More than 43 years after Armstrong has put his foot on the Moon, NASA has successfully landed Curiosity, which is the rover belonging to the Mars Science Laboratory. That’s an amazing achievement and the first pictures from the lander are really great. However, given the advance in science and technology it is even more astonishing what has been achieved 43 years ago when Armstrong announced the successful touchdown of the Apollo 11 mission on the moon by the (famous) words “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” On July 20th, 1969 scientists and engineers had achieved something that people thought would be impossible. Although they used computers to control their systems, the computing power of these devices would make us laugh nowadays. One could run the whole mission software as an “App” on a smartphone and still watch TV or play a game without interfering with the Apollo code. This shows the tremendous advance in PC and microchip technology. Fortunately, all the program code and the system description from the Apollo missions has been made public on this page. It’s surely a pain to read through it line by line, but I believe it should be treated like any other cultural heritage.