Categories: MoonSpace Flight

Listen to Apollo 11 Conversations the Earth Didn’t Hear

[/caption]
The whole world watched as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the surface of the Moon. Everyone listened intently to every word said between the Eagle lander and mission control. But what did Neil and Buzz say to each other when the microphone was off? Now you can find out. NASA has made the onboard audio tapes available online, so everyone can listen in the what happened inside the spacecraft. These are not necessarily major milestones of the mission but are some of the more interesting and clearly recorded conversations the crew members had among themselves as the mission progressed.

For example, here’s one exchange between Armstrong and Aldrin:

“I would appreciate if you could … see if you could … find the map …”

“Trade you that for a piece of gum. There it is.”

Find the Apollo 11 audio highlights here.

And here’s the Apollo 11 onboard voice transcription.

All of the Apollo spacecraft included onboard voice recorders, activated during much of each mission to record the crew’s conversations. The transcripts of those recordings were publicly released in the mid-1970s and they have been posted on the Internet for years. But only recently were the actual onboard recordings from Apollo 11 digitized so that the recordings could be made available on the Internet.

The Apollo 11 Onboard Audio Tape Database cross references the tape numbers to the Mission Elapsed Time (MET) that was on each tape. The database includes a description of the mission status at that time. It is best to listen to the tapes while simultaneously viewing the same mission elapsed time on the transcript, since often the recordings are faint.

Source: NASA

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/

Recent Posts

Congressional Hearing Fuels Fresh Debate About UFOs

An 11-page document that's attributed to a Pentagon whistleblower has provided new cases in the…

4 hours ago

New Study Examines How Extraterrestrial Civilizations Could Become “Stellarvores.”

One of the most challenging aspects of astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)…

6 hours ago

A Screw-Driven Robot Could Autonomously Mine Rocky Worlds

Navigating the harsh terrain of other rocky worlds has consistently been challenging. The Free Spirit…

8 hours ago

How Life Could Live Under the Ice on Mars

Mars has been a fascination to us for centuries. Early observations falsely gave impressions of…

8 hours ago

NASA’s JPL Lays Off Another 325 People

NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab has announced a second round of layoffs for 2024, this time…

10 hours ago

Lessons From Ancient Earth’s Atmosphere: From Hostile to Hospitable

Will we ever understand how life got started on Earth? We've learned much about Earth's…

12 hours ago