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NASA Releases Thousands of Hours of Apollo 11 Mission Audio (thehill.com)

Posted by msmash on from the for-the-record dept.

NASA and the University of Texas have teamed up to digitize 19,000 hours of recordings from the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first two people on the moon. From a report: The audio was uploaded to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit website that hosts digitized versions of cultural artifacts. "One of the things that comes across is that each of the people working for NASA is proud of what they do. They were always working collaboratively," John Hansen, a speech researcher at the university and principal investigator for the project, told NBC News.

3 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. Moon Hoaxers? by CohibaVancouver · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Now that we have pictures of moon buggy tracks and the gear left behind on the moon...

    https://www.nasa.gov/mission_p...

    ...as well as things like this newly-released thousands-of-hours of audio, do any of the moon hoaxers start to lose their resolve?

    Or to them, is it still just part of a huge ongoing conspiracy involving thousands of men and women that continues to live on nearly 50 years later?

  2. Is there a key to understanding the tapes? by mykepredko · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I have no idea how this works. If I look at the Official Apollo 11 timeline (https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4029/Apollo_11i_Timeline.htm), the countdown started on July 14th and splashdown was on July 24th. I can be generous and say that the mission took 11 days (264 hours). According to TFA, there were 30 tracks of data (which yields 7,920 hours of audio). This is only 1/3 of the total - where does the 19k hours come in?

    Secondly, how do you know which tape to look for what? For example, I'd love to hear the rendezvous of the conversation of the CM and the ascent module during docking after launching from the moon but I have no idea where to look in terms of time/track.

    I did do a search, but couldn't find any information on this or a key to understand the tapes. Anybody have any ideas?

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    1. Re:Is there a key to understanding the tapes? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The article says 170 tapes with 30 tracks, it does not say how long any of them are or that they were only recording 30 tracks at one time. 5,100 tracks is all it gives you. The NASA release mentions these are "surviving tapes" and also says there is a lot more audio that hasn't been digitized. It also hints at transcriptions, perhaps coming to the Explore Apollo site at some point.

      The labels have things like "Flight Director (L)" and "Flight Director (R)" taking up two tracks on a tape. Some of the ones I have opened up sound like they are data (the labels are the same for every tape and do not match the contents). I also found one with some folks that sound Australian (maybe) troubleshooting something.

      I imagine "T880" is a tape label (I get 24 audio tracks for that one), followed by which Historical Recorder was used and potentially which reel on the recorder (U and L look a lot like Upper/Lower to me), then the channel. Unsure on the timestamp, except it appears to be sequential (T889 has channel 17 from 01-42-10_10-12-10 and 10-12-10_18-21-28, but there is silence in the first and talking in the second).