The source code for the Apollo guidance Computer is available on GitHub.

[https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11](https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11)

