Alsj Mp3s, Apollo audio Options

[dvandorn]

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

[edstrick]

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.

[dvandorn]

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.

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