— PROJECT NAME
Google AMP:
Moon Stories
— ROLE
Head of Copy
@ R/GA London
— DATE
July 2019
In 2019, the world looked back at one of NASA’s greatest achievements: the 1969 Apollo 11 mission that put the first human beings on the Moon. The Smithsonian Institution in the US has an incredible archive about this landmark mission, but it’s only available to people who can make it to the actual museum in Washington, D.C.
So, in collaboration with the Smithsonian and Google Arts & Culture, I helped write a series of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) that appeared in Google Search as instantly visible stories. It meant millions of users could discover content from the Moon mission in a more interactive way, just as the 50th Anniversary hit the headlines.
A new medium for a classic story
Google AMP is a new platform that shows search content in a ‘visual stories’ format. To find these stories, people search for something moon-related like ‘Apollo 11’ on their mobile device. Then they can tap through a sequence of full-screen photos, videos and descriptions of history’s most famous space journey: the mission, the spacecraft and the people who made it possible.
20 Unique Stories
Using archive material from the Smithsonian, we created 20 individual AMP stories, each one giving a different angle on the 1969 Lunar Landings.
From the three famous astronauts who went into space, to the lesser-known Ground Crew who stayed behind (including women like Rita Rapp, a pioneer in space food) we told different stories to people at different points in their Google search. The challenge was condensing such a rich narrative down into bite-size nuggets.
Below are sample screens from our story about Michael Collins, the third astronaut who went into orbit around the Moon but never set foot on it.
Below are sample screens from our story about Rita Rapp, the NASA physiologist who experimented with new formulas for space food.
Below are sample screens from our story about the A7L pressure suit that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wore on the surface of the Moon.
