NASA has published over 19,000 hours of audio recordings made during the Apollo 11 mission. These include not only conversations between the command center on Earth and astronauts, but also between flight controllers and other specialists who supported the mission.
The Apollo 11 spacecraft was launched into space on July 16, 1969. It was his crew, which included Neil Armstrong, pilot Edwin Aldrin and Michael Collins (remained in orbit), who made the first landing on the lunar surface. The astronauts planted a US flag at the landing site, placed a set of scientific instruments and collected 21.55 kilograms of lunar soil samples that were delivered to Earth. In total, the flight took 8 days.
Now NASA has published audio records of the mission: in total, the researchers digitized 170 tapes, each of which contained 30 tracks. At the Lyndon Johnson Space Center, there was only one SoundScriber phonograph that could reproduce the recordings. The main problem was that it can only play one recording at a time. To listen to it, the user needs to mechanically turn the knob and move the tape reading head from one track to another. At this speed, it would take about 170 years to digitize tapes. Therefore, specialists from NASA modified the device so that it could play 30 tracks at the same time.
Information about all tracks on the tape.
In addition, most of the time, specialists and astronauts were silent during the recording, so the team had to develop a system that learned to independently determine when a conversation begins and ends, who says what and when. In total, NASA received 19,000 hours of audio recordings - over two years of continuous playback.
The data can be found in the NASA archive. In some of the recordings, you can hear not only the commands of the control center, but also how the employees and astronauts joke and talk about life.
Christina Ulasovich