It took seven years to put a man on the moon.
But it would have taken 172 years to digitize the audio recordings of all of the manned Apollo missions without help from the University of Texas at Dallas.
July 20 marks 50 years since Neil Armstrong became forever famous for being the first man to walk across the moon’s surface. Back on Earth, the University of Texas at Dallas is celebrating its role in supporting NASA and America’s spacefaring efforts.
Teams at UTD created equipment that analyzed the moon’s atmosphere so that NASA would know what to expect when astronauts got there, and they also developed gear that allowed three manned Apollo missions and the Gemini 8 mission recordings to be digitized in five years.
“Being able to hear Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin speak was a big eye-opening moment,” said John Hansen, an associate dean of research at the University of Texas at Dallas. “‘The Eagle has landed’ and ‘One small step for man,’ those are big words.”
Taking off
The moon landing has captivated audiences since the day it was broadcast live around the world, and the Apollo 11 mission symbolizes an advancement that has created a ripple effect in the science world that is still felt decades later.
In 2012, Hansen, an electrical engineering professor who does speech research, had one question: How do people work together in teams to solve problems?
Few problems are bigger than getting a man to the moon. Hansen and a team of research students decided to answer his question by processing and analyzing the recordings of Apollo 11.
While the question seemed simple enough, Hansen and his students arrived at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and were met with hundreds of analog tapes that contained the mission recordings.
“We were not expecting that they hadn’t digitalized any of it,” Hansen said.
So, they set out to digitize the tapes themselves. The space center pointed the team to a machine called the soundscriber to do so, but the antiquated technology proved ineffectual.
The team had 19,000 hours of analog tape, which, using NASA’s 1960 soundscriber, would have taken 172 years working 24/7. But instead of calling it quits, Hansen and his students rewired and modernized the machine and began the process of digitization.
What NASA’s soundscriber would have taken 172 years to accomplish, Hansen’s rebuild did in only five. Hansen said that as the rebuilt soundscriber began digitizing the Apollo 11 tapes, the emotional impact of the whole endeavor became apparent.
“It was going to be a preservation effort,” Hansen said. “The heroes behind the heroes. The people who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo missions successful.”
Although the 10,000 hours of Apollo 11 recordings seemed daunting enough, the team additionally transcribed 7,000 hours of the Apollo 13 mission, and select tapes from the Apollo 1 and Gemini 8 missions. Armstrong was part of the crew of Gemini 8, one in a series of missions that were a precursor to Apollo.
Hansen said the digitization project proved a testament to his belief that “open-ended problems are not something to shy away from.”
Looking back
But UT-Dallas’ relationship with NASA didn’t start with Hansen.
Before UT-Dallas was a university, it was the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies, a research institution funded by the founders of Texas Instruments. In 1962, Francis “Frank” Johnson joined the research center’s space and atmospheric sciences department and was asked by NASA to design instruments that could detect the lunar atmosphere in preparation for the first manned moon landing.
Rod Heelis, who joined Johnson’s team of engineers and scientists in 1973, said that Johnson’s work on detecting the lunar atmosphere proved pivotal when it came to putting men on the moon.
“One of the big questions that we wanted to answer... was the notion of putting humans and maybe habitats on the moon,” Heelis said. “Is there an atmosphere on the moon? And what does it look like, what does it consist of?”
Thanks to the “fundamental guidance” offered by Johnson, the research center’s instruments sent into space revealed the “tenuous” nature of the lunar atmosphere to NASA scientists well before men went to the moon in 1969.
Less than two months after Apollo 11, the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies evolved into UT-Dallas. Johnson became president of the center during the period in which it attained university status.
He and his team of scientists continued to participate in NASA endeavors, sending equipment into space on the Apollo 12 through 17 missions, as well as the Pioneer and Phoenix missions.
Heelis, who is the director of the William B. Hanson Center for Space Sciences, said none of the men working alongside NASA in the 1960s and '70s could have imagined how rapidly space exploration and its associated technology would advance.
“I think it's really gratifying to be involved in an activity that has come such a long way in such a short time,” he said.
Eagle landed
Hansen’s team didn’t stop after they digitized the audio tapes. They then wrote an algorithm and created software that could help answer the original question about team problem-solving. The software took the digitized audio and began transcribing it, while also identifying who was speaking, in a process known as diarization.
It was then that the full extent of the number of people who contributed to the Apollo 11 mission became clear.
As the diarization of the tapes came to a close, Hansen's team decided to make their work public. They launched a website called Explore Apollo, which takes listeners through every step of the Apollo 11 mission.
They also created a database that allows anyone to download 100 hours of audio at any given time.
As the publicized tapes gained traction, Hansen began receiving requests from family and friends of mission control members asking for specific audio tapes of their loved ones speaking. Hansen obliged, and began building on his prior idea of highlighting the "heroes behind the heroes."
“Anyone that can identify a person that they know worked there, we can find all of their appearances in audio and place it on the website,” Hansen said.
He said the latest project will give people a “permanent spot where people can listen to that person's contribution” to the mission.
Hansen said his biggest takeaway from the project is his hope that it will encourage people to “think more about new directions.”
“You don’t have to take steps on the moon to have an impact on society,” he said.
