I still get chills and misty eyes watching this. For those of us that watched the Apollo 11 moon landing live on TV, we had to be content with the voices of Walter Cronkite and Wally Schirra along with simulated models and radio traffic. Here, thanks to this award winning new website, we can experience the landing as if we are in the cockpit of the LEM and listening in the live communications loop (both Air-to-Ground and Flight Director’s audio loop) from the beginning of the descent, to the touchdown, and the STAY/NO STAY decision making afterwards.
This website even keeps track of the pitch angle of the LEM from telemetry data, and tracks what console at Houston Mission Control is speaking. You can even watch the heart rate of Neil Armstrong.
Trust me, this will be the best 18 minutes you ever spend online. It makes me proud to watch.
From the About page at the website:
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.
Until today, it has been impossible to comprehensively experience mankind’s shining exploratory accomplishment in a singular experience. We have compiled hours of content available from public domain sources and various NASA websites. Thamtech staff and volunteers generously devoted their time to transcribe hours of speech to text. By using simultaneous space and land based audio and video, transcripts, images, spacecraft telemetry, and biomedical data—this synchronized presentation reveals the Moon Shot as experienced by the astronauts and flight controllers.
Our goal is to capture a moment in history so that generations may now relive the events with this interactive educational resource. The world remembers the moon landing as a major historical event but often fails to recognize the scale of the mission. This interactive resource aims to educate visitors while engaging them with the excitement of manned-spaceflight to build a passion for scientific exploration.
Visitors begin the experience by hearing the words of Buzz Aldrin while simultaneously viewing the moon through the lunar module window. Moments later, the audience hears capsule communicator Charlie Duke inform flight director Gene Kranz that the astronauts are on schedule to start the descent engine. Throughout the presentation, visitors are able to customize their experience by jumping to key moments in the timeline. The timeline guides visitors to the crucial moments in the mission, including: program alarms (computer alerts), famous Go No-Go polls in the control room, low level fuel milestones, and landing.
“The Eagle has Landed.” Neil Armstrong’s words signal a technical milestone and successful execution of John F. Kennedy’s vision to land a man on the moon safely. Prior to these famous words, visitors see the synchronized audio communications, transcripts, video of the lunar module’s casting a shadow on the lunar surface, and biomedical telemetry of Armstrong’s heart rate surpassing 150 beats per minute!
The footprints from Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969 paved the way for five additional successful trips to the lunar surface over the following years. Thamtech takes pride in providing visitors with a glimpse into this and mankind’s enduring spirit for exploration.
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Click the image below to watch, listen, and experience the moon landing like you have never seen it before. – Anthony
P.S. For you Lewandowsky types, if you happen to run into Buzz Aldrin at a climate conference where he talks about his climate skepticism, it is probably best that you don’t call him a “denier” (moon landing or otherwise) to his face.
Here’s video of Buzz landing the punch heard round the world.
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They have vid of Buzz Aldrin giving Buzz Lightyear space travel tips. How cool is that.
Buzz Aldrin Day at Disneyland. Give it a think.
Those videos bring back a marvelous event. I’m from the UK, but I felt just the same pride as the LEM came in to land – pride for science and engineering! From the UK, at least, the Voice of America seemed to bring the most detailed and interesting accounts of every space mission.
Could anyone imagine then, that the lunar missions would be cut short before they were finished, or that there would be no meaningful continuation of manned space missions, or that by 2013, the US would only be able to put astronauts into space by sending them abroad!
I guess politicians can spoil anything.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the website to do much – does it only work in the US?
Jim Butts says:
May 1, 2013 at 8:33 pm
Were you christened BUTTS or did you achieve it ?
@Janice Moore 8:53 pm
It is true that there was some heroic software work arounds developed in the hour the LEM was behind the moon before GO/NOGO descent. Frankly, trying to debug and patch machine language an hour before powered descent just shows how close to the line of death NASA played then. But that wasn’t in regard to the 1201 landing alarms.
One of the key people that made of the Apollo 11 landing a success was Dick Koos and the team that designed and ran the lunar landing simulations. From “Failure is Not an Option” (pages 268-272), six days before Apollo 11 launch, the Mission Control White Team with Kranz leading, went in for a full landing simulation with the Apollo 13 crew. Koos told his team to load Case 26. Three minutes into the landing sequence Koos nodded to his team, “Okay, gang, let’s sock it too them and see what they know about computer program alarms.“
It was a 1201 program alarm. The Guidance controller was seeing the alarms thinking the computer was sick and shortly called for an ABORT. Kranz ordered the ABORT, which is a very dicey maneuver, but saved the crew in the simulation. But Kranz was “really unhappy with Koos.” The last simulation should have been one that landed on the surface.
Steve Bales worked the night with his team and the next morning understood that Koos was right. Bales and Koos worked up four hours of simulation exploring computer alarms. By July 11, Steve Bales had a descent program list of computer alarms that would require an abort — 1201 and 1202 were NOT on that list. Kranz writes that if not for Koos’ last simulation problem, the Apollo 11 landing would probably have turned into a harrowing abort.
Computer problems and re-programming aside – and though crude, they were very important to Apollo’s success – Armstrong had to pilot the LEM himself “over” and around a rock-strewn landscape that no one anticipated. Landing directly on the boulders would have been fatal, landing safely but skewed or twisted would have prevented take-off later. Landing off-centered (hitting one with a single leg) would have also been fatal.
We did not have the autopilots, the sensors, the controllers, the radios and radars and robots to do it. He had to land and guide it himself by hand. And ended up landing with only seconds to spare of fuel. (You can here them counting it down…)
Science fiction note: no science fiction writer had ever written a story of any lunar landing that was televised live to the world. The idea of doing that never occurred to fiction writers.
Marvellous, but in a way sad, because we are looking to the past for evidence of mankind’s capacities and talents, there being little sign of it today in the old democracies. As it stands America has no chance of duplicating this achievement anymore, never mind thinking in terms of an manned expedition to Mars. The rot of political correctness, misplaced self importance, the entitlement culture, corrupt government and fantasies such as equality and fairness have combined with other factors to corrode the spirit that made the US so inventive, courageous and important to the world. It is difficult to convey how disappointing this conclusion is.
Friends:
I, too, watched the Apollo 11 landing live. And a few years ago I had the great thrill of walking the length of the last remaining Saturn V.
But the greater thrill was before that.
In 1968 Apollo 8 went around the Moon for Christmas. For minutes the vehicle was behind the Moon and out of any communication so would have to do its deceleration burn ‘on its own’. Had its crew got it wrong then they would have died away from Earth, and the later Moon landing may not have happened. We waited – we waited – we waited – we waited. And then the vehicle came from behind the Moon, the news came that the burn had worked, and people around the entire world let out a collective sigh of relief. That moment is even more memorable than the later “One small step for man”.
And Apollo 8 was important for another reason. Indeed, to date it is more important than Apollo 11.
Apollo 8 took a photograph of the Earth rising above the Moon’s surface. For the first time people saw the Earth as a small, seemingly fragile orb floating in space.
Before that image all peoples at all times had considered the world as a provider of threats to be opposed; storms, earthquakes, volcanoes, diseases, predators, etc.. After that image many people saw the world as a fragile globe needing our protection. Environmentalism became a major philosophy with international influence; e.g. the AGW-scare.
Yes, Apollo 11 was a great achievement and I thrill at the memory of it. But Apollo 8 was the game-changer.
Richard
The glory days of NASA are long past. By the eighties, no astronaut was safe in their hands. At present it is simply a stale, giant bureacracy searching for a role, flirting with the global warming crowd and besmirched by the Hansen and Schmidt types. I am not impressed by today’s NASA. Mission over and long gone.
As for saying it is a fake they are still pinging signals off kit left on the moon to study it’s position and orbit around earth and other features of both earth and moon
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/masterCatalog.do?sc=1971-008C&ex=09
You can’t do these sort of experiments if the kit is not there.
PS I did like the punch. For an older man he still had some power in his arm beautiful.
James Bull
I was 5. Well, almost 6. But watching this “live” in grainy B/W fuzz-o-vision is still one of the most memorable moments of my entire childhood. I’d be lying if I said I remembered exactly what I saw, it probably involved Walter Cronkite and I think I recall also wishing the announcers would shut up so I could hear the REAL stuff they were talking over.
Since Neil Armstrong passed away I have watched all of the NASA videos I could find, and my respect for the men and women involved with NASA in the 60s is about as high as it can get. The real money was in defense, and these people essentially “repurposed” the DoD hardware for this. The LEM was nothing more than crepe paper with a bamboo frame (yes, I’m exaggerating… but not much). In that era my brother, the artist and near-pro Model maker, built a perfect replica of the LEM from a kit. I’m still not sure where he got the gold foil, but I remember he used charcoal ash from the BBQ for the lunar surface and dropped pebbles into it to make craters. Clear memories.
My memories of the actual landing are as grainy and fuzzy as the ancient vacuum tube TV I watched it on. This presentation makes it crystal clear, accessible, and relevant. I never knew about the loops (read the user comments, some are from people actually involved in 1969).
And Janice Moore, if you’d like to learn more about the computers of the era, try YouTube. There are a few incredible series on the history of computing, and even some Defense Department videos explaining the immense tracking system they built, at a time when even the most remotely useful computer filled a multistory building. In fact, IBM built some of the Saturn 5 guidance computers into the rings between stages, where they were jettisoned when no longer needed.
I started my career in programming back in the era of 4k RAM on a Z80 in 1979, and at that those were powerful machines compared to what NASA was using. In 1982 I was working for a seismic data processing company that had a VAX 11/780 and several surplus NASA Raytheon computers. Anyone else remember DECUS? Anyone else ever get disciplined for using too many CPU cycles during an overnight shift?
To put this in perspective, I just bought two Raspberry Pi computers, each the size of a deck of cards, each $35, each more powerful than those two million dollar VAX’s. One of them is now a 1080P media center (it’s a bit slow, but the playback is hardware accelerated), and the other is my development web server. They have 512Mb of RAM, run at 1GHz, hardware GPU, hardware H.264 encoder/decoder, Ethernet, USB, and a 16Gb SD card from Walmart for $10. If I could only time-travel to 1960 with these things…
Well done NASA. How the mighty have fallen.
I listened to the landing on a Short Wave radio in a car in the mist driving back to college across the African highveldt late at night. I was so moved and excited and proud to be a human being that I welled up.
In 1995 I visited Cape Canaveral and stood in the dark, with a hundred or so Americans while the whole landing was emulated on the same kit that was used originally. At the end one guy in the crowd shouted out “America” and I welled up again and I felt a huge surge of pride for all Americans.
Watching this now I have once again welled up because I understand the spirit and astonishing teamwork that America puts into such grand projects as this and also all of the much smaller adventures I have had with so many Americans in my business and private life.
What a beacon of hope and progress you are. No wonder there are malcontents and self haters trying to pull you down when you stand head and shoulders above so many.
richardscourtney says:
May 2, 2013 at 2:47 am
– – –
There is a very old movie long pre-dating the moon landings which shows an Earth rise. When I hear the story of the real image of the Earth rise, I can’t help to wonder if it’s a bit of exaggeration of the reaction to this image. Surely someone at NASA must have seen that movie and therefore the “surprise”, the statements I have heard stating no one thought of this, rings hollow to me.
The movie was released in 1902.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon
“Landing safely on the Moon, the astronomers get out of the capsule and watch the Earth rise in the distance.”
Now we, US, rest on our laurels, our thorny crown misplaced. The music has died.
To put the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programme into context, the total cost from when Kennedy said go to Apollo 17, the last lunar mission, was $25.4bn
In the same period of time, US women spent more on cosmetics!!!
garymount:
re your comment to me at May 2, 2013 at 3:42 am.
Perhaps the Earth-rise picture was planned. I don’t know. As you say, it seems likely that a photo of the Earth from the Moon seems likely to be one of the things scheduled to be obtained from the first manned flight around the Moon.
But the effect of that photo is not altered by whether it was planned for Apollo 8 to obtain the photo or it was fortuitously obtained.
For me, as I said, my personal greatest Apollo memory is the waiting for Apollo 8 to return from behind the Moon while hoping all had gone well with the burn, and the immense relief of everybody when told it had.
And there was the Christmas message to the world from the space capsule. Oh, yes, Apollo 8 was the ‘big one’ for me. After that we ‘knew’ a Moon landing flight was going to happen.
Apollo 11 came close especially the LEM landing with its exhausting fuel, but we were seeing what we thought we would see. Not until Apollo 13 was there another ‘fingers crossed’ mission as severe as Apollo 8, and Apollo 13 is memorable because it went wrong.
Heroes. Long may they be remembered. They achieved one of the two greatest achievements of humankind: only the eradication of smallpox surpasses it.
Richard
Yes, what happened to NASA? Political correctness. They should leave Earth monitoring to NOAA and develop rockets.
Jim Butts says May 1, 2013 at 8:33 pm
There was no good reason to get out of the trees either; and we all know what damage fire does. And that language thing just leads to arguments.
garymount:
It always amused me, that one. The Earth doesn’t rise to an observer on the moon… it just appears to rotate. The only way it can rise is if the observer is in orbit.
My future bride and I watched this through the outside display window of a Penny’s. Of all the things you barely remember, this is one I remember in great detail. Great post.
MY memory of watching this event on a tiny B&W portable TV in my college apartment at UCSB (Isla Vista) includes Armstrong humming quietly, as he back down the ladder, “Heigh Ho Heigh Ho, Off to Work We Go”.
Honest question –> Does anyone else share this memory?
Thanks so much Anthony! Talk about memories… I was a student operator of a proton linear accelerator at USC. Hughes Aircraft rented the accelerator to calibrate the proton sensors for Apollo 8. We worked all weekend 24 hours a day. What a thrill to know that our sensors made it to the moon and back.
NASA may have degenerated into a typical governmental bureaucracy, but the can do attitude is alive and well in the USA. Scalable Composites just flew the Virgin Galactic rocket, we have two firms delivering payloads to space on their new boosters, it’s looking like a privately developed throttleable engine for vertical landings is going to be successful, that’s a lot of space activity which doesn’t require taxpayer subsidies.
Since when was success measured by what the Federal Government did? They actually subcontracted virtually all of the manufacturing of the Apollo components. The first Apollo systems didn’t have any integrated circuits at all – the technology was called cordwood, and the components were stacked like cordwood between the two circuit boards. The components were actually, in some cases, spotwelded together. We were still learning how to do space qualified assemblies.
Despite what you are told, very little electronics technology came from the space program. In fact, much of what we’re told about the results isn’t true at all.
I’m delighted to see a private group win the Ansari X-Prize for the first private launch of a vehicle into outer space with SpaceShipOne. I look forward to Virgin Galactic being successful, and resulting in private space flight becoming a regular means of traveling around the world.
At the time that Apple has over $100 billion in corporate cash, the idea of some company spending $20 billion developing a viable moon spacecraft isn’t science fiction any longer. There are funds available, and if there’s a market for the services, they will come.
Took this for granted as a kid.
Now I well understand the huge effort it truly was, right at the extremity of the technology of the time.
However I am still in awe of the incredible courage of these men, calmly going about their work in spite of having an intricate understanding the risks involved. Armstrong’s heart-rate during the landings showed that they had the same feelings as ordinary men, but could calmly over- ride any fear.
And this was not the sort of courage of a quick adrenaline rush leap into danger, it was facing years, month, days, hours then minutes of danger.
Here is a bailout of the landing simulator during training by Armstrong. He just went straight back to the office to catch up with work after that.
http://www.airspacemag.com/video/Armstrongs-Close-Call.html
Here is a great interview of Neil Armstrong in recent years. 51 minutes, but well worthwhile.
Jim Butts: May 1, 2013 at 8:33 pm
I find your attitude a bit sad. Did you never get in the car and just drive to see what was around the next bend, or take a vacation to see a place you hadn’t been before? When you were young, did you not take walks through the woods just to see what you could find. Did you never take on a challenge just for the sake of the challenge? It is to people who took the challenge, went exploring, and tried new things that we owe our way of life. We are very fortunate that we are not all as incurious as you.
The moon landing was a highlight of my youth. I remember arriving home from a trip just in time to turn on the TV (small, B&W) to watch the landing. It raised the spirits of the nation, and surprisingly of most of the world, like nothing before or since. Sending a robot would not have had that impact. Sending a robot does not require the incredible courage of those astronauts. Next time you get a chance, sit in a replica of a space capsule at a museum and get a feel of what it must have been like, lying on your back, enclosed, constrained and helpless, waiting for a controlled explosion to be triggered beneath you.
I am a little confused: the esteemed Lewandowsky writes alarmist acclaimed reports how none of us WUWT readers believe the moon landings actually happened because we are all conspiracy-driven denier nutters. Yet everyone here – one sourpuss excepted – is so enthusiastic about the NASA moon landings. Could it be that there was a flaw in the great Lewandowsky’s research?
However, as already commented, those were the glory days of NASA. Now it is a bloated stale bureaucracy, prouder of Hansen’ rantings than Armstrong or Aldrin’s achievements.