Last week I shared a post about how we are all residents of a tiny, fragile, blue speck of dust, floating in the midst of endless, black nothingness, and how we can now all experience this firsthand in virtual reality. As promised, please find below the first in a new series of posts I’ll be writing about all of the space-related VR space experiences I can get my virtual hands on! For now I’m focusing purely on realistic and scientifically accurate experiences, but there are also some amazing sci-fi experiences out there too (I’m looking at you Lone Echo) that maybe I’ll cover in the future if there is interest. So, without further ado, let’s start with Apollo 11 VR.

Apollo 11 VR Game Trailer

“One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” — Neil Armstrong

Apollo 11 VR is an incredible virtual reality experience created by Immersive VR Education, in which you get to join Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins on their historic journey in 1969 to the moon and back. I would describe it as more of an interactive documentary with game elements, which lets you experience the entire journey from take off to re-entry as if you were one of the astronauts. It uses a mix of beautiful graphics, original audio from the archives and accurate recreations of the spacecraft, and it has an appropriately epic soundtrack to match. I purchased it via Oculus Home for £7.99, but it’s also available on Steam, where at time of writing it’s on sale for 50% of its normal price. The following section explores my experience of the game in detail, so if you want to go in blind stop reading now. But in summary, it’s incredible and if you have a VR headset you should try it out immediately.

The Experience

The game starts with you sitting in a small room that was unmistakably decorated in the 1960s, watching Kennedy’s famous 1962 “We choose to go to the Moon” speech on a projector in front of you.

“There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the Moon! … We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win…” — President Kennedy, 1962

As inspiring as this speech is, at this stage I was a little unimpressed. It seemed like the creators missed a bit of an opportunity here. This is VR after all, with all its limitless possibilities. I’m not sure why they chose to lock me in a room with a TV, when I could have been placed within the crowd itself watching the speech in person. I think this would have been a lot more powerful, but also I suppose, much more time consuming to create. But I digress…

Before I knew it I was transported to the Kennedy Space Center, where I was standing at the base of the rocket, which looked impressively enormous up close. It was towering above me, and I had to crane my neck to see the top of it. This is an area where VR can really shine; I can tell you that Saturn V was exactly 110 metres tall, but that’s nowhere near as impressive as seeing it up close and personal.

Although you can rotate your view, you don’t have any control over your own movement or the movement of the camera for this section, and many of the others. You have to kind of sit back and go along for the ride. This can feel a little disorienting and might be a little tricky if you struggle with VR motion sickness. That being said, I’m normally fairly badly affected by motion sickness and I found this manageable most of the time. I think I took one break during the entire experience because I was feeling a little dizzy. But hey, you could argue that’s just part of the astronaut’s experience!

Back at the launchpad, you are then swept over to the elevator where you join your fellow astronauts, standing shoulder to shoulder with them as you ascend to the tip of the rocket to board Apollo 11. At this stage I had begun to feel a little nervous, and turned from side to side to survey my companions’ faces. They seemed eerily calm, and just as I began to wonder what must have been going through their minds at the time, a voice over from Neil Armstrong started playing:

“I thought we had a 90% chance of getting back safely to Earth on that flight but only a 50–50 chance of making a landing on that first attempt. There are so many unknowns on that descent from lunar orbit down to the surface that had not been demonstrated yet by testing and there was a big chance that there was something in there we didn’t understand properly and we had to abort and come back to Earth without landing.”

It would seem he felt much calmer than I currently did, standing in my slippers in my living room. He carried on talking about “risk reward equations”, but by this stage I was starting to sweat quite a lot and can’t remember exactly what he was saying. Then all of a sudden, I found myself inside the command module. I was shocked at just how tiny it was; basically only large enough for the three astronauts to fit shoulder to shoulder. I had a window seat, and I could see a small triangle of blue sky over to my left. In front of me the dashboard was covered in hundreds of dials and switches, lovingly recreated in painstaking detail.

It’s really the audio that makes this experience, and the conversations between the astronauts and Ground Control during this section made the experience truly immersive. As the final checks and countdown began, I started to feel genuinely terrified. The space was very claustrophobic and as the engines started to rattle the entire module, I looked over to the astronauts on my right, and was filled with an immense respect for their bravery and calm, clear-headedness. These guys literally fired themselves into the unknown, in the pursuit of knowledge and in the name of science. I had goosebumps all over.

Looking out the window as we took off, the sky turned gradually from blue to black, and I could see the Earth gradually growing smaller beneath us. At this point the fear began to melt away as I became mesmerised by the planet below me. In the following sequence, I was required to dock the spacecraft with the lunar module. Let’s just say… that I probably wouldn’t make a good astronaut. I was continually distracted by the stunning blue orb below me, staring at it with my mouth hanging open instead of concentrating on the task at hand. After a few failed attempts I ended up letting the other astronauts take over so I could stare out the window. I’m such a team player!

Next, I found myself hovering above a perfectly black circle, and for a moment I thought the game had crashed or glitched somehow. Then I noticed the lunar module flying beneath me. Turning to my right, I saw the sun beginning to peek out beyond the horizon, and I realised that I was looking at the dark side of the moon. Slowly the sun began to illuminate its crater-covered surface beneath me, and the crescent shape of the Earth appeared over the moon’s horizon, far in the distance. As the cinematic music began to swell, I felt a sudden lump in my throat.

Guiding the lunar module to the surface was another tricky challenge. I was again struck with just how detailed and high res the dashboard was, and I longed to reach out and fiddle with them, but unfortunately (and probably to the relief of my fellow crew mates) there is no hand presence. On a slight tangent and despite how highly I’ve spoken about this experience so far, it’s probably worth noting that if you’ve played quite a lot of VR games, you might need to go into this experience with slightly lower expectations when it comes to graphics and gameplay experience. This experience isn’t triple A and it is a little rough around the edges in certain aspects. Once you’ve experienced full hand-presence in VR (i.e. the presence of both of your hands in game via the use of Touch controllers) it can be difficult to go back. I found myself continually drawn to reach out and touch things (like all the buttons on the dashboard), but my in-game body would not respond. On top of this, it’s really easy to accidentally step outside of your own body, and sometimes outside of the entire spacecraft. Things like this have a tendency to feel jarring and break your immersion a little. That being said, if you can accept that VR is in its infancy and that this experience is more about the content than the implementation, you’re still in for a magical ride.

Back in the lunar module, I was busy trying my best not to crash into the moon. You can control the landing using the Touch controllers, but the controls are explained as though you were using an Xbox controller, so I struggled to work out exactly how to control my movement. I gave it my best shot, but yet again I had to let the experts take over, and to be honest I’m glad I did because I was much more curious to see what it was actually like for the astronauts at the time. The archive audio made the experience truly intense.

The communication between us and Ground Control was pretty patchy, which must have been nerve-wracking, but eventually all the people responsible for various checks starting giving the go ahead to land. But as we approached the surface, the master alarm started to go off, flashing red and beeping alarmingly! It really made me jump. I just can’t imagine what those astronauts must have been feeling at the time, but their voices remained calm. I looked this up afterwards, but apparently Aldrin was pretty startled by this, saying, “We couldn’t look it up in the book to see what the problem was ’cause we were watching where we were going!” All they could do was ask Houston to clarify and wait. At Ground Control they decided that it was more dangerous to abort than to continue, so they were given the go ahead “so long as the alarm was intermittent.” Super reassuring! On top of that, it turned out that the lunar module had overshot their planned landing location, and had ended up in a dangerous area full of craters and boulders. So Aldrin had to take over manual control and find a landing spot… with only 60 seconds of fuel left.

Outside the window dust was flying up everywhere and the radio fell suspiciously quiet. It felt pretty tense. But then with a relatively small thump, we made contact with the surface. And in his incomprehensibly calm voice, Aldrin said, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” In that moment I felt pretty embarrassed that I had never realised before where that phrase came from, and laughed in relief as Houston replied, “Roger Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.”

I watched with a front row seat as Armstrong took his famous first steps onto the surface. Before long we were bouncing around on the moon’s surface, and I noted that Aldrin’s description of it as “magnificent desolation” was pretty apt. After a few minutes of hopping about in circles and taking photos of each other (which is of course the main reason we travelled here right?) I began to feel pretty motion sick and fed up with the bad Oculus Touch controls, so I mostly stood still and watched Neil have all the fun. Again, the audio over the top of this experience is really what makes it. He was describing the powdery consistency of the moon dust and frolicking about talking about how he could kick it with his feet, and how it was absolutely no trouble to walk around, easier than in the simulations even. He was genuinely a joy to watch.

There were also items (e.g. the American flag, camera, various sensors) for you to discover and activate audio information about, but I stopped listening to these because it really pulled me out of the experience to suddenly hear a random Irish woman narrating a pop-up text bubble, as though I was in a museum. I’m on the moon damn it! Stop interrupting Neil Armstrong!

Looking up into the sky you could see the crescent of the Earth hanging in the sky, like a blue version the moon. In this moment of role reversal, I was suddenly aware of just how far away these guys were from home. Since landing there had definitely been an air of celebration, excitement and palpable relief. But once they were back inside lunar module and I stood on the surface watching its ascent back into the starry darkness, it sank in just how far they had yet to go to arrive safely home.

In the final scene, having reconnected with the command module, we began our descent towards Earth. There are surely few things in this life more disconcerting than hurtling through the atmosphere in a rattling tin can, whilst looking out of your window and seeing enormous flames roaring all around you. Once again, I had my mind blown at how mentally resilient these guys must have been. After an uncomfortable amount of time, the parachutes finally opened and we sailed down into the ocean.

Here, the VR experience ends, but during the research for this piece I learned that apparently the module actually landed upside down in the water, and remained that way for 10 minutes before flotation devices kicked in and it self-righted. In a manner which was at this stage becoming pretty typical of my equanimous buddies, Armstrong’s last official transmission from the command module was, as cool as a cucumber: “Everything’s okay. Our checklist is complete. Awaiting swimmers.” But personally, I like to imagine that as soon as the transmission had finished, all three of them were whooping and cheering and yelling, “WE’RE ALLLLIIIIVVVVVEEEEEE!”

I know I would have been.