(Inside Science) — On July 20, 1969, just before 11 p.m. Eastern time, Neil Armstrong planted the first human footprints on another world. It was a defining moment in a journey that had transfixed the planet.
A few days earlier, Armstrong and his fellow astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins had blasted skyward atop a 6.2 million-pound rocket, embarking on an epic eight-day trip to the moon and back that included a brief stay in the moon’s Sea of Tranquility and ended with a splash into the Pacific Ocean.
During the entire tense mission, NASA recorded thousands of hours of audio communications between the astronauts, mission control and backroom support staff.
For decades, most of these tapes sat in storage. Only a fraction of the audio — like Armstrong’s famous first words from the moon — were ever released to the public. But now a years-long project to digitize and process the audio from the tapes has given this historic record new life.
The original impetus for the project was simply to find a large set of audio data to help develop tools for assessing how teams work together.
