NASA releases thousands of hours of Apollo 11 mission audio

NASA and the University of Texas have teamed up to digitize 19,000 hours of recordings from the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first two people on the moon. 

The audio was uploaded to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit website that hosts digitized versions of cultural artifacts.

“One of the things that comes across is that each of the people working for NASA is proud of what they do. They were always working collaboratively,” John Hansen, a speech researcher at the university and principal investigator for the project, told NBC News.

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The newly digitized recordings track conversations between astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and mission control in Houston.

They include serious discussions, such as one about a program alarm Armstrong and Aldrin hadn’t encountered in training, and more light-hearted exchanges like one about an oatmeal-eating contest. 

Digitizing the tapes was an arduous task, NBC reported, as each one contained 30 different audio channels and a unique tape recorder was needed to read one track at a time, requiring each of the 170 tapes to be played 30 times.