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posted by Jason Kottke  ·  gift link

Apollo 11 landing on TV as it aired 40 years ago

Inspired by the ApolloPlus40 Twitter account and We Choose the Moon, both of which are tracking the Apollo 11 mission as it happened 40 years ago, I’ve built a page where you can watch the CBS News coverage of Walter Cronkite reporting on the Moon landing and the first moon walk, 40 years to the second after it originally happened.

Apollo 11 TV Coverage

Just leave this page open in your browser and at the appointed times (schedule is below), the broadcast will begin (no manual page refresh necessary).

Schedule:
Moon landing broadcast start: 4:10:30 pm EDT on July 20
Moon landing shown: 4:17:40 pm EDT
Moon landing broadcast end: 4:20:15 pm EDT
Moon walk broadcast start: 10:51:27 pm EDT
First step on Moon: 10:56:15 pm EDT
Nixon speaks to the Eagle crew: approx 11:51:30 pm EDT
Moon walk broadcast end: 12:00:30 am EDT on July 21

If you’ve never seen this coverage, I urge you to watch at least the landing segment (~10 min.) and the first 10-20 minutes of the Moon walk. I hope that with the old time TV display and poor YouTube quality, you get a small sense of how someone 40 years ago might have experienced it. I’ve watched the whole thing a couple of times while putting this together and I’m struck by two things: 1) how it’s almost more amazing that hundreds of millions of people watched the first Moon walk *live* on TV than it is that they got to the Moon in the first place, and 2) that pretty much the sole purpose of the Apollo 11 Moon walk was to photograph it and broadcast it live back to Earth.

Thanks to Meg for her JS help…any errors or sloppy code are mine. Please note that schedule times are approximate, based on your computer’s clock, and that the syncing of the videos might not be perfect. You need to have JS and Flash 8+ to view. This is just like real TV…if you miss the appointed time, there’s no rewind or anything…the video is playing “live”. I have not done extensive browser testing so it may not work perfectly in your browser. Bug reports are welcome and I will try to fix things as they crop up. If you run into any problems, just reload the page. To ensure that you have the latest (hopefully bug-free) version before the broadcast begins, reload the page. Other than that, if you leave it open, the broadcast will happen automatically.

Update: If you missed the “live” show, you can watch all of the clips on YouTube.

Update: The Apollo broadcast no longer requires Flash. Big thanks to Geoff Stearns for helping me with the upgrade.