I can think of few events in American history that have inspired the sense of awe, wonder and national pride as landing on the Moon. Today marks the 40 year anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission and to celebrate the occasion, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum has launched a fantastic web site called We Choose The Moon. The site is a textbook example of brilliant new media design. In addition to all of the information you could possibly want about Apollo 11, the all-Flash site is currently staging a real time recreation of the mission to the Moon via 3D animation, video, and archival audio from the actual mission. At the time of this writing, we are in Stage 5, having just turned the command module around and docked with the LEM.

The Site

The design of the site is clean and elegant, some may even say minimal. Upon visiting the site there is a short pre-load, during which users are given a visual walkthrough of the various icons that serve as the site’s main navigational elements. Once you click the start button, you are presented with a full frame (or full screen) 3D animation of the current stage of the mission. The animation gently comes to rest and the various navigation icons dissolve into place. From there, you may look through archival images and video surrounding the event, all the while the real time mission control audio is playing in the background. The remainder of the interface is comprised of fly out tabs, including the Mission Tracker at bottom, the Live Transmission panel on the right and on the left side of the screen is the Mission Status panel, which features timers for both mission time and time until landing on the Moon. As I mentioned previously, the mission is occurring in real time, so the stages and audio you see and hear are exactly what was happening on the mission 40 years ago today. Wonderful stuff. Once the landing has been completed, on July 20th, users will then scrub through the stages at will, rather than experiencing them as they happened. The site features a full compliment of “Web 2.0″ (even though I really dislike that term) and social functionality, including a twitter feed of the real time events, SHOUTcast streaming of the mission audio, and an Adobe Air Desktop widget.
This is fantastic information design that suits the project perfectly and really should be experienced. If you can’t experience it in real time, bookmark it and visit the site after the landing on the 20th.