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Houston We Have a Problem

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the oh-tom-hanks dept.

thanosk writes "NASA has started releasing the transcripts from the early NASA missions and started with releasing the transcripts of the Apollo 13 mission and the famous 'Houston we have a problem' quote."

12 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Misquoted by Sacro · · Score: 5, Informative

    The actual quote was "Houston we've had a problem".

    1. Re:Misquoted by spectro · · Score: 5, Informative

      Looking for the exact quote? Here you go

      --
      HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
    2. Re:Misquoted by CatsupBoy · · Score: 4, Informative

      Some other key moments:
      With oxygen dropping, the crew considers a move to the LM
      There's one whole side of the spacecraft missing
      The crew completes their first 'mailbox'

  2. Starting to release? by HonIsCool · · Score: 4, Informative

    The transcripts of the Apollo missions have been available online for a long time. Apparently these are new "multimedia" transcripts, or at least transcripts with hyperlinks or whatnot, but the actual text in the transcripts have been available. I know because I read a fair few of them before...

    --
    "Give me six lines of C++ code written by the most competent programmer, and I will find enough in there to hang him."
    1. Re:Starting to release? by RussGarrett · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yep. We built Spacelog to make the transcripts in NASA PDFs more accessible and searchable. For some reason everyone thinks we're NASA and this content is new. (We're not related to NASA.)

      What is news is that NASA has recently started to release the full mission audio for Apollo/Gemini/Mercury missions on archive.org. Hopefully we'll be able to do something fun with that.

    2. Re:Starting to release? by RussGarrett · · Score: 4, Informative

      I suspect you mean the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal and the Apollo Flight Journal, and they are semi-official NASA projects. (To tell the truth, I didn't know about the latter until after we built Spacelog.)

      Although some of the commentary and analysis interspersed into them is awesome, we're not a huge fan of the ALSJ and the AFJ because:

      • The weird split between Flight and Lunar Surface is a bit arbitrary
      • They're a bit ugly (ugh, frames), whereas Spacelog is pretty (photos are inline, for example)
      • It's difficult to link directly to a quote
      • The commentary is on the technical side, while we want Spacelog to be fairly accessible
      • Their transcripts only cover certain Apollo missions (notably not 13). We want to cover Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and more (NASA just released some Shuttle transcripts)
      • They claim copyright on their corrected version of the transcript. All of Spacelog (both the corrected transcript and the code) is public domain like the original transcripts
  3. shortcut to the famous quote by martyb · · Score: 5, Informative

    Okay, so the summary points to the root of the web site. If you'd rather not navigate through the different missions and multimedia items to find it, here's a direct link to the "Houston, we've had a problem" quote:

    02 07 55 19 Fred Haise (LMP)
    Okay, Houston --

    02 07 55 20 Jack Swigert (CMP)
    I believe we've had a problem here.

    02 07 55 28 Jack Lousma (CAPCOM)
    This is Houston. Say again, please.

    02 07 55 35 Jim Lovell (CDR)
    Houston, we've had a problem. We've had a MAIN B BUS UNDERVOLT.

  4. Re:That's one small step for ? by eln · · Score: 3, Informative

    They called it the LEM before they changed the name to LM. IIRC, the name was changed because it was thought the word "excursion" in there made the whole thing seem too fanciful. It's still popularly called LEM though, probably because LEM is easy to pronounce as a one-syllable word, while LM can only really be pronounced "ell em", and doesn't roll off the tongue nearly as nicely. In fact, the page you link to calls it the LEM in several places.

  5. Is this news? by xded · · Score: 4, Informative

    Transcripts and audio files have been available forever at http://history.nasa.gov/afj/ (even if they actually miss Apollo 13).

    Also, probably not everyone knows that in that speech Houston is not the city in Texas hosting the JSC, but the CAPCOM (no, not the company) callsign.

  6. Not directly from NASA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Mission transcripts have been available from NASA for years as PDFs with very poor OCR. This project is an independent effort to turn them into a computer-friendly format. You can help too (see the bottom of the front page).

  7. Re:That's one small step for ? by Virtex · · Score: 4, Informative

    My understanding is that what he meant to say was "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind". That one little extra word makes the phrase make a lot more sense.

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  8. "NOUN 37" / "VERB 12" - not redactions by thatseattleguy · · Score: 3, Informative

    Just an FYI: reading through the transcript I kept seeing things like "NOUN 37" and "VERB 12" - I thought these might be redactions for national security or censorship of Very Bad Words (ala the Nixon White House tapes and "expletive deleted" - but I'm dating myself to know about that). But they actually seem to be the way the internal shipboard guidance computer was controlled, with two part commands, one being an action (not surprisingly, "VERB yy") and one being an object to be acted upon ("NOUN xx"). Details here:

    http://history.nasa.gov/afj/compessay.htm

    Interestingly, this is not at all unlike how the original Fortran code for ADVENT (the seminal "Collossal Cave Adventure") was architected, even down to the terminology used.