That was really interesting read.
Some of the stuff sounds like lifted from the SF book or a movie… so my question(s) :
-What is the source of these transcripts?
-Are they in any way verifiable as actual conversations from the Lunar missions ?
Regardless, it was a fascinating read (as I mentioned already) so thanks for posting.
P.S. - This topic of yours DavidRavenMoon deserves the whole thread of it’s own.
I don't have any definitive answers... but I believe they are supposed to have been from ham radio operators who were able to listen to the conversations, and were following the mission. I don't know if there are recordings of them, but I'd imagine they must exist somewhere (NASA perhaps?)
Yeah, after I posted that (and I didn't mean to post the entire thing, but they were all pretty interesting), I thought it would have made a good thread.
I followed
all the space missions, and was 11 when they landed on the moon the first time. I would actually stay up late and watch the transmissions as they bounced around up there.
Here's a thing I remember very clearly. The first time they used a color camera, it had only been in operation for a short time when they damaged it by accidentally pointing it at the sun. That's the story anyway.
What I remember was at some point they were panning around and showed what's commonly referred to as "moon domes", which are these low smooth hills, that look like a dome. I didn't know that at the time, but I remember they commented on them, and then mission control said "burn the camera". Then they swung it around and past the sun and shut it off! Even the news commentators at the time thought it was odd, and asked what "burn the camera" meant.
So a year or so later later I was at my friend Fred's* house, and his uncle worked for Bendix, and they were doing contract work for NASA. He used to bring by these newsletters called NASA Facts. I remember we had one and it said "Top Secret" on it, and talked about the "moon domes". Apparently they would be there when the astronauts went to sleep, and when they woke the next morning, they had moved!
So it seems they didn't want these things televised.
* dB, do you know Fred Ramondi? He works for Digital Domain. I figured you might know him since you work in the same field. That's my old childhood friend. We had a really weird thing happen once when we were in his basement, where we used to hang out. There was only one way in or out, which was behind us. We looked down towards the back of the basement and saw this rabbit sized thing... it was black and white, very shaggy fur, and shaped like a guinea pig, but much larger. We couldn't see a head, it was just pill shaped. It walked from the right wall to the left at a moderate pace, and we didn't see where it went. We freaked out and ran up the stares and locked the door!
