When I was a kid, my dad was a test engineer for many of the great space missions. He attended at least one launch that I know of, and our basement was stuffed with NASA memorabilia. Sadly, most of that was lost to mildew from a flood.
Presented here are recordings from the great Space Race, the great exploration of our lifetime. These guys were true heros, at the apex of teams of thousands of men and women, facing the unknown with nerves of steel and carrying the dreams of the world as their payload.
Another great dustbin find.
(From the liner notes) "The successful flight of Apollo 11 has brought honor to the astronauts, to the U.S., and to all of mankind. Yet it cost the people of the United States 24 billion dollars. And it cost the country the lives of three of its finest men, Astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Edward White, who were killed in a tragic training accident. This record, then, is dedicated to all those who have worked so long and so hard to help turn man's age-old dream of setting foot on the moon into reality, and is issued in commemoration of the flight of Apollo 11."
The entire cockpit recordings of Friendship 7's 5-hour flight. Complied by Nathan Lindstrom from NASA's public domain recordings. A massive file (280mb), please download this rather than stream it from this server.
A special thank you to Nathan and his pal loquacious for finding backup copies of the files so that I could restore them to the server.
Many wrote to complain when the files went missing, these gentlemen pitched in to help fix the problem. Thanks guys!