More than 600 attendees at Spazio Chirale for the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing

On 20 July 1969, the Lunar Module of the Apollo 11 Mission touched the surface of the Moon, carrying on board, for the first time in the history of Humanity, a human crew.

Exactly 50 years later, Spazio Chirale wanted to celebrate this event — which has inspired millions of innovators in the years to come — with a great themed party held in our FabLab in Garbatella.

Helped by the big publicity given by the main news outlets, which included our event in the list of celebrations held in the city to remember the Moon landing, and by the programme winding between “vintage gems and nerdy moments” — to use the words of la Repubblica — the audience attendance was much greater than expected.

To the more than 500 free registrations received via the Eventbrite site, numerous last-minute guests were added — often phoned by those already at the event.

The exhibition hall of Spazio Chirale hosted, for the occasion, a large-format photographic exhibition, printed in our laboratory with the fine-art technique starting from the high-resolution images published in 2015 by NASA itself and contained in the original rolls of the Apollo Mission.

In Spazio Chirale it was possible to meet the very young aerospace engineers of the Tardis Experiment, who are about to send materials and electronic instruments into the stratosphere thanks also to our sponsorship and of course to the support of the ESA, which selected the project.

A path, marked on the floor by the high-resolution photos of Armstrong’s famous footprint on the lunar soil, led to our FabLab where there was an exhibition celebrating the iconic technologies of the Apollo era.

It was possible to discover the Apollo Guidance Computer by consulting the original manuals and peeking at the software listings. On the electronics bench, one could try first-hand the use of ferrite-core RAM memories through a dedicated shield for Arduino, made for the occasion by hand-weaving magnetic rings and copper wires.

In the Analog Photography Laboratory it was possible to try a Hasselblad 500 camera — the model from which the equipment supplied to the astronauts of the Apollo missions was derived.

The evening, starting at 5 p.m., continued with nerd conversations, anecdotes on the Apollo missions and the splendid musical performance “Notturno” by Ynaktera, co-written with the Japanese artist Kenta Kamiyama and released last December for the Stochastic Resonance label, until 10:03 p.m.

Exactly fifty years later, at 10:03 p.m. Italian time — in perfect synchrony with the time of the original event — on the window of Spazio Chirale, already turned into a giant projection screen to host the evocative images that accompanied Ynaktera’s performance, the projection of the live video of the final phases of the Moon landing began.

In 1969, the processing capabilities of the Apollo Guidance Computer were entirely dedicated to the spacecraft’s guidance operations and to telemetry with the Houston mission control centre — and there was no way to also transmit live television images.

Therefore, the viewers of that time, holding their breath all over the world, had to settle for only the audio coming from the LEM with the voices of the astronauts and the technicians on Earth, accompanied by the comments of the television hosts — in Italy, Tito Stagno.

However, on board the LEM there was a 70 mm cine camera, loaded with colour film and pointed at the window. This footage, recorded at 6 frames per second, was visible only after the astronauts returned to Earth, but today, thanks to the splendid work of the Moonscape project coordinated by Paolo Attivissimo, it is possible to relive the moment of the descent and landing in high resolution and from the astronauts’ point of view.

At 10:03 p.m., the entire Garbatella block around Spazio Chirale stopped and gathered in front of our window-screen.

In stereo, three different audio channels: in the centre the conversations between the astronauts and the Houston centre — the same audio listened to live by the whole world in 1969; on the left, the conversations inside the LEM between the astronauts, not transmitted to ground and therefore not heard live; on the right, the conversations between the technicians of the Houston centre, recorded in 1969 but kept secret for some years so as not to reveal confidential aspects of the technology.

Needless to say, the moment of the Moon landing was thrilling.

The night then continued late, with screenings of videos of the first lunar walks and tales of anecdotes about the mission.

For many, the event was the occasion to discover Spazio Chirale and its fantastic FabLab, which by coincidence has roughly the dimensions envisaged by NASA for the future FabLabs that will be on board space stations and spaceships on missions to the Moon and Mars.