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NASA Lovell.jpg

Original Audio of Apollo 13 Incident, in Real Time

By Alexander Joenks | Miscellaneous | January 6, 2014 |

By Alexander Joenks | Miscellaneous | January 6, 2014 |


I like to give SyFy a lot of trouble, mostly for their inability to use vowels correctly, failure to broadcast almost any real science fiction, and their inexplicable attachment to Ghosthunters and professional wrestling, but one thing I’ve always liked about their website is the willingness to spend pixels on items of real historical import touching on space and science. That’s all really apropos of nothing to do with the news here, just a tip of the hat on this news, since tomorrow I’ll probably be mocking them again.

In any case, this lovely video today was created by a YouTube user (not our own lovely Harry Hanrahan, but you can’t have everything), stitching together a couple of different audio tracks from different sources, and some videos that serve mostly just to give the listener something to look at. It’s the original archived audio from the Apollo 13 incident, about an hour in length, starting a couple of minutes before the explosion and running through the initial troubleshooting and figuring out of what to do. And to my mind at least, it’s more gripping than the eventual movie (which was no slouch itself).

The audio tracks (put onto left and right of the stereo, respectively to give an intuition who’s talking) are what was on the ground crew audio and what Apollo 13 itself was sending back to Houston, which gives a round and real-time picture of the entire incident.

I can’t vouch for the validity though, I mean none of these guys sound anything like Tom Hanks or Ed Harris.

Things like this? This is why the Internet is different. Not stored in archives where no one but researchers will ever see it, instead our history is restored in new ways and laid out for anyone to see. All of our history becomes oral history, always but a question away, always being reconsidered and reevaluated instead of being enshrined in tomes and monuments. It’s a gorgeous thing.

(source: Blastr)