Wednesday, September 30, 2009

There is a vast lacuna in the Apollo 11 Transcipts.

Woefully missing from the Onboard Voice Transcription-Command Module transcription is the on board conversation that takes place before a curious question is posed to Houston, which we find in the Technical Air-to-Ground Voice transcription, on pg. 190 (of pdf) at time stamp (day/hour/minute/second) 02 12 45 46:

"Do you have any idea where the S-IVB is with respect to us?"

Houston answers that the S-IVB (final stage of rocket) is 6000 miles away. But outside the capsule the astronauts were seeing something much closer, as Buzz Aldrin describes in Apollo 11- The Untold Story (beginning at around 4:00).

Three days of transcripts of the onboard conversations are missing; these were apparently not included in the original confidential document, as the page numbering indicates: page 51 ends with 00 03 29 21 and page 52 begins with 03 03 39 38.