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Posted by: dvandorn May 5 2005, 08:02 AM

I discovered a while back that Eric Jones' excellent NASA website. the Apollo Lunar Surface Journals, has been incorporating links to MP3 files of the air-to-ground audio. So far, it's complete for Apollos 15 and 16, and I believe is complete through EVA-1 for Apollo 17.

Now, I grew up with Apollo -- I was born 10/17/55, so I was 13 in the summer of 1969. And, just the way the dates lined up, I was 15 years old when Apollo 15 flew, 16 y.o. during Apollo 16, and 17 y.o. during Apollo 17.

I took pictures off the TV screen of the moonwalks, and I set up a microphone from my little tape recorder in front of the TV set's speaker and recorded audio of the (progressively more scarce) TV coverage of the moonwalks. For several years I fell asleep at night listening to the moonwalks, memorizing details and allowing my subconscious to fly me to the moon in my dreams...

So, when I discovered the MP3s, it occurred to me that I could download them from their source and burn CDs from them... hehehehe...

I finished Apollo 16 -- every bit of air-to-ground from the beginning of Rev 16 (PDI Rev) until ascent and injection into lunar orbit three days later. A total of 32 CDs. And I can listen to them in my car as I drive to work... *big grin*...

I guess this is just a heads-up for any other Apollo junkies out there who might want to do something similar.

-the other Doug

Posted by: Bob Shaw May 5 2005, 08:42 AM

I too taped the majority of the Apollo missions, mostly BBC coverage. I still have the tapes, and will at some point try to rescue them (if they're still playable). Interestingly, for the Apollo flights Gene Shoemaker provided commentary, making him actually rather well-known at the time in the UK. Presumably he was cheaper than an ex-astronaut at the time of Apollo, what with the US networks and their largesse being flung about for the first few flights. Until important stuff like The Lucy Show took over the Apollo slots!

Posted by: edstrick May 5 2005, 11:11 AM

:grin:

I've got audio of the launch of Ranger 3, John Glenn's first two orbits, Ranger 9's "live from the moon" pictures to impact... First 2 orbits of
Gemini 3, Spotty coverage of later Gemini starting from 6/7.

Prize possessions are the launch of Saturn 501.. the first Saturn 5 test flight.. the Landing of Surveyor 1 on the moon. Fairly comprehensive coverage of Apollo, steadily increasing <as broadcast coverage permitted> with time. Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz... bits of unmanned mission coverage. Shuttle Enterprize's first free flight and landing test. etc.

Starting with Apollo 14, I have "prime" bits of coverage in stereo.. 2 different tv networks's live coverage. Line input on the tape recorder attached to the TV speaker leads.. much better audio than the microphone trick.

Tapes seem to be in pretty good condition. be careful copying tapes.. The tape can get brittle, the oxide coating can flake as it's being played.
Be prepared to record it when you try to play it. you may not get a second chance.

Posted by: Bob Shaw May 5 2005, 06:51 PM

Darn right!

Not to mention print-through, and general attacks by mice...

Once (if) the job is ever done, I'll turn 'em into MP3s and release them into the wild. Or the WWW (same thing).

Posted by: lyford May 6 2005, 02:02 AM

Dooood! Time to http://beradio.com/notebook/radio_baking_magnetic_recording_2/

At least that's analog, and providing you still have the original tape deck in working order the problems are surmountable. Digital archiving is a http://student.vfs.com/~deadmedia/frame.html even within a single career-span there have been so many different data formats that I don't envy those charged with http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=4805&URL_DO=DO_PRINTPAGE&URL_SECTION=201.html

Please post your MP3s if you ever break the tapes out....!

(Now if I could only resurrect my old betamax tapes of Benny Hill....)

Posted by: GregM May 6 2005, 02:17 AM

Gentlemen, if you are into this sort of thing (and I assume that you are):

You may or may not be aware of this, (but if not) Spacecraft Films has restored all of this stuff to the highest visual and audio standard available and transferred it all to DVD for sale to the public. ALL (and I mean all) inflight film and video records that exist of all of the Apollo, Gemini, and soon Mercury missions (including unmanned test flights and all early Saturn test flights) are on these products. There is no corny music or narration to interfere - just as it happened at the time. The Apollo stuff has all of the air/ground audio matched to the visuals. The Gemini stuff has post filght crew debriefings matched to the visuals. If you have old recordings that you made at home of the moon landings - preserve & store them for posterity's sake, and then get this stuff to view and listen to for practical use. If you are into human spaceflight from 1961 to 1972, I guarentee that you will NOT be disappointed. There is nothing else like this collection of complete and restored material available commercially anywhere else in the world. No matter what audio/visual record that you may have of human missions of that era, this stuff is one hundred times better.

I would never normally shill a comercial product like this, but I have purchased their product and have come away astonished at their work.

If you are an Apollo Junkie - this is the ultimate. Just get them. Trust me. You will thank yourself.

Posted by: edstrick May 6 2005, 09:53 AM

The Spacecraft films stuff is "The Real Stuff" I've got some and will steadily collect more.

But it's not what we watched and listened to in real time. Before about 1975, we weren't condemmed to 100% Talking Airheads and Celebrity space coverage. The space reporters were reasonably technically literate and then generally let you hear astronaut talk and mission control announcements. And they had "articles" prepared to fill dead air time... technically interesting articles.

Reel-to-reel tape recorders are widely available. I recently bought a refurbished "Prosumer" level 4-channel deck from a local stereo repair and reselling shop for a few hundred $. I bought that unit as my older tapes are 2-track mono, and a regular stereo deck only plays 1/2 of the width of each mono-track... the other track during playback is the other side of the tape in reverse.

Posted by: djellison May 6 2005, 10:56 AM

Being too young to have experienced Apollo - I just like to listen to the 40-odd minutes of Opportunity landing chatter that's on the dvd that came with the 2nd volume of the mars misison reports

Does anyone know if similar footage for pathfinder exists?

Doug

Posted by: Bob Shaw May 6 2005, 11:16 PM

I think the point about the 'off-air' recordings made by us guys is that they reflect the mass experience of the time - there's no doubt that there are far superior archival recordings, but it's the 'being there' which counts, So, a bald NASA recording of the Apollo 4 launch pales into insignificance beside the experience of the window falling in, and - secondhand- listening to it happen.

The Holy Grail, however, might be the Apollo 15 video with the cleaning up applied which was done for later flights...

Posted by: dvandorn May 7 2005, 03:57 AM

Yeah -- while I really enjoy my Apollo CDs, I miss the commentary a bit. Somewhere on my original cassettes from 33 years ago, I have John Chancellor commenting on the exuberance of Young and Duke, saying "Do you think that when these fellows come home from the office at night, they say things like 'Gee, the key fits in the door! Out-STANDING!'?"

-the other Doug

Posted by: edstrick May 9 2005, 01:41 AM

What I *don't* have, probably is the quote from Apollo 16 after the first EVA, when they were eating and relaxing and having "private time' with the link to Houston nominally turned off... the switch wasn't quite in the off position and they had a live mike... (I'd have to dig up the source for a perfect quote but...)

"Christ, Charlie, I had the farts out there.. I don't know what does it .. I think it's that G__dammed orange juice.... I really do...
....
...
Houston: Apollo.. you're on the way to having a hot mike...

(Printed in Aviation "Leak" the following week)

I said to myself... My ghod!... this proves it, despite the best effort of the NASA PR flacks... The astronauts are human after all!

Posted by: ElkGroveDan May 9 2005, 03:22 AM

According to Encyclopedia Astronautica, the story goes like this:

Duke had been hypnotized to keep him from using his customary cuss words while being broadcast live from the moon, which led to his constant singing to compensate... Tang, orange-drink sponsor of CBS coverage of the mission, was not pleased when Young confided to a crewmate, not knowing that his words were being broadcast live: "I got the farts again... I mean, I haven't eaten this much citrus fruit in twenty year...in another twelve f***ing days, I ain't never eating any more...I'll be damned if I'm goint to be buried in oranges.."

here: http://www.astronautix.com/flights/apollo16.htm

Posted by: dvandorn May 9 2005, 04:40 AM

It's something of a shame that John Young, one of the most capable astronauts who ever wore the pin, is remembered by most people primarily for two things:

1) The corned-beef sandwich he "smuggled" onto Gemini 3, and

2) The "acid stomach" comments he made on a hot mike (that he had *no* idea was hot) on Apollo 16.

Actually, my favorite moment in re the "acid stomach" incident during Apollo 16 happened the next day, near the end of EVA-2. Young and Duke were lobbying Houston for an EVA extension, so they could finish up their close-out without the need to hurry through it (and perhaps forget something, or screw something up). Since I have the exchange memorized, I can tell you it went like this:


Duke: Tony, how about an extension, you guys? We feelin' good.

Young: Yeah -- you said all we was gonna do tonight was sit around and talk! ((Young spoke the word "talk" like it was the most disgusting thing he could think of.))

CapCom Tony England: Oh, we like to hear you talk. Especially about the orange juice...


((Less than two minutes later, the Flight Director agreed to grant a 15-minute extension, to which Duke replied "Let's here it for ol' Flight! An Attaboy for Flight!" To which Tony added a spontaneous "yea!"))

BTW, I don't know how the otherwise excellent Encyclopedia Astronautica got this so wrong, but the story about Duke is actually about Pete Conrad, and it is an apocryphal story. Conrad, as anyone who ever spoke with him could tell you, used profane words as grace notes. He swore every three or four words, usually. In Bartlett's Quotations, the phrase "swear like a sailor" has a picture of Pete next to it...

Anyway, before Apollo 12, NASA PAO was having conniptions, convinced that their Third Man on the Moon was *never* going to be able to control his language. His LMP, Al Bean, even talked to Pete about it, saying he was really concerned that Pete was going to slip and swear a lot on the Moon. Pete told Al not to worry, he would be fine -- and that, furthermore, it was guys like Al, who rarely swore in everyday life, who would be *more* likely to slip up and swear on a live mike. Sure enough, Pete only swore once or twice, mild things like "damnits" under his breath, and Al slipped up five or six times.

Now, a naturally ebullient Conrad was absolutely ecstatic to be walking on the Moon, so as he went about his business, he hummed and sang little wordless ditties. The apocryphal story was that NASA had convinced Pete to undergo hypnosis, and that he was under a post-hypnotic suggestion forcing him to hum or sing whenever he felt like swearing. But it's not true -- Pete, good to his word, knew how to keep his language fit for a G-rated audience when he was on a live mike.

As for Duke, he was a good ol' Carolina boy, but also a devout Christian who, after his astronaut career, took up a career in the ministry. Charlie was naturally pretty mild-mannered and soft-spoken, with that marvelous deep-South accent that will forever be linked in my mind with the moment men first landed on the Moon (Duke was the CapCom who responded to Armstrong's declaration that Eagle was now Tranquility base with an emotion-choked "Rog, Twan - Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathin' again -- thanks a lot.") His swearing, as revealed on the onboard recordings, was always very mild and infrequent. So this entry is a little unfair to Duke.

I need to remember to write Mark Wade an e-mail about this...

-the other Doug

Posted by: edstrick May 9 2005, 10:53 AM

Remembered background bit...
on Apollo 15, the flight medicos noticed some heart arrythmias in the working-awfully-hard crew during or after an EVA. This was attributed to low blood potassium...
So the 16 crew had potassium laced pseudo-tang to counter any possible problem
I really think it wasn't tang. We had some K-juice like that for my grandfather or somebody in the family who was on a low salt/extra potassium diet about the same time and it was worse than tang.

Posted by: dvandorn May 9 2005, 06:58 PM

Tang is an interesting subject, since Tang itself (the exact formulation that was sold commercially) never flew in space. The same people who made Tang formulated the various citrus drinks that NASA included in Apollo meal packs, but the formulation was slightly different from the commercuial product. And yes, after the Apollo 15 situation, in which low potassium levels were identified as a contributing factor to the bigeminal heart rhythms that both Scott and Irwin displayed (Irwin more than Scott), the fruit drinks for the LM crews on the remaining flights were enriched with potassium. Which encouraged stomach acid and intestinal gas production.

The citrus drinks weren't the only culprits for gas production, either. On Apollo 17, Jack Schmitt blamed the corn chowder for a rather pungent episode of gas-passing during translunar coast, and felt he had to warn Cernan about it when the corn chowder showed up on the menu for their first post-landing meal. Since they were going to begin EVA prep right after eating and Schmitt would be cocooned in his own suit (with his own stink) for the next eight hours or so, Cernan didn't seem too worried about it...

But every single American space flight through the end of Apollo ran across some level of problem with intestinal gas. On Apollo, this was partially blamed on leftover hydrogen gas bubbles in the drinking water (the water having been produced by combining hydrogen and oxygen in the electricity-generating fuel cells). One flight surgeon even tried to blame it on the 5 psia cabin pressure -- the rationale was that the intestines always contain a certain amount of gas, and that if you lower the outside pressure, the gas will, in response, increase in volume and push harder to escape. Of course, the body maintains the same pressure against the intestines at 5 psia as it does at sea level, so that argument never made a lot of sense... but it was put forth back in the 60s.

But for whatever reason, early American spaceflights were all flown in a cloud of methane at some point. The issue was made a lot more obvious by the fact that the smell of the gas can't dissipate, like it would even in an indoor room on Earth. With such a relatively small volume of air and limited scrubbing for aroma removal, *any* farting became immediately obvious and stayed around for hours. So even a normal amount of intestinal gas became much more obvious.

-the other Doug

Posted by: GregM May 10 2005, 03:25 AM

So, the capsule lands in the deep blue south pacific sea. The air is fragrant. You are the frogman. You and your frogman buddies get the float collar on, and dingy inflated. You climb on the collar, knock on the hatch. The door opens, you stick your head in, and take a deep breath.....

Sometimes spaceflight isn't so glamourous!

I once read that it was real bad on the long duration Gemini flights. Lots of sweating, no cleaning up, no getting out of your seat, living in your suit for half of the time, don't even imagine going to the bathroom (it's that horrible) - all in the free space of a phone booth.


Major Matt Mason - Space Ranger, never talked about this

Posted by: lyford May 10 2005, 04:22 PM

Yes, and I understand at times Mir could be worse than a gym locker room filled with old sweaty socks.... Imagine slipping the surly bonds of Earth and docking in orbit - the hatch opens - PHEW - and thinking "I got 3 more months of this air?????"

Though, http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/academy/astronauts/livinginspace/lucid/LucidInterview1.html this reputation is undeserved. http://lsda.jsc.nasa.gov/scripts/cf/exp_descrp_pop_up.cfm?exp_id=5.3a&string=¤t_string=NASA ran its own tests on air quality, and did find some formaldehyde and ethanol levels high... not sure how this relates to "human contributions" to air quality.

And don't get me http://www.space.com/news/spacestation/space_fungus_000727.html

Somehow, you never hear about this stuff when pundits discuss the manned mission to Mars...

Posted by: dvandorn May 10 2005, 05:58 PM

Yeah -- when they speak of the glories of exploring the Moon, they never talk about things like space adaptation syndrome, which made at least one guy on most every flight queasy enough to vomit. They never talk about the indignities of bowel movements in a capsule no larger than the inside of a Volkswagen Beetle, for which, according to Wally Schirra, the only way to proceed was to get entirely naked and leave yourself a good hour for preparation and clean-up. They never talk about less-than-palatable food, total lack of warm water and food while on the Moon, or struggling into pressure suits that are designed to fit so snugly that, until you actually pressurized them, the neck ring would bite into your shoulders.

Even on the ISS, they never talk about how the only drinking water temperature choices are lukewarm and sort-of-hot, or how the noise level in some parts of the station is such that it could cause permanent hearing degradation if endured for as long as six months at a time.

I always thought SkyLab was on the right track. Hot showers, a refrigerator and freezer for food, an oven and table-top heaters with which to cook their food (making available such meals as lobster thermidor and prime rib), and a nice, big open space to just plain have fun floating around in. Now that was flying in style!

-the other Doug

Posted by: garybeau May 21 2005, 04:19 PM

What a great thread, you guys have an extraordinary memory for detail. I too was 13 in 1969 and watched and read everything I could get my hands on about the Apollo program. At one time or another I had read about most of these incidences, but completely forgot about them until now. I also had set up a camera and took pictures directly from the TV. I remember thinking at the time that this was a once in a lifetime event and that I had to somehow preserve this for the future. Who would have guessed that 36 years later you could get access to so much information with just the click of a button. There is far more material available with easy access today about the Apollo program than there was back then when it was happening.
But I still treasure those grainy photos I took off the TV because they bring me back to a very specific point in time.
Greg, I also have a couple of DVD sets from Spacecraft Films ("The Mighty Saturns" and "Apollo 15") and I agree with you they are well worth the money. There is a lot of footage there that I never saw before and the quality is superb.
But I do miss some of the commentary. I would like to find some footage of the
Apollo 11 landing exactly as it played out on TV with Walter Cronkite’s commentary.
If someone knows of a source where I could find that it would be greatly appreciated.


Gary

Posted by: Bob Shaw May 21 2005, 09:00 PM

Yes, it's the 'realite' that counts, the feeling of being there at a point in history which for once wasn't full of pain and blood (think of Apollo 11 as the Omaha Beach of our generation, but blessed with no terror or death so that we may in all innocence cherish the memory).

I certainly hope to live long enough to see more flights to the Moon, and I hope that a good few of the Apollo astronauts make it, too.

And I too treasure the photos I took from the TV! I was lucky enough to visit KSC in 1975 to see the last Apollo launch, and then I returned for STS-1, which sort of turned the circle. I hope to be at the Cape again for the last Shuttle, too...

Posted by: GregM May 23 2005, 02:41 AM

I understand where you are coming from here. The Spacecraft Films products are without a doubt the best existing visual records of the Gemini and Apollo flights - but they are of course from an Astronaut's/Mission Control point of view. The great advantage of this is of course that you get to see and hear the mission as it happened uninterrupted and unfiltered.

Of course it however cannot reproduce the flavor of the moment that each person experienced viewing the events through the looking glass of the media and popular culture - which of course was all most folks had access to at the time. That is something quite different. It is this experience, however filtered and presented by the television networks, that we have the memories of. I would think that if you are looking to rekindle that personal experience, you might try contacting the television networks about their video records of their presentations of the Apollo missions. Although the actual television downlink of the missions are of course public domain, the television network's presentation of them, and the accompanying commentary, would I think be network property. Walter Cronkite = CBS.

Posted by: edstrick May 23 2005, 05:09 AM

Walter: "My GOD... The Building's Shaking....THE BUILDING'S SHAKING HERE!...."

That evening, they censored his report for the evening news. Took out his first two words after Saturn 501 lifted off!

Posted by: dvandorn May 23 2005, 06:29 AM

I have never seen a man more completely enraptured than Walter Cronkite after his experience of holding the glass wall up to keep the acoustic pressure of the Saturn V from pushing it into his booth. I think his reaction to the physical *presence* of the mighty Saturn was even more profound than his speechlessness a couple of years later when men finally landed on the Moon.

-the other Doug