Forty Years Ago, Some Guys named Armstrong and Aldrin Landed on the Moon

And now, NASA is allowing me and anyone else to relive it. They are broadcasting the Houston-to-Apollo radio transmissions in real time. (They entered lunar orbit about an hour ago.) They have the mission report. They have onboard audio files with transcripts. Basically, they have everything I need to act like I'm back in 1969, except that I'm "in the know" and following everything possible.

You have no idea how excited I was when I found all this. I was honestly shaking.

Here's a timeline of the mission. If you want to know when to listen to the radio transmissions, this will help. (There's a lot of dead noise between events, and even for me static can be boring.) If you don't want to listen, the timeline will at least humor what interest you have in the mission. There should be at least some interest somewhere inside you, because seriously, it's THE FREAKIN' MOON, and WE WERE THERE.

[Photo courtesy of NASA]

Added 2009.07.20: Actually, visit We Choose the Moon. It can stream in Firefox on a Mac (!), and it's a lot more interactive than the NASA site. You can even follow updates from the lunar module Eagle, the Apollo 11 spacecraft as a whole, and CAPCOM in Houston on Twitter. Whoa!

I'm following this at work all day. (In the background, of course. I'll still be working.)