Channel 4 launches livestream mirroring the 1969 moon landing, to the exact second

Fifty years ago to the very day, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins waltzed onto Apollo 11. Six days later, the three likely lads from Nasa landed on the moon, changing the face of human history forever.

To celebrate that moment of stratospheric success, Channel 4 has partnered up with digital specialists Little Dot Studios on a major new project which mirrors that first mission to the moon. To the second.

Starting at 14:31 — which, yep, was the exact moment that the shuttle began its journey from the Kennedy Space Centre to the moon — lunar-lovers will be able to follow the trip in real-time.

The team explains: “Using the unedited audio feed between astronauts and mission control as the narrative backbone, Little Dot Studios has reconstructed the Apollo 11 mission with a minute-by-minute livestream that will play out in real time, 24 hours a day,” over on Channel 4’s YouTube channel and Facebook page.

The 124 hours of broadcast material on offer will be accompanied visually by a combination of archival Nasa footage, stills shot by the blokes who had a stroll on the moon itself, and new work by the Little Dot Studios team.

“It took six days to get to the Moon and we’ve never been able to appreciate that duration or sense the astronauts’ isolation in a single clip or edited TV documentary,” says Little Dot Studios’ creative director Tom Hemsley. “In building the story as a continuous livestream that you can’t pause or skip through, I’d like to think we get a little bit closer to how it might have felt to watch the mission on television in 1969.”

You have six whole days to judge that for yourself.