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Apollo 11 in Real Time

apolloinrealtime.org

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Re: Apollo 11 in Real Time

#63

Post by lisper »

bfeist wrote: post #30
btown wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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!)

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.

Re: Apollo 11 in Real Time

#66

Post by gridspy »

bfeist wrote: post #32
mgraczyk wrote: post #29

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

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.

If you don't mind the sharing part, don't be embarrased about the quality of your source code. Quality will come from getting lots of eyes on it.

You made it actually happen, that is very special even if the code is a huge mess.

Re: Apollo 11 in Real Time

#67

Post by oefrha »

copperx wrote: post #56
bfeist wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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."

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).

Re: Apollo 11 in Real Time

#68

Post by teh_klev »

bfeist wrote: post #3

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

This is tremendous.

Is this any relation to wechoosethemoon.org from a few years back (2009)?

The site is still there but needs flash, there's a YouTube video of the site here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlFbX3SHbOk

Re: Apollo 11 in Real Time

#70

Post by acqq »

rebuilder wrote: post #54
hirundo wrote: post #10

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.

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_telegraph

- The first transatlantic telegraph cable became operational in 1858, that was 160 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable

"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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes

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).

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