NASA's Apollo DSE "Black Box" Transcripts - revealing the unscripted truth about the Moon

In this examination into NASA's "black box" transcripts, we will look at just a few of the many interesting and revealing comments made by the astronauts throughout the Apollo program that were captured by the CSM's DSE system, as well as touch on some of the scripting protocols employed during the various TV broadcasts made from the CSM during the journey to and from the Moon and while in lunar orbit. Contrary to what many think, those TV broadcasts were in fact elegantly scripted affairs, designed to rigidly control the amount of data that we, the general public, would have available to analyze. Because of this, the DSE and DSEA internal crew conversation transcripts can provide us, in the astronauts own words, an unscripted and less-guarded insight into some of the incredible things they really witnessed during their journey to and from the Moon. During the Apollo lunar landing program, NASA made use of two primary flight telemetry/voice recording systems aboard their spacecraft. One of these systems was inside the Command/Service Module, and the other was mounted within the Lunar Module. These two systems were known as the DSE (aboard the CSM) and the DSEA (aboard the LM). The "Data Storage Equipment" systems essentially served as Black Box cockpit voice recorders, designed to tape some of the internal conversations between the astronauts while they were out of radio contact with Mission Control in Houston. After contact was re-established during the flight, Mission Control could then dump (downlink) the recorded data from the CSM to Earth, where it would be analyzed. Unfortunately, NASA today claims that the original DSE Black Box tapes from the Apollo missions are missing and are presumed lost. However, these DSE recordings were transcribed shortly after the contents of the tapes were originally dumped from the CSM to the Earth, and several years after the Apollo program ended, these transcripts finally were declassified and then released to the NASA archives. In coming segments, we will examine many more impressive statements made by the NASA astronauts that were captured by the various cockpit voice recording systems utilized during not only the Apollo program, but during the earlier Gemini Earth-orbital flights as well. There is much more to come! Cheers, LunaCognita All the transcript pages shown in this presentation are official source documents, the online versions of which can be accessed @ http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/missi...