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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

Behind-the-scenes audio from Apollo 11 mission have now been made public for first time [arstechnica.com]. These consist of thousands of hours of audio communications between the astronauts, mission control, and backroom support staff [insidescience.org] recorded by NASA over the course of the entire mission. The tapes have been in storage for decades with only a small fraction previously made public. The original motivation for digging them out was simply to find a large set of audio data to help develop tools for assessing how teams work together. However, now that they are digitized they have been made available online for general use, education, research, or enjoyment.

The main air-to-ground recordings and on-board recordings from the historic mission have been publicly available online for decades. But that was just a fraction of the recorded communications for the mission. Thousands of hours of supplementary conversations ("backroom loops") between flight controllers and other support teams languished in storage at the National Archives and Records Administration building in Maryland—until now.

Thanks to a year-long project to locate, digitize, and process all that extra audio (completed in July), diehard space fans can now access a fresh treasure trove of minutiae from the Apollo 11 mission. And those records are now preserved for future generations.

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