Apollo 11 moon mission reincarnated as website
Forty years after Neil Armstrong made his historic first steps on the moon, Apollo 11 is beginning the same trip to the lunar surface this week via the internet. The website WeChooseTheMoon.org was launched today, sponsored by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum to recreate the lunar mission minute-by-minute as …
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Why now?
Clearly the government has been hiding something. Why didn't they put this Web site up back in 1969 right after the launch? This is just another sham to conceal the use of a sound stage on Mars to fabricate the lunar landing!
sound stage on Mars?
need new keyboard and 24" flat panel display.
Site illegible?
Fun idea. But are they using historically correct technology to make that website? Tiny blue-gradient letters on a black background make the captions almost completely illegible. They may be the smartest guysin the room, but someone needs to send a Saturn V up the designer's bums...
Scary...
Scary to think that the PC you are accessing their site on has far more processing power than the computer that actually got them to the moon in the first place.
Re: Scary....
I suspect that the mobile telephone that you use has far more computing power, let alone your PC
Paris - because she also has more computing power than the apollo program
Re: Why Now by Tom Maddox
Hmm... I wonder why? Oh yeah, there was no WWW / Internet in 1969!! At least not like it is today.
I read this a few weeks ago and found it interesting. On page 15 it talks about how one model of those "early" mainframe computers was used to control the Apollo missions.
@ Steve Evans
Love the thought, lets not go to the level that we're using technology to type this that still exceeds what we're using to pilot the current space endeavour (English spelling, by way of our French friends).
Mine's the one with a Sinclair calculator still running 0/1 in the overheating pocket.
Scarier
Scarier to think that YOUR CELL PHONE most likely has far more processing power than the computer that actually got them to the moon in the first place.
@Simon Taylor 2
Back in the early '80s, the Smithsonian in Washington DC had an exhibit with one of the computers used to control the trajectory of an Atlas ICBM. It noted that the computers used to guide the Apollo missions to the Moon and back were not much bigger or more powerful, and that the average American schoolchild had a calculator that was as powerful, if not more so, than this machine.
And this was in the days when the four basic mathematical functions were all you got, unless you could find a really high-tech one with *gasp* percentages and square roots on it...
(ps I think the bit about "sound stage on **MARS**" means Tom was having a larf...)
@Simon Taylor
Joke icon dude. The rest of us didn't need it, but he provided it for the special people amongst us.
In any event, this looks like a very cool website. Wonder if I'll bother staying up to watch the moon landing....again. ;-) Can't count the number of times I've seen that on documentaries.
@Simon Taylor 2
Sad to see that even with the Joke Alert icon that some people still can't comprehend.
36KB or thereabouts
Having recently got the Haynes Apollo 11 manual for a friend, there is a section about the Apollo Guidance Computer having a RAM total of approx 36KB!
This wiki concurs - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer
Is it just me?
does anyone else find it a little depressing that 40 years after this event we are celebrating it with a commemorative website rather than a commemorative plaque laying at tranquillity base?
Computing power to get to the moon
It is something of a myth to suggest that a mobile phone has more computing power than it took to get to the moon. Sure, the Lunar Module itself had a tiny amount of processing power and memory, but on Earth, which was really doing the donkey work of the calculations, there were banks of machines, with many times the power and memory of a phone.
I've had a look
That's never a real web site. That's been simulated in a studio somewhere.
Scarier still...
The thought that my mobile phone (it's on a UK contract, so it's certainly not a cell) has a better sense of humour than Simon Taylor 2...
@Simon
Methinks Tom was making a joke. Have a humour hand grenade.
Oh, and for the record, my pants have more processing power than it took to get man to the moon.
Lazy website
Slightly annoying that the website doesn't seem to want to work in Opera Web Browser. Only loads in IE8 for me. (The rest of the NASA website has always worked fine in alternate browsers in the past)
Scarier still is the "powered by AOL" logo. Are we sure this isn't Apollo 13?
It's not just you (@DolJuran )
I'm massively saddened too. I forget who said "I always dreamed I'd see the first man on the moon; but I never dreamed I'd see the last..."
Kennedy misquoted
It wasn't
"we choose to go to the moon.....but because it is hard"
but
"we choose to go to the moon....because we is hard"*
it being the cold war and all that.
*the "as nails" bit was probably lost in the applause.
@DolJuran
We can only hope that the plaque will be for the 50th anniversary, eh?
Problem is, we may have to ask the Chinese to put it there for us...
Chinese will own the moon
Given the propensity for the Chinese government to treat its corporations as part of the state, and charge those who go around trying to get compensation for broken contracts worth billions, as spies with state secrets (Stern Hu), the fact that china does not recognise intellectual property.
If they dont play fair with trade, dont expect them to play fair when they're the only people heading there.
Not normally Xenophobic, but its really rough what they're doing with Hu!
@hugo tyson
'Twas a science fiction (or SyFy, if you're a TV Exec in the Good Ol' You-Ess-ov-Aye) author by the name of Jerry Pournelle. Kinda sad, really, given how true it appears to be.
FIJAGH!
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