Planet Vintage presents
Spaceflight is the best-documented human undertaking of the twentieth century, because everything had to be said out loud and everything said out loud was recorded. Held here are the loops themselves — air-to-ground, onboard tape, the flight director’s room, the press conferences afterwards — from the first American in space to the last landing of a shuttle. Every recording is a work of the United States government and carries no copyright anywhere in the world.
524
Recordings
17
Programmes
189h
Listening
1961–2011
Years covered
One seat, then two
Mercury and Gemini: fifteen minutes of suborbital flight, then the rendezvous, docking and spacewalk techniques that made a lunar landing arithmetic rather than ambition.
1961–1963 · NASA / Manned Spacecraft Center
Air-to-ground, launch coverage and post-flight debriefs from the first American crewed programme.
Mercury was flown by one man in a capsule barely wider than his shoulders. The recordings are short because the flights were: fifteen suborbital minutes for Shepard and Grissom, then orbits for Glenn, Carpenter, Schirra and Cooper.
23 recordings
1965–1966 · NASA / Manned Spacecraft Center
Rendezvous, docking and the first American spacewalks, taken from mission audio and press material.
Gemini existed to solve problems: how to find another spacecraft in orbit, how to dock with it, how to work outside, how to stay up for two weeks. Everything Apollo did in 1969 was rehearsed here first.
11 recordings
Apollo, 1967–1972
From the fire on Pad 34 to the last boots in Taurus–Littrow. Nine flights to the Moon, six landings, and a rescue conducted entirely out loud.
January 27, 1967 · NASA
Programme audio and official material surrounding the loss of Grissom, White and Chaffee during a plugs-out test.
A ground test, not a flight. The spacecraft was sealed, the cabin was pure oxygen at above-atmospheric pressure, and the crew could not get the hatch open. Apollo was redesigned around what the review board found.
26 recordings
October 1968 · NASA
Air-to-ground and mission coverage from the first crewed Apollo flight.
Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham flew the redesigned command module for eleven days and broadcast from it daily. The programme was back.
21 recordings
December 1968 · NASA
Translunar audio, the Christmas Eve broadcast from lunar orbit and post-flight material.
Borman, Lovell and Anders were the first people to see the far side of the Moon and the first to see the Earth rise over it. The Christmas Eve transmission was heard by an audience estimated at a quarter of the planet.
46 recordings
March 1969 · NASA
Earth-orbit test audio: docking, extraction and a separate flight of the landing craft.
Spider and Gumdrop separated over Earth and came back together. Without that day there is no landing four months later.
27 recordings
May 1969 · NASA
Air-to-ground from the dress rehearsal that flew to within nine miles of the lunar surface.
Stafford, Young and Cernan took the lunar module down to 47,000 feet above the Sea of Tranquillity and then left it there. The tanks were deliberately short-loaded so they could not be tempted.
42 recordings
July 1969 · NASA
Air-to-ground, onboard recordings, Mission Control loops and press conferences from the first lunar landing.
The most completely recorded week in the history of exploration. Held here are the flight loops, the onboard tape, the surface transmission and the material that surrounded them.
60 recordings
November 1969 · NASA
Mission audio from the Ocean of Storms, including the walk to Surveyor 3.
Conrad and Bean set down within walking distance of an unmanned probe that had been sitting on the Moon for two and a half years, and brought pieces of it home.
30 recordings
April 1970 · NASA
Air-to-ground, Mission Control loops, press conferences and post-flight review audio.
An oxygen tank ruptured 200,000 miles out. What survives is the sound of a room full of engineers working the problem out loud, which is why it is the most-studied flight audio ever recorded.
50 recordings
February 1971 · NASA
Mission audio from the flight that completed Apollo 13's objective.
Shepard, the first American in space, came back ten years later to walk on the Moon and, at the end, to hit a golf ball across it.
35 recordings
July 1971 · NASA
Surface and flight audio from the first of the extended scientific missions.
Three days on the surface, a rover, and a crew trained hard enough in geology to argue with the scientists on the loop.
29 recordings
April 1972 · NASA
Mission audio from the only landing in the lunar highlands.
Young and Duke went to high ground expecting volcanic rock and found breccia — which rewrote a good deal of what was assumed about the Moon's crust.
29 recordings
December 1972 · NASA
Mission audio from Taurus–Littrow, including the only professional geologist to walk on the Moon.
Cernan and Schmitt spent seventy-five hours on the surface. Nobody has been back since.
36 recordings
Living up there
Skylab's three long-duration crews aboard a workshop built from a spent rocket stage, and the docking that ended the Apollo programme with a Soviet crew on the other side of the hatch.
1973–1974 · NASA
Mission audio from three long-duration crews aboard a workshop built out of a spent rocket stage.
The station arrived damaged and the first crew repaired it in orbit. The last crew stayed eighty-four days, a record that stood for two decades.
24 recordings
July 1975 · NASA / Soviet Academy of Sciences
Docking audio, joint crew transmissions and press material from the first international crewed flight.
An American and a Soviet spacecraft docked 140 miles above the Earth in the middle of the Cold War, and the crews traded meals. It was also the last flight of an Apollo spacecraft.
15 recordings
1981–2011
Thirty years of a reusable spacecraft: launch loops, mission audio and crew press conferences across one hundred and thirty-five flights.
1981–2011 · NASA
Launch and mission audio, crew press conferences and programme material from the Space Transportation System.
One hundred and thirty-five flights, five orbiters and two losses. The audio spans the whole programme, from the first launch of Columbia to the end.
20 recordings
