Motorola communications equipment was used by NASA during the first moon landing, and for the company’s 75th anniversary in 2003 Fibre (a UK design company) created a poster that contained the entire transcript of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The famous sentence “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” is highlighted in red.

Reading about this poster reminded me of the Wired article that revealed the embarassing fact that NASA lost the original moon landing footage as received by the tracking stations in Australia. The article gives some background on the technicalities of transmitting a signal from the moon to earth and then distributing it around the world (hint: it’s rather difficult) and described the race against time that a few engineers face in attempting to locate the lost footage.

The Wired article also has some links to really impressive panoramic images of various moon landings. In this age of CGI it’s refreshing to see images which inspire wonder because of what they depict and not because they demonstrate artist’s skills with Photoshop. Unless, of course, you are one of those conspiracy theorists who thinks that the moon landing never took place…