I have been spending a lot of time the last few days with Apollo In Real Time on in the background - the website where all the audio, video, and photos of the Apollo 11 mission are available synced in real time (+50 years) so you can follow the mission as it happens. (It makes good company for #booksort).

They just reported "The Eagle Has Wings"! Landing is in about three hours. Which I will miss because work, *sigh*. But you can rewind and catch up on stuff you missed; I hope the website stays up a good long time, it's a really great way of experience space travel.

Anyway here are five things I have learned from it so far:

1. It really is amazing how low-tech it was. Like, I knew nearly all the calculations were done by hand, that the computer power on the capsule was very small, etc. But it puts in it in a much different light when I'm hearing Buzz Aldrin taking sighting with an actual sextant to compare to his paper star charts in order to recalculate rocket burns when they're already halfway to the moon. The old 1950s SF with slide rules in space seem a lot less silly when you hear them debating whether they'll need a slide rule on the lander.

They lose signal a couple times day because the moon and/or Earth are in the way. Why would you not just throw up a couple comms satellites to take care of that first, I ask, of people who succeeded at a manned landing before INTELSAT was even up and running.

2. There is a lot of "wastewater" in orbit around the moon. I knew there was a lot of waste left on the surface of the moon, and a lot in orbit around the earth, but somehow I'd not made the connection that they were dumping wastewater in lunar orbit. (They were dumping it a couple times a day the whole way, in fact, so presumably there is also a lot of "wastewater" wandering around the Sun in and near Earth's orbit.)

3. They never know where their towels are.

4. I asked my sister (graduate degree in space science) and my mom (in college when it happened) whether they got out and walked as soon as they could after landing, or it they spent a lot of time in the lander on the surface first. Neither of them had any idea. I guess I will have to wait and find out from the live coverage today.

(They told me I could just look it up but what fun would that be? That's another thing this website is making me think about - just how little information was available to people following it at the time. I can hear all the audio and see all the photos and videos; but a lot of that wasn't even available to Mission Control until after the landing - this website is probably the first time it's all been put together chronologically, ever. In '69 the average person on the ground - unless they had a receiver that could pick up the actual radio from the capsule - was limited to maybe a couple of minutes on the nightly news, and whatever was in the paper. We take so much info for granted?

Also the '60s were weird. The Apollo astronauts didn't have wifi like the ISS does, but they did get a daily radio news digest, and it contained things like "There is an expedition going out in search of the Loch Ness Monster"

5. Pilot picks the music, shotgun gets out of the damn hallway so I can shut my hatch and we can all--

(did you know they brought mixtapes and a tape player? I didn't know they brought mixtapes! The PR person has to keep explaining "That music you are hearing over the radio seems to be music they are playing in the capsule.")

(p.s.: Michael Collins is the coolest. No this is not up for debate.)