Warning, not work safe. But it’s the Onion, so not tea or coffee safe either.

If, like me, you’re a bit of a space nut, then this is a momentous week on the calender. It’s the 40th Anniversary of man landing on the Moon. One of my first memories as a kid was of getting a Lego set recreation of the Eagle Lander on the Moon’s surface. Before there was Star Wars, there was Apollo. Before there was Darth Vader, I wanted to be an astronaut. And I’ve always felt a little sad that I never got to see the moon launch. By the time I was born men had flown to the moon and back several times. And yet, as an adult, not a single man has been back there. It’s like it never happened.

So imagine the little kid in me discovering this website over the weekend.

We Choose the Moon, is recreating the Apollo 11 moon launch in real time.

It’s T-minus 4 days. And counting…

Very exciting news! The original analogue tapes from the Apollo 11 landing have been missing since the week of the landing. The terrible quality pictures that have been shown since then are low resolution versions compressed on the fly. They were never meant to be the final record.

Most people don’t realize just how easy it is for NASA to lose tapes. During the Apollo era there was very little in the way of an organized archival system. There wasn’t the money or manpower to review the tons of information and much of it was piled into boxes and stored. Later, a wealth of information was scheduled for destruction and only exists today because a NASA employee felt strongly enough that she kept the material in her garage until some future NASA finally came to its senses (which it did.)

Anyway, the missing tapes were found in a box in… Australia.

Next month NASA plans to debut the footage.