Apollo 11 40th anniversary edition of MoonLander3D
You probably realise I’m a bit of a space nut. Could it be the cheesy pictures of me in mission control at the Johnson Space Center?
Or the fact that I dropped everything to see Buzz Aldrin speaking in London a couple of weeks ago?
Or perhaps the fact that my most prized possession is a commemorative edition of The Times from the Apollo 11 landings (and I believe the first ever edition printed in colour)?
Well whatever gave it away, I don’t care. I’m coming clean. I am mental about space. And I always have been. Ever since watching the first ever shuttle launch in the classroom when I was 9, right through to watching night after night to see the most recent shuttle launch.
And I get frustrated when my friends don’t share my excitement and wonder at the possibility of leaving the Earth. Not to mention the odd one or two people I encounter who still actually believe that we didn’t go to the moon! WTF!
The Apollo missions were an incredible achievement, I recently heard that there’s 10 times more computing power and 100 times more RAM in the chip on my credit card than there was in the Lunar Module! I have no idea if that’s true or not, but still, it’s pretty cool, right? Right?
And now it’s been 40 years since we landed on the moon, and I haven’t quite achieved my childhood ambition of becoming an astronaut. But instead, I’ve done what I can to excite people about the Apollo missions. I’ve rebuilt the 3D lunar lander from the 5K app competition into a special Apollo 11 commemorative edition!
Now with levels, one for each Apollo mission! With crew listings!
And actual quotes from each mission!
I have some more plans to make it a little slicker, and would like to add a high score table, but I had a bit of a tight deadline. Tomorrow at 8.17pm UTC. Exactly 40 years since Buzz and Neil landed.
So perhaps, as you’re enjoying the memories, you can now experience what it was like for Armstrong and Aldrin for yourself*. Play MoonLander3D here.
*Any similarities between this game and what it was actually like in the Lunar Module, are entirely coincidental. 
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Hi MoonSkeptic
I must admit to being convinced to some of the moon hoax theories flying around the 90s, and for a time, I’m ashamed to say, I was even starting to become convinced by them. But in recent years I’ve looked into this more and the more I’ve discovered about the missions, the more outlandish the claims by the conspiracy theorists become.
So I ask you, are you an expert in radiation? Because I’m not. But even the man who discovered the Van Allen belt (Dr James Van Allen) claims that passing through the belt wouldn’t cause any adverse reaction. So I have to concede to him.
And, as every little niggle gets explained away, the hoax theorists find another niggle, only to get debunked again.
So instead of tearing the arguments apart, why not concentrate on the positive evidence? There are reflectors placed on the moon during Apollo 11 that have been used to measure the distance from the earth accurate to a millimeter for 40 years. The missions were tracked independently by both the British and the Russians, who in particular would have delighted in discovering such a scam. And what about the recent images from NASA with the LRO clearly showing the Apollo landing sites? http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/07/17/apollo-landing-sites-imaged-by-lro/ And there’ll be more better quality photos coming from the probe soon.
I expect the hoax theorists will say NASA are continuing to doctor evidence.
But for the reasons I have outlined, and many, many more, we can indeed know that they went to the moon. The only other possibility is ludicrous and unworkable amongst an international scientific community.
Which is too bad really, because the moon hoax conspiracy would be such a nice story.