Apollo 17: Onboard voice recorder transcripts

This page should be moved to the Apollo Flight Journal.

By Eric Hartwell - January 19, 2006

NASA recorded the onboard dialog and the air-to-ground transmissions of the Mercury through Apollo missions. The NASA Mission Transcript Scanning Project produced PDF scans of 80 transcripts totalling nearly 45,000 pages of text covering every US human space flight from the first human Mercury mission through the last lunar landing flight of Apollo 17. These transcripts are available on a two CD-ROM set, or can be downloaded from the Johnson Space Center: Communications Transcripts: Mercury Through Apollo.

[MissionTranscriptCollection.htm#Background Image:Typist.jpg]The material in this section is my attempt to create a single timeline for the Apollo 17 mission. I have compiled the text from three sources:

• AS17 CM: Apollo 17 Command Module Onboard Voice Transcription Recorded on the Data Storage Equipment (DSE) MSC-07633, January 1973, 746 pages.
• AS17 PAO: Apollo 17 Spacecraft Commentary, 1,964 pages.
• AS17 TEC: Apollo 17 Technical Air-to-Ground Voice Transcription (GOSS NET 1) MSC-07629, December 1972, 2,461 pages.

The Onboard Voice Transcription contains transcripts from different downloads covering the same period. Where there is an overlap, the onboard transcripts and the PAO and Technical transcripts sometimes disagree on the wording, the speaker, and/or the exact time. I've chosen one transcript as the "Primary" and listed the conflicts to the right, identified by source.

We start with MSC-07633 - APOLLO 17 COMMAND MODULE ONBOARD VOICE TRANSCRIPTION (U) RECORDED ON THE DATA STORAGE EQUIPMENT (DSE):

[edit] Introduction

This document is the transcription of the Apollo 17 flight crew communications as recorded on the command module (CM) data storage equipment (DSE) and subsequently transmitted (dumped) to Manned Space Flight Network stations. Magnetic tapes containing dumped voice and onboard-recorded ground elapsed time (GET) were forwarded to the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston, Texas. Transcription of these tapes was managed by J. L. Gibbons, Test Division, Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, to whom inquiries regarding this document should be referred.

The transcript is divided into three columns -- time, speaker, and text. The time column consists of four two-digit pairs representing days, hours, minutes, and seconds (e.g., 04 22 34 14). The speaker column indicates the source of a transmission; the text column contains the verbatim transcript of the communications.

The time used by Mission Control Center (MCC) and indicated as GET in the flight plan may be updated to both the spacecraft and MCC computers but will not be updated to the telemetry downlink pulse-code-modulated bitstream or other time-recording devices. This GET updating will be performed only to correct significant changes in flight-plan time occurring as the result of delayed lift-off, midcourse corrections, or spacecraft burn-time differences (trajectory dispersions).

Should these updates occur, the Apollo elapsed time (the true mission-elapsed time) may not agree with flight-plan and MCC times. Users of this transcript are cautioned to apply the appropriate time-update deltas for the updated periods.

The Apollo 17 mission was flown December 7 to 19, 1972; lift-off occurred at 05:33:00.60 GMT (12:33:00.60 a.m., EST.) on December 7. The CM was designated America and the lunar module was called Challenger.

[edit] Index

The PDF transcript has 746 pages. Automatic OCR has been performed.

• http://ston.jsc.nasa.gov/history/default.htm
• Apollo 17: Onboard voice recordings)