Digitizing Apollo 17 Part 15 – Apollo17.org v1.0 Launched for the Mission’s 43rd Anniversary

Updated: at 05:00 PM

In time for the 43rd anniversary of Apollo 17, the all new Apollo17.org is now live!

v1.0 Splash Screen
v1.0 Splash Screen

Over the past three months, I have completely rebuilt how the site works. My good friend Chris Bennett, who I have worked with on many projects in my professional career, pushed me into new territory when in September he suggested that the mission imagery was far more important and impactful than the mission commentary or transcripts. This simple, and somewhat obvious, insight had escaped me. I had worked for so long on rebuilding the transcripts that I couldn’t see past the need to make them the primary part of the experience. He provided a simple design sketch showing what a reprioritized interface might look like. This was an exciting new direction and got me rolling on a complete redesign.

Chris Bennett’s initial media-first design direction
Chris Bennett’s initial media-first design direction

Suddenly Slow

Over the summer, Google had released several new versions of the Chrome browser. The new browser could not contend with the massive amount of data that I was housing in the scrolling transcript window of the old site. What was smooth and fluid in April was borderline unusable in August. I spent a week or two trying to see if it was something I was doing at the code level, but all diagnosis of the situation pointed to the underlying browser. Honestly, it’s remarkable that it worked at all to begin with. I realized that the only way to fix this would be to avoid loading the entire transcript into a scrolling window. Not only was the site going to look very different, but it would have to work differently too. I was in store for a daunting amount of coding and problem solving, but also a lot of fun.

Loading portions of the transcript window on demand meant I had a new interface problem: how could I enable users to navigate to a specific mission time if they couldn’t simply scroll the transcript to that time and click an utterance (my name for a spoken event in the transcript)? To solve this, I would have to invent a graphical interface that enabled navigation within 305.6 hours of mission data. This interface problem had been in the back of my mind for years. I was finally going to try to solve it.

I started with the design goal that the navigation scheme needed to provide a way to click on a specific event within a 305.6-hour-long mission. My calculations showed that assuming an average interface width of 1000 pixels, and a mission 1,100,166 seconds long, a line representing the mission would have a resolution of 1180.43 seconds per pixel—not fine enough to jump to a specific minute, let alone second. If I added a second line that represented 1/25th of the first line (like a zoom function), it would have a resolution of 45.75 seconds per pixel. Still not fine enough. A third level of zoom at 1/25th of the second level would get me down to 1.77 seconds per pixel. That would be fine enough to get someone in the vicinity of a particular moment. A modern laptop would have an interface more than 1000 pixels wide, getting closer to 1 second per pixel.

Over weeks of effort, I built out an interface prototype that represents time in this way. Guided Tour mission events were called out along with ticks representing utterances, photographs taken, and television broadcasted. I hope the interface isn’t too complex for the general public to figure out. It’s a pretty new idea.

Photography Data

Doing a massive amount of coding can take its toll on you. I needed breaks. It might sound crazy, but slowly chipping away at establishing when in the mission over 4,000 mission photographs were taken counted as “breaks.” It was an archival task, not a technical one. Even after all the years working on this project, I still find spending time with the mission content super interesting. The timing of photos was laborious investigative work. Often only one or two mentions of a whole magazine of photos exist in the mission audio. But by piecing together the order of activities like a jigsaw puzzle, I was able to narrow down when each particular photo was taken to a matter of minutes, or even seconds. It just took persistence. For example, often Jack Schmitt, the Lunar Module Pilot on the mission, would call out descriptions of his observations as he snapped photos from orbit. Other times, I was able to see via the television broadcasts when one of the crew was snapping photos and timed them accordingly.

Serendipitously, during my photo-timing efforts, previously unavailable high-resolution raw scans of most of the mission photos were released by Kipp Teague to much fanfare online. I wrote a program to harvest all of them from Flickr and treated them to give them correct contrast for inclusion in the site. The resulting images add immensely to the richness of the experience. They are truly spectacular.

Visual Design

Beta3 interface before Chris Bennett’s designs
Beta3 interface before Chris Bennett’s design work

A few months into the process, I had gone as far as I could go. The site was completely functional, had a new layout, the navigator interface was singing, but the site still looked like it was built by a developer (me). I reached out again to my good friend, Chris Bennett, for help. Chris is a very talented, multidisciplinary guy. I knew he had both the coding and design skill to take the site to the next level. Chris took the layout I had arrived at (from his original recommended approach of photo-first) and applied his own visual design concept to the site. It’s truly rewarding to work with people of complementary talents. As the site took shape with Chris’s design, it went from being a personal hobby project of mine to having a life of its own. Chris also trimmed down (greatly) a lot of the copy I had written while trying to explain things on the site. The simple summary of “A real-time journey through the Apollo 17 mission. Every moment relived as it occurred in 1972.” was really all that needed to be said. I couldn’t be happier with the results of Chris’s efforts. I owe him huge.

Site Launch

nasa-me

December 6th is the 43rd anniversary of the launch of Apollo 17. I hope the anniversary is a good reason for people to discover apollo17.org and dive into the great things that were achieved on the mission. The site isn’t “finished,” given that it’s a living record of what happened back in 1972—as more data becomes available and errors are discovered and corrected, the site will only become better. I hope everyone enjoys it.

Update: Dec 12/2015

JSC_twitter

The response to the website has been nothing short of amazing. Thousands of people have visited throughout the anniversary so far, and I have received many notes of compliments and thanks. I heard through a friend close to the mission that Jack Schmitt, the Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 17, saw the site and thought it was great. I never thought any of the crew would see the results of my efforts, and it’s humbling to know that Dr. Schmitt saw it. I also heard that Gene Kranz, Flight Director of the mission, said that I have “made the mission come alive once again.” Fantastic!

NASA’s Johnson Space Center shared apollo17.org on Facebook and Twitter. This drove a big spike in traffic and really got the word out among those interested in the history of spaceflight. It was a real compliment that they thought the site was share-worthy. Some people even thought NASA had made it. Nope.

I have also received a lot of positive feedback on the user experience. While there’s plenty of opportunity to make the experience more palatable to a broader audience, the vast majority of people not only understood how to use the site without instructions but loved how the navigation enabled them to consume such a vast amount of content. I have some ideas on how to improve the interface, but these can wait. For now, I’m going to keep spreading the word about the site during the mission anniversary as best I can.

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