Counting Down to Apollo — A Personal Record of the Space Race — Est. 1962

Counting Down to Apollo

One American's account of watching humanity reach the Moon

About This Demo

About This Site

Counting Down to Apollo is a fictional blog. It was created by Tag1 Consulting to demonstrate the capabilities of Scolta, an open-source AI-powered search platform, on a WordPress blog with rich narrative content.

What You Are Looking At

This site is a WordPress demonstration built to show how Scolta performs on personal narrative and journalistic content. The site presents a fictional American’s firsthand account of following the U.S. space program from Gagarin’s flight in April 1961 through the final Apollo 17 mission in December 1972.

The blog contains approximately 200 entries written from the perspective of a civilian observer — not a scientist or journalist — recording his reactions to each major event as it happened. The content covers:

  • Mercury program (1961–1963): from Shepard’s suborbital flight to Gordon Cooper’s 22-orbit mission
  • Gemini program (1964–1966): rendezvous, spacewalks, and the techniques that made Apollo possible
  • Apollo program (1967–1972): the Apollo 1 fire, the Moon landings, and Apollo 13’s survival mission
  • Supplementary pages: Mission Timeline, Glossary, and Resources

What Scolta Does Here

The search bar uses Scolta to let you explore twelve years of space history using natural language. Try these example queries:

  • “What happened during Apollo 13?”
  • “How did Neil Armstrong feel about landing on the Moon?”
  • “Tell me about the Apollo 1 fire”
  • “What was the first spacewalk like?”
  • “Buzz Aldrin’s experience on the Moon”

Scolta uses Pagefind for full-text indexing, Claude via the Anthropic API for query expansion and AI-generated overviews, and a custom BM25-based scoring layer. The result is a search experience that understands narrative context, not just keywords.

About Tag1 Consulting

Tag1 Consulting is one of the leading Drupal development and consulting firms in the world. Tag1 built and open-sources Scolta as a demonstration of what AI-augmented content discovery can look like on modern web platforms — including WordPress. For more information about Tag1 and Scolta, visit tag1.com.

Reuse and Attribution

If you are evaluating Scolta for your organization and have questions about how this demo was built or how to implement Scolta for your use case, contact Tag1 Consulting.