Falling, with style

Posted on February 16, 2012 by David

Flying in space is a hugely misunderstood phenomenon. When asked why astronauts float around their spacecraft, most people reply that there is no gravity in space. The truth is that gravity reigns throughout the universe.

If you give a football a good kick or throw a tennis ball across a room, then what you are doing is no different to what NASA did to the Apollo 11 spacecraft. All were given a short push then left to coast on a long flight path known as a ballistic trajectory. Ignoring air resistance, the path taken by these objects depends to a large extent on the gravity field through which they travel.

Another example of a ballistic trajectory is when something is let go from a height. Imagine a lift cage in which the cable breaks. (Not something you would want to experience in real life but it serves to illustrate the point.) For the few seconds that the lift descends in freefall, all the people and objects in the lift appear to float like astronauts. Indeed, the comparison is exact. Astronauts float around only because they are falling. There is a great deal of truth in the line from the movie ‘Toy Story’ after Buzz Lightyear flies around the room; “That’s not flying. It’s falling, with style!”

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The Scale Problem

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Henry

An interesting problem we’ve run across today is that of communicating scale & distance over planetary scales. I’ll start where we did this morning.

Part of the design for the app includes a diagram of the Apollo 11 flight path, which is based on this profile from the original Apollo 11 Press Kit:

Credit: NASA Johnson Space Center (NASA-JSC)

We’re intending to use a simplified version of this as a kind of progress indicator, showing a dot where you currently are along the app’s mission timeline.

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Music from space: 182,190 nautical miles away

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Alyson

One of the many pleasures of curating the story for the Apollo 11 App is spending time listening to the audio from the mission.

This audio includes the conversations between the astronauts and CAPCOM on the ground, as well as the conversations just between the astronauts, and the sounds from inside the capsule.

I’ve been fascinated from the start about the story of the music the astronauts took with them on their historic journey to the moon. (What would you take with you?)

During the Apollo11 App project, I’ve been gathering and collecting all the music I can find from the Apollo 11 mission – and will be sharing as a playlist later on in the project.

But there’s a couple of pieces of music that have eluded me so far.

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“The greatest achievement in human history”

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Dave

I’ve been watching BBC2′s Stargazing Live with a mixture of interest and awe. One particular moment has stuck in my head since the first show on Monday. At the start of the show, Professor Brian Cox said:

The Apollo missions are the greatest achievement in human history.

For him, it was a statement of fact – and it certainly wasn’t up for discussion. The reason for his statement was a live interview with Captain Gene Cernan – for now, at least, the last man on the moon, from the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

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‘The big story has already been told’

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Alyson

In September, Henry, Dave and I came together for three days of thinking about how an Apollo 11 app might work conceptually, what story we might tell, and how we could tell it. Over the three days and many cups of coffee, we filled a wall with notes on post its, and scribbled and sketched several boards worth of wireframes and diagrams.

What we were attempting to describe and define was the the core logic for the app’s timing and story. We were trying several different starting points and hoping not to set ourselves logic traps someway further along that path. When we inevitably hit traps we’d step backwards and unpick until we could plot a new course. After those three days we had a rough working shape for the app, and plenty of thoughts and questions to mull over.

Working on the story for the app, one of the notes I reflected on most over that time, and have done so subsequently, is how we tell the ‘untold’ parts of the Apollo 11 story.

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Music & soundscapes

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Henry

As I write this, we’re about to go into production. Aly, Dave & I met up in the summer to work out the general shape of the app and what we’re hoping to achieve, and since then we’ve been doing some research, prototyping, meeting a lot of interesting and lovely people & generally letting things percolate before our production run starts next week.

One big topic of conversation has been how to soundtrack the app. We know that the lion’s share of the story will be told through archive audio, but what do we do between the story bits, maybe even through them, to maintain atmosphere and give consistency to the app’s sound?

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Time & the Mission Clock

Posted on December 13, 2011 by Henry

In the last app we produced as a team, the central idea which held the whole thing together was “a fictional character has lost his phone, you’ve found it.” That one starting point gave us a central reference point to which everything else could refer and helped us keep things consistent.

For this one, the central idea is realtime, or the BFMC (where MC stands for ‘Mission Clock’).

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Apollo 11: coming in Spring 2012

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Dave

Ever wondered what it’s like to go to the moon? You’re about to find out.

The eight-day experience of travelling to the moon – and back again – is coming to the App Store in Spring 2012. We’re recreating the entire Apollo 11 mission through our BAFTA-nominated Story Engine, enabling you to experience it first-hand in real-time on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

We’ll be posting regular updates about how the app is progressing over the next few months, so do follow us on Twitter to be the first to know when new updates are available. In the meantime, you can find out more about the app, and meet the team who are bringing the Apollo 11 mission to life.