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Houston We Have a Problem

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."

21 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 Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Vladimir Komarov supposedly had a few choice words for the Russian space agency just before his crash.

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

      Looking for the exact quote? Here you go

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  2. To translate into newspeak for you youngsters... by John+Hasler · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...that would be "Houston we have an issue".

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  3. Re:To translate into newspeak for you youngsters.. by tverbeek · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Houston, this is so unfair!"

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  4. Re:That's one small step for ? by jimbolauski · · Score: 5, Funny

    I really want to know what people are going to write for the statement that Neil Armstrong made when he stepped off the LEM ladder.

    "Can we do a retake?"

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  5. 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...

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    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. Re:Starting to release? by DerekLyons · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The transcripts of the Apollo missions have been available online for a long time.

      And in a much more useful format (with illustrations, technical notes, etc...) at the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. This 'new' version is nothing but the transcripts run through a bot that adds pretty pictures and stupid 'tweet this' links.

  6. Beatles in Space by digitaldc · · Score: 5, Interesting

    01 00 16 12
    Jim Lovell (CDR)
    Gosh, we had forgotten, but we'd like to hear what the news is.
    01 00 16 15
    Joe Kerwin (CAPCOM)
    Okay. There's not a whole lot to it. Well, let's see, we'll start with the—Let's start with sports, what the heck. The Astros survived 8 to 7, the Braves got five or six runs in the—five runs in the ninth inning, but they just made it; and in the other important game of the day, the Cubs were rained out. I have all the rest of the scores, you can tell me if you want any of them. They had earthquakes in Manila and other areas of the island of Luzon. There were three tremors and they kept the buildings shaking for about a half an hour or so, and it was about a 5 on the Richter scale.
    Okay, let's see. The Beatles have announced they will no longer perform as a group. The quartet is reported to have made in excess of a half billion dollars during their short musical career. However, rumors that they will use this money to start their own space program are false. 01 00 17 24
    Jim Lovell (CDR)
    Maybe we could borrow some.
    01 00 17 26
    Joe Kerwin (CAPCOM)

    (Laughter) Okay. Okay.

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  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. Re:To translate into newspeak for you youngsters.. by j00r0m4nc3r · · Score: 4, Funny

    Apollo: hustun we has teh prob. LOL
    Houston: n00bs...

  11. Re:That's one small step for ? by PPH · · Score: 3, Funny

    Or if the boom operator accidentally lowered the microphone into the scene for a moment.

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  12. 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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  13. "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.

  14. Re:To translate into newspeak for you youngsters.. by w0mprat · · Score: 3, Funny

    Apollo 13: srsly HALP!!!11!!

    Houston: RTFM!!

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  15. Re:That's one small step for ? by geekoid · · Score: 3, Interesting

    IF you look at the oscillation in the signal, it's becomes very obvious he did say that, but after 32ms into the a it was interrupted by a signal error.

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