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.
I was 14 years old that day and I remember sitting on our couch absolutely transfixed. The entire Apollo 11 mission remains one of the most significant event in my entire life. For those too young to have witnessed the moon landings, for a recreation of what it was like, I suggest finding a copy of HBO’s “From the Earth to the Moon”.
Even my mother's childhood chores included churning butter by hand. They were not a poor family. It's difficult to imagine seeing the same kind of change in lifestyle in my lifetime as the previous two generations did.
The daily life changed for most of the people by the scale of the modern technology, but the previous generations were already familiar with the concepts we consider recent.
- In the time of Napoleon France already had an operational telegraph service. That was even before the electricity could be used for it:
"reducing the communication time between North America and Europe from ten days – the time it took to deliver a message by ship – to a matter of minutes."
So even then the people were absolutely able to understand the "internet." Not in the terms of the infrastructure, but in the terms of the effect. In the terms of infrastructure, even the people of today who don't directly work on that mostly use some simplifications, if they are even aware of the technical details of what is actually involved:
The "series of tubes" (from 2006) is just one of possible analogies, which can even be good enough for some scenarios (e.g. when discussing the throughput being limited by the capacity of the installed cables).
I was mostly thinking of the science fictional trope of all mankind's knowledge being in a centralized thing-- e.g. Encyclopedia Galactica. For both societal and technical reasons (especially golden age) SF was often oriented towards benevolent centralized governments.
Sure, they might not have predicted the extent to which knowledge could be "small pieces, loosely joined", but I'm not sure that in every case they are were creating centralized structures from first principles--generally there is one new concept they are exploring/pushing, and everything else is just rebranded things from their everyday life. The Encyclopedia Galactica is nothing more or less than "The Britanica.... IN SPACE!!!!" with no more or less authority implied.
That being said, the general concept of knowledge in earlier sci-fi does seem curiously impoverished--everything worth knowing often can be held within the brain single computer/robot/polymath, or quickly established by proceeding axiomatically from a few observations.
I was really entertained by the banter between the crew as they're orbiting the moon, given the gravity of the moment. They're almost jovial, which is a pretty stark contrast to the way it's depicted in hollywood. Especially First Man; that movie was so brooding it was hard to take seriously.
I, too, was 6 years old and have good memories of it. They made a Big Deal of it in school, leading up to the launch, and we were reading books like "You Will Go To The Moon" by Mae and Ira Freeman, and seeing films and hearing stores about it.
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.
From my understanding, whenever you click on a track it switches to "Mission Control Audio" tab near the top. Clicking "Photography" takes you back to the master audio. Definitely a little confusing. The "photography" label should maybe be master track?
Thanks for the fresh eyes on this. Just added a "close" button on the mission control audio interface that pops you back to the photography tab and unmutes master audio.
I wholeheartedly agree with what everyone else is saying: "Truly incredible", "almost unbelievably great", "REALLY amazing", "unprecedented", "I love it", "the attention to detail is extraordinary", "an absolute masterpiece", "so awesome", "absolutely remarkable", "Incredible", etc...
In a comment you mentioned not having much money. I would highly recommend taking a day or two to set up a Kickstarter or similar for your next release (even if you would do other missions for free anyway). Also consider Patreon or similar. Allow people to give something, even if it's a small amount.
While the pieces (audio, video, photos) have been "available" for some time, you probably don't realize how much value you are adding to multiple lives by making them "accessible" in this way.
This site is almost unbelievably great. Have you considered trying to contact the Smithsonian to see if they'd be interested in using it? I've never seen a more impressive interactive exhibit.
Stunning work, huge kudos to you, not just on concept but great execution/UI etc. My 14yo son is the most ridiculously keen space nut (the only teenager I know with a pdf of the Apollo manual on his phone) - he’s going to be very excited to see this.
I’m ex Head of Web at the Science Museum (London) and now run a company that works exclusively with museums. I’ll ping a few people: I know the curator of Space at SciM but also lots of museum web people. Just possible someone will know someone at the Smithsonian.
This is sadly typical from my own experience with institutions like that -- too many mini-kings and queens who are only interested in their own self-preservation and glory.
In defence of museums (who in my experience working with them for ~20 years) aren't like this at all - this is probably more a case of hitting up the wrong person at what is after all an enormous organisation...
This is REALLY amazing. Thank you for making this. The amount of data / information available at my fingertips on this one site is... unprecedented. And I even figured out how to use it!
I found it obvious and intuitive, despite the multiple ways of navigating, and the attention to detail is extraordinary. Now I want that three layer seek on other video sites! I love that each photo - most of which I've never seen or knew existed - appears at the precise moment it was taken and you can click through to a full size.
You managed a work of art. I am deeply impressed. The web needs more sites like this. This is what the web should be. I hope you have the bandwidth for when the BBC or similar inevitably find it. :)
My very hazy memories of watching the launch and landing in 69 (honestly probably of Apollo 17 in 72 - they've mostly all merged together in the memory now), here in the UK, are recreated wonderfully!
Apollo 11 is one of those early memories that is a lot of "I remember that I used to remember", and retain some fragments of. Later missions, and Apollo 17 especially I have a much more coherent picture of yet aren't quite fully separate from each other, and remember some of the programmes explaining all about the Lunar Rover etc. And the programmes about the space stations, and lunar bases... If only. :(
I'm trying to come up with words to describe this that would be worthy of even saying. All I can say is I love it. I was born in 1973, but for those of you who don't remember the pre-internet edge, current books and movies weren't exactly a click away. It would take years for the encyclopedia sets and science books to be updated. So at the ages of 6-12, all of the materials about space were about the Apollo missions. My friends and I would just absorb anything and everything Apollo and moon related we could find as if it were currently happening. This whole real time experience takes me back to that place of trying to figure what time of day they lifted off, how fast they were traveling, how long it took to get into orbit, how long they were there, etc. All of that kind of thing, and here it is beautifully recreated with time, voices, and video. And point in time data to boot. It's just wonderful.
Do you have, or do you plan, any kind of write up on what all went into building this site? I know that I, for one, would love to know more about what it takes to pull off coordinating all these different media sources and on-screen effects and what-not.
Hey Ben! This is so neat! I worked with Dr. Hansen on the audio digitization over on http://exploreapollo.org. Thanks for the link in the footer! I’ve been out of the loop on that project since graduating. Regardless, if you want to collaborate shoot me an email austin@austinpray.com
Thank you. This is really incredible work. Is the source code available anywhere? I trust you’ll keep this online for the foreseeable future but this should be preserved and redundantly available in case anything happens.
Yes and no. You can find the Apollo17.org source code that this site has extended, here https://github.com/bfeist/Apollo17. That said, the media elements and photography and some of the other material isn't on github (too big).
I’m coming from the following point of view: it’s only clear in hindsight, but if someone had asked me “what’s the greatest experience one could build on the web?”, the answer would be “an interactive real time presentation of the Apollo 11 mission”.
For a moment I felt as if I was with them in 1969, amazed by our achievements as humans and looking forward to our next steps. It was a nice, inspirational afternoon.
I can't imagine how complex the development of the UI must have been. Can you tell us a little bit about the technical implementation? What languages and frameworks you might have used, things that were particularly difficult?
Edit: looks like the client is hand-written with jQuery. I guess the next time someone makes a joke about jQuery you can send them this site. :D
Edit2: Just to preempt it, let's not have a debate about the state of JS frameworks here, there are enough of those already. :)
Yeah, it's nothing special. No trendy JS frameworks. The UI was pretty much just whatever I could think of in terms of layout, then a friend of mine helped to design it up a bit so it didn't look like a developer designed it. Wish I could say it was more involved that that, but it wasn't.
I was convinced this was an official NASA exhibit made for the 50-year anniversary. Fantastic work and much appreciated. My dad will be psyched; he was 17 at the time of the launches, and this fits in great in the recent tradition of "slow entertainment" that happens in real time over multiple days :)
It's the sort of thing I'd love to see NASA do for Skylab, Voyager, and other missions, where we used tune in for regular updates. It was all a huge free PR boost for the US - most of my generation were somewhat hooked on space going through school. Then there was all the associated programmes explaining how it all worked, the plan or the why, and the artist's impressions of space stations, manned Mars plans or Lunar bases. There's got to be a huge archive we've seen only snippets of - I never realised they kept every station's comms.
If it were official, I suspect I might be disappointed by the time it had got through multiple committees and large government contractors.
Thanks very much. I'm a NASA contractor now, so it it's partially a NASA project from that perspective. Can you post some examples of "slow entertainment"? I like that this website might be fitting a genre I didn't know existed.
It does indeed, in a spectacular way -- the other examples of this genre aren't interactive, and don't have nearly as much data. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_television, for a nice overview of the various TV-broadcast examples of this :)
My experience is just from the Norwegian Broadcasting Company, e.g. with "The Bergen Line minute by minute" [0] which is around 7 hours, or "A coastal voyage from Bergen to Kirkenes" [1] which is 134 hours. These were both sent on national TV in Norway. IMHO not nearly as interesting as the Apollo missions, but something you could have on as background scenery during a day or week at work, at a social gathering or something like that.
The silliest example I've seen was a bunch of students who built a live-updated clock for 24 hours, out of a sort of plywood template. They lined up in front of a camera at the Bergen train station (20 meters behind the camera at the start of video 0, incidentally) and worked in shifts for the 24 hours that the broadcast lasted. [2] (Unsure if the link is available internationally).
I'm running Firefox 67.0.2 on Linux Mint 19 (fully patched) and the site does not work. It sit waiting for the interface to fully load and the Youtube video pane shows the "three dots" image when Youtube cannot reach the audio. Nothing else loads but I do see the individual audio channel links - none work.
I did try your Apollo17.org site and it works beautifully in the same Firefox browser. And if I run Google Chrome, your Apollo 11 site works perfectly. Just not in Firefox.
I am running similar extensions in both browsers and I did disable Ublock Origin in Firefox but that had no effect. Apollo17.org in Firefox works fine with Ublock Origin enabled and I also run Ublock Origin in Chrome.
I'm willing to help out with debugging if you like.
INIT: Loading index.js index.js:193:65
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INIT: onYouTubeIframeAPIReady():creating player object index.js:193:65
$(this).data... help_overlay_manager.js:9:234
Object { helpOverlayManager: {…}, forceRight: true, forceBottom: true, overlayTarget: ".app", jsClass: "HelpOverlayManager" }
help_overlay_manager.js:9:265
INIT: jQuery(function ($) index.js:193:65
INIT: splash image loaded index.js:193:65
Failed to execute ‘postMessage’ on ‘DOMWindow’: The target origin provided (‘https://www.youtube.xn--com-to0a) does not match the recipient window’s origin (‘https://apolloinrealtime.xn--org-to0a). 11
processPaperData(): done ajax.js:43:9
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setApplicationReadyPoller(): Checking if App Ready index.js:193:65
APPREADY: populatePhotoGallery(): 2 index.js:193:65
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setApplicationReadyPoller(): Checking if App Ready index.js:193:65
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APPREADY = 4! App Ready! index.js:193:65
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I'm no expert, but it looks like you have a virus hijacking your traffic. What's with the .xn--org urls? Or maybe it's just a super overzealous adblocker.
I'd like to report as of June 21st at 4pm CDT, the site now works beautifully in my Linux Mint/Firefox system. I've made no changes other than a Firefox update was automatically installed so whatever you did - THANKS!
Sensational work. Really. I don't have much more of a constructive comment to add, but sometimes I feel it's just necessary to say "well done". Brilliant.
Yes. It's a way to drop in on today's time of day within the mission. During the actual anniversary in July, it will drop you in 50 years earlier to-the-second.
About 2 years. I did a similar site for Apollo 17 before this one (Apollo17.org), which took 6 years. This time I knew what I was doing and could just do it.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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?
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.
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.
I recently built a small web app in React for a special interest group. React, Redux, GraphQL, and all that. Partially to teach myself some new hotness (well, new hotness from three to five years ago). After several days of discovering and trying a lot of libraries, I’m pretty happy with the end result, and it probably is more maintainable, but I realized I could have done the same in jQuery for at most half the amount of time (of course to be fair, the percentage of time that went into the code driving the finished product was pretty low).
Also, I realized that the new hotness to me is already legacy to some. “Redux is the new jQuery”, they say (when talking about Relay or Apollo v2).
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.
