Forty years after man first walked on the moon, we're still far enough from commercial spaceflight that most of us can certainly count on staying well within the Earth's atmosphere for our lifetime.

But now ordinary folks will have a chance to peek further than ever before into the Apollo lunar expedition of 1968 with a sophisticated Web interactive at WeChooseTheMoon.org.

The many-layered Web site, powered by AOL, features a virtual shuttle that will launch at 8:02 a.m. on July 16, 2009 -- exactly 40 after the Apollo 11 shuttle. Currently visitors can see pre-mission data, including a nostalgic list of the news, bestsellers and hit songs at the time of the original launch.

Once the shuttle "launches," the site will recreate the mission minute-for-minute and word-for-word with archival audio, video and photos. And, of course, there's Twitter -- once the mission launches, you can follow conversations between spacecrafts Columbia, Eagle and the Houston base.

Credit goes to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and the site is certainly homage to Kennedy's extraordinary and ambitious vision of space travel that made the mission possible.

The site will feature 400 NASA photos, 44 hours of video and 2,223 pages of declassified mission documents. AOL will expand the experience with other features on its various Web sites, such as buddy icons for AIM users.

"The undertaking is pretty massive," said Joe Alexander, the creative director at one of the companies that designed the site. "We’re joking a lot about how sending millions to the moon in cyberspace in 2009 is going to end up taking just as much time as sending three guys to the moon in 1969."