Amazing website lets you live Apollo 13 mission failure in ‘real-time’ on 50th anniversary.

Every now and then, the Internet drags itself out of the gutter and brings you the content of such immense historical and educational value it almost makes you forget about all the trolls and cat memes it’s normally used for.

If you have a child who’s interested in space, or even if really that’s just you (okay, me), this weekend, you can force them to sit with you watching as the Apollo 13 near-disaster unfolds in real-time as it did 50 years ago.

You probably (spoiler alert) know already that NASA’s third attempt to land on the lunar surface almost went disastrously wrong, and only a MyGyver/A-Team style effort with a few cabbages and elastic bands turned into an ad-hoc flux-capacitor saved the crew from a terrible fate in the vacuum for fate.

Well now, using original NASA audio and images, you can relive the event like it was April 1970.

At the time of writing, they are en route to the moon, some 59,000 miles from Earth. The actual incident takes place tomorrow (13th), and you can imagine it will feel every bit as tense as it did 50 years ago.

And don’t worry if you think you have missed any of the cool bits, you can either join at the exact point in history we are now, or one-minute from launch. 

The Apollo In Real-Time project is education at it’s very best – technology married with real drama to teach history. It sure beats learning about wars from a book like we did back in the day.

Included is 7200 hours of mission control audio, all the press conferences as they happened at the time, all on-board audio as well as that which was transmitted to the ground, and there’s even a searchable transcript of the entire event.

It’s a space nerds dream. I’ll see you in a few weeks.