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Nature News has completed ApolloPlus40, a Twitter project which re-visited the Apollo 11 mission in real time, 40 years later.
The project, conceived by former Chief News & Features Editor Oliver Morton, attracted around 5,000 followers in the weeks leading up to and after the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing.
Feedback from ApolloPlus40 followers ranged from encouraging to humbling, via downright odd:
Jun 17th: Snufkin @ApolloPlus40 – my dad worked on this mission & one of my first memories was him feeding me @ night while watching it on TV.
Jun 24th: industwetrust @ApolloPlus40 – Tweeting the Apollo 11 Mission – welcome to a brand new kind of narrative poem https://2dl84.tk
Jul 16th: Fek_Lar @ApolloPlus40 I think you’ll find that Dr. Aldrin was technically a scientist when he walked on the moon. Schmitt was the only geologist.
Jul 20th: giagia Come on! Come on! @ApolloPlus40
Aug 13th: mikemietlicki RIP @ApolloPlus40 is now space trash.
Thanks to our re-tweet-happy followers, ApolloPlus40 echoed throughout the internet. CNET called the project “a real-time news report, forty years later,” in its Apollo 11 commemoration roundup and plenty of bloggers passed it along. We got mentions in Portuguese and Russian. An editor at Forbes.com asked me to write a personal take on the experience and I gave an interview for BBC Radio 5 [audio, 4:18].
For the Nature News team, producing ApolloPlus40 gave us a taste of the training, protests, technical glitches and tension that must have gone on in the real mission control back in the 60s. It’s a shame there’s no audio recording of my editor’s voice when he called me right before the real-time launch countdown.
On that note we leave you with this suggestion from one follower:
Aug 13th: cdbarker@ApolloPlus40 Thanks for the great work. Please please please consider a relaunch next April for Apollo 13?
Image: Screenshot from ApolloPlus40