So, for the past several hours, I’ve been listening here at work to that Apollo audio feed I wrote about last night. It’s something of a strange experience, to be honest… I’m very conscious of the fact that this is a recording, that I’m sitting in my cubicle in the year 2009 and that everything I’m hearing happened two months before I was even born, and yet it all seems so immediate. I find myself feeling genuine anxiety as I wait for the next exchange, wondering what’s happening up there and what the astronauts and controllers are doing right now. And then I remember that I ought to be thinking in the past tense, that there is no spacecraft currently zooming outward from the earth at 11,000 feet per second, that some of the voices on this feed belong to people who aren’t even alive anymore, and I feel a little silly. But I keep listening anyhow.

There is a lot of dead air when no one is talking, just the hum of the carrier wave (or maybe that’s tape hiss — I’m not sure) with the occasional burst of static or a soft, overlapping transmission that you can’t quite make out, something like the echoes of strange conversations you sometimes hear on the telephone. When the astronauts and ground controllers are talking, though, it’s captivating. I know enough about these missions that I can decipher many of the technical discussions, but even the stuff I don’t understand is just plain neat. This is what the future sounded like, friends. Or something… I don’t know. Maybe I should just stick with “neat.”

I’m especially enjoying the moments in which the astronauts reveal themselves to be plain old guys, and not patriotic superheroes or Titans of Science after all. They frequently respond to requests from Mission Control with a decidely non-military “okay” or “alrighty,” and even sometimes, when they’re feeling especially jaunty, “you got it.” After Neil Armstrong delivers a “weather report” (i.e., he describes all the weather patterns he can see moving across the globe), his companions chime in with smart-alecky additions of their own. I’m not sure who said what, but one comment was “I didn’t know what I was looking at, but I sure did like it,” followed by, “I didn’t have much outside my window.” The tone in which the last was delivered caused me to immediately think of Charlie Brown’s trick-or-treating lament: “I got a rock.”

Just to note a couple of related items, the Boston Globe‘s fabulous Big Picture blog has an Apollo 11-themed entry today, featuring 40 large, hi-res and utterly gorgeous photos from the mission. Check out this one and this one, in particular, for some insight into just how bloody big a Saturn V rocket really is, and how far off the ground the astronauts were while they waited to blast off.

And then there’s the big news of the morning, NASA’s release of some digitally restored video of Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon. I was somewhat confused at first over whether this video had anything to do with those lost slow-scan-format tapes I’ve discussed before, but it turns out that NASA has given up on finding those. After three years of searching, the best anyone can figure is that the tapes were probably re-used to capture satellite and shuttle telemetry. How’s that for short-sighted? On so many levels, too… not merely a huge loss to history, but just think of the ammunition that’s going to provide the conspiracy theorists and disbelievers. I’m sure those guys are already going apeshit over this little revelation.

Back here in the real world that’s not run by the Illuminati, you can look at the wiping of those tapes as a colossally boneheaded accident carried out by some doofus bureaucrat, but I think maybe it really just shows how our priorities have changed over the past four decades. In 1969, the important things to archive were the still photographs and the rock and soil samples, not the TV images. Today, though, it’s the video we value. Interesting shift, eh?

In any event, the restored video comes from broadcast-format sources, i.e., recordings of what people would’ve been seeing on their TVs, not from the higher-quality transmissions that came directly from the Eagle lunar module (which is what was on those recycled tapes). The official press release here tells about the restoration process. And here’s a montage of cleaned-up footage:

You can see before-and-after comparisons of the footage here. And now back to the audio…