Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

You can still hear the voices of the Apollo controllers, recorded for posterity on the tapes kept at Houston and in the National Archives. You can hear the voices from the back rooms and the fainter voices of the astronauts themselves. What you cannot hear are the background noises of flight control—the microphones on the controllers’ headsets were too highly directional to pick up extraneous sounds. Thus, at the point after the first lunar landing on Apollo 11 when Kranz had to call for quiet in the MOCR, the listener must imagine the hubbub for himself. On the first night of Apollo 13’s troubles, when Lunney had to call for quiet, the tapes reveal nothing of the commotion that was distracting him. But three minutes and fifty-three seconds after Jack Swigert’s “Okay, Joe,” the screen at the right front of the MOCR lit up with a television image of Odyssey, its main parachutes safely deployed. That moment, you can still hear. No microphone could have filtered out that pandemonium.