2018-11-06 18:58:36

Hi all,
Recently, NASA released over 130,000 hours of audio from the Apollo 11 mission. Why 130,000 hours, you ask? To cut a long story short, various support personnel on the ground were able to communicate over a very elaborate system, known as communications loops. Fortunately, most of these were recorded and are now available to the general public after almost half a century.
This is an invaluable resource for people like myself who are not just interested in the historical aspect, but also the technical side of things. At the moment, this is fairly messy, as the raw multi-track tapes were digitized and then uploaded one channel at a time to archive.org
There are several projects as I understand it being undertaken at the moment to put this in a more digestible order for casual browsers, however if there's anything you are particularly interested in, you can check it out here:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=Ap … Collection
If you're interested in a more general look, there's also the nasa audio collection of which these files are a part. This covers a great number of things including Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and space shuttle missions.
https://archive.org/details/nasaaudiocollection
If there's anything that you're interested in, feel free to ask here as chances are I can help you out finding it.
Hope this is useful to the curious!
Cheers,

Daniel

2018-11-06 18:59:51

Well. This will make my productivity dip even further than it already has.
I love stuff like this. Thanks for posting. smile

Much less active on this forum than in the past.

Check out my live streams: http://lerven.me
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2018-11-06 19:02:45 (edited by daniel 2018-11-06 19:10:49)

No problem Liam. Glad to see I'm not the only one who has an interest in this stuff smile
Some great stuff in the collection, that's for sure.
Also, as far as the multitrack tapes from Apollo 11, you may notice that the channel assignment chart is a jpg. I've done my best to ocr and then proof the results, I've pasted them below. A word of warning, there may be some misspellings, many of these terms haven't been used for some time. There were two historical recorders, each recording different material.

A/11, as506
HR1:
CH1: Timing
CH2: flight operations director
CH3: Mission Director
CH4: DoD mannager
CH5: Operations and procedures
CH6: assistant flight director
CH7: flight director left
ch8: flight director right
ch9: flight plans officer
ch10: network controller left
CH11: network controller right
ch12: surgeon left
CH13: surgeon right
CH14: capcom left
CH15: capcom right
CH16: inco
CH17: ecom
CH18: gnc
CH19: retro
CH20: fdo
CH21: guido left
CH22: guido right
CH23: load control
CH24: rtc
ch25: tcat command
CH26: tech
CH27: ctac scan
CH28: track left
CH29: track right
CH30: voice annotations
HR2:
CH1: timing
CH2: nasa recovery coord
ch3: assistant nasa recovery coord
CH4: recovery status
CH5: recovery evaluator
CH6: DoD coord
CH7: DoD primary opperations
CH8: DoD mannager recovery
CH9: DoD exec
CH10: DoD assistance for comm1
CH11: DoD CIO
CH12: comm tech third floor
CH13: comm controllers third floor
CH14: space environment
CH15: computer support
CH16: span
CH17: booster left
CH18: booster centre
CH19: booster right
CH20: third floor flight director loop
CH21: pre afd conference loop
CH22: pre goss2 loop
CH23: pao2
ch24: pre mocr dynamics loop
ch25: pre goss conference loop
ch26: pre goss4 loop
CH27: lm GnC
CH28: lm ecom
CH29: experimental activities
CH30: voice annotations

HTH,

Daniel

2018-11-06 23:01:18

It must just have taken them fifty years to fake this much audio. Just kidding. Thanks for the links.