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The First Men on the Moon (neat way to experience Apollo 11's landing)

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http://www.firstmenonthemoon.com/

This might mean more to people who are very familiar with the Apollo program, but I'm hoping that it's interesting for people with even just a little bit of interest. From the About page:

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.

A few things worth noting:

  1. The running time is about 18 minutes, I think.
  2. There are little tooltips all over the place to tell you what the acronyms and jargon mean.
  3. Check Armstrong's heart rate every now and then (bottom-centre section of the screen, top-right corner of that section).
  4. The 1202 and 1201 program alarms were caused by a faulty radar switch config, resulting in the memory blocks filling up and causing the software to reboot. A related and scarier story was the descent of Apollo 14, where the software got into a state of auto-abort-the-landing. MIT had to "remotely" patch a fix to the software to ignore the error.
  5. The fuel warnings were mostly erreneous. The warnings came up because of sloshing around as a result of their descent angle.

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Fake.

But really, this is AMAZING. I can't even imagine how heart poundingly exciting this was to witness. Only thing I can compare it to personally was when Curiosity landed. On the edge of my seat the entire way, cheering like a maniac when they confirmed touchdown. Even then, probably didn't compare to putting humans on the friggin' moon! It's things like this!

Thanks! :D

We need a space thread, because space is awesome.

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It's nice to finally be able to witness this secondhand after reading about it years ago. What I wouldn't give to have worked in NASA mission control when they were still doing this stuff.

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Related:

This clip is raw from Camera E-8 on the launch umbilical tower/mobile launch program of Apollo 11, July 16, 1969. This is an HD transfer from the 16mm original. The camera is running at 500 fps, making the total clip of over 8 minutes represent just 30 seconds of actual time. Narration is provided by Mark Gray, Executive Producer for Spacecraft Films.

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http://www.firstmenonthemoon.com/

This might mean more to people who are very familiar with the Apollo program, but I'm hoping that it's interesting for people with even just a little bit of interest. From the About page:

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.

A few things worth noting:

  1. The running time is about 18 minutes, I think.
  2. There are little tooltips all over the place to tell you what the acronyms and jargon mean.
  3. Check Armstrong's heart rate every now and then (bottom-centre section of the screen, top-right corner of that section).
  4. The 1202 and 1201 program alarms were caused by a faulty radar switch config, resulting in the memory blocks filling up and causing the software to reboot. A related and scarier story was the descent of Apollo 14, where the software got into a state of auto-abort-the-landing. MIT had to "remotely" patch a fix to the software to ignore the error.
  5. The fuel warnings were mostly erreneous. The warnings came up because of sloshing around as a result of their descent angle.

I finally got around to clicking on that link.... WOWOWOW!

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