posted 07-15-2009 03:16 PM               

Apollo 11 Conversations Earth Didn't Hear Now Online at NASA.Gov

You're in a spacecraft, on a mission to land on the moon for the first time in history, and the microphone to Earth is off. What do you say?

Now you can listen in on a NASA Web site and find out.

As Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins flew on Apollo 11 to a lunar landing in July 1969, the world heard communications between the crew and Mission Control live as they happened. But Earth did not hear the private conversations between Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, although they were recorded aboard the Command Module Columbia and Lunar Module Eagle.

Those conversations now are available on the Internet. All the Apollo spacecraft had 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. Only recently were the actual onboard audio recordings from Apollo 11 digitized and made available on the Web.

Listen to the recordings and view the transcript.

For more information about the history of onboard recorders on the Apollo spacecraft and full transcripts of all mission recordings, see Mission Transcripts: Apollo 11.