Monday, June 29, 2009

Twittering Apollo 11

I have been busy and on travel but will be trying to write up some ideas this week. I wanted to post a short one to get ball rolling here.

Nature is twittering Apollo 11. Well, 40 years after the fact. They are doing kind of a media mashup where they are twittering 40 years after the Apollo 11 mission. They have already started with tweets on the astronauts training and other launch preps. On July 16th, they will twitter the launch. Everything is being done 40 years later so we can experience the mission in a way you just couldn't in 1969.

You don't have to subscribe to twitter, just check out the Apollo 40 plus feed and you can see what they are doin.

I remember in 1989, I think it was A&E, aired the original news coverage with David Brinkley. I wasn't home for some of it and was setting the VCR to tape it. Now, on the 40th anniversary, videotapes are already fading into history...if the do television broadcasts, I will Tivo it this time. Wonder what I will be doing on the 50th anniversary?

Reprinted with permission from the Half-Astrophysicst Blog.

3 comments:

kkdither said...

Interesting. I can see the pluses. But it seems to me to be a cheapening of the wonder and awe.

There is something to be said about the family gathering around the console tv of old; together, excitedly awaiting the evening news from Chet Brinkley or Walter Cronkite. I remember being awakened to witness the space missions first hand.

News today is available 24-7, just a click away. You can run a story and rerun a story to your heart's content. However, it is often and most frequently accessed by you alone. Is that why we congregate here to discuss it? hmmmmm...

SER said...

There use to be a commercial about a family who got a computer and connected to the internet. He was sitting at the computer typing away and all of a sudden, a message popped up on his screen, "You have reached the end of the internet".

That use to make me laugh. Can you imagine how much information he would have to look at?

OrbsCorbs said...

I was playing poker with some buddies in one's bedroom. We were drinking and smoking and playing cards and watching the moon landing on a B&W TV.