Forty years ago today, July 16, 2009, in Cape Kennedy, Florida, a rocket blasted off from launch pad 39A, destined to place human beings on non-Earth soil for the first time in history. I’ll probably write a lot more about that in three days – the anniversary of the actual landing and first moonwalk.

For now, I wanted to direct your attention to one of the more fascinating uses of integrative Web technology I’ve seen in a while, the Kennedy Presidential Library’s We Choose the Moon. Not only is the site updating the mission in “real time” (40 years later) with actual radio transcripts, it also has twitter feeds for Eagle, the Command Module, and CAPCOM.

Having spent a little time researching among the Nixon library’s Apollo 11 materials, I really have to acknowledge what must have been some serious cooperation between the archives that were required to make this happen. To do this kind of project, they’d need cooperation from archivists at at least five NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) archives – the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon libraries, NASA’s own archives, and the rest of the Executive Branch archives in College Park. That this site came about is a testament to the ways in which serious archival research can come alive for the general public.

Stay tuned to We Choose the Moon to keep following the Apollo 11 mission.