Godspeed Apollo 11

It was 40 years ago today, and the Amer­ic­an space pro­gram put it all on the line send­ing three young avi­at­ors to land on the moon.

Wow. I don’t think we’d even con­sider that a risk worth tak­ing now. Some­where along the line we lost our abil­ity to take risks.…and return to the Moon.

I’m lucky to have been alive (barely) dur­ing this peri­od, but the space race, for what it was, did make a last­ing impression.

And here’s a very cool thing. Over the next few days, you can live (or relive if you’re old enough) through the exper­i­ence by fol­low­ing the Apollo 11 moon­shot through this amaz­ing web­site: WeChooseTheMoon.org

“This site rep­res­ents a unique oppor­tun­ity for view­ers to ‘go back in time’ and exper­i­ence one of mankind’s most amaz­ing achieve­ments,” said Tom Put­nam, dir­ect­or of the John F. Kennedy Pres­id­en­tial Lib­rary and Museum. “From actu­al mis­sion audio trans­mis­sions and archiv­al video to mis­sion fact­oids and news reels, vis­it­ors to WeChooseTheMoon.org will be able to track every step of the Apollo 11 mis­sion, as it happened, 40 years later.

And that’s anoth­er really cool thing. You can fol­low ‘live’ tweets from Cap­Com, the Eagle lander or the Apollo 11 space­craft, as they happen(ed).  Simply fol­low AP11_CAPCOM, AP11_EAGLE, and AP11_SPACECRAFT to (re)live history.