INST 154
Apollo at 50
Spring 2020
E3: Apollo 11 Team Project
INST 154
Apollo at 50
Spring 2020
E3: Apollo 11 Team Project
We're going to be listening to some tapes that were made in Houston during the Apollo 11 mission, so you also need to know about how those were made. There were two historical tape recorders running continuously, and another pair that could pick up the task when the tapes were being changed on the first pair. The tapes typically ran for 12 hours before they needed to be changed, so during the 8-day Apollo 11 mission there a total of 32 tapes were recorded (2 recorders running for 8 days, with 2 tapes per recorder per day). Each tape could record 30 channels of audio, one of which was for time case. There are 48 total channels of audio recorded for the entire 195.3 hours of the mission. That's more than 11,000 hours of audio. If you spent 40 hours a week listening to it one channel at a time, it would take you more than four years. Clearly we need a better way to make sense of what happened.
Our "better way" will be to assign each team of three students one event during the mission and write about what was happening in the Mission Control Center during that time. Each team will be assigned a one hour period around some mission event. We'll focus on the following events:
The Apollo 11 mission control audio is available at https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/. That system has two modes. Just select either button (T-1M or NOW) to start it, and then click on the timeline at the top to get to your start time. The system will then play stereo audio, with the flight director loop in one channel and (when available) the onboard audio in the other channel. Note that the onboard recorder was only running during specific mission phases (e.g., when the spacecraft was behind the Moon), so there are lots of times during the mission when no onboard audio was being recorded. To hear any of the other channels, just click on one of the buttons down the middle. To get back from listening to a single channel, click on the circled X in the upper right.
Of course you can't reasonably listen to all 48 channels for an entire hour each. So you should start by getting a sense for what actually happened during your hour (e.g., by listening to the flight director loop and the onboard audio (if available) for the entire audio and by reading either the Apollo 11 Flight Journal or the Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal (one of which will cover the times you are working on). Then you should poke around and listen to everyone of the 48 channels for at least a few minutes to get a sense for which ones have novel content and which ones are simply listening in on the CAPCOM's communication with the spoacecraft without ever saying anything. Once you have done that you shoudl be in a good position to pick a story about something that happened in Mission Control to write about, and then you can listen to whatever channels you need to to write about that story.
You can, and should, also go hunt up other sources that can provide information about that (for example, perhaps one of the flight controllers mentioned it in an oral history -- see the JSC Oral History Project for the full set of Apollo oral histories from the Manned Spacecraft Center (which is now the Johnson Space Center) and a document from the 20th Anniversary Flight Operations Reunion for a complete list of the Apollo 11 flight controllers. Or perhaps the Apollo 11 Mission Report or the Apollo 11 Technical Crew Debriefing makes mention of it. That's just a smattering of the many primary sources you can find if you look for them.
When you are done, you should be the world's experts on the story that you are telling. The goal here is not to find someone else's story, but rather to craft and tell your own story, building on the materials that you can find in primary sources, and building especially on what flight controllers actually said to each other in mission control.
Your report can be a 3-5 page Word document (single spaced, standard margins, 12-point font, not including references) or a Web site with a similar amount of content (1,500-2,500 words). A Web site would be a better choice if you want to include some of the actual audio (which is available from the Inetrnet Archive), but that's not required. You should write in a way that would make it possible to make your report public (although whether to actually make it public will be up to you), and it would be great if you included some relevant graphics and an attractive layout.
Your goal should be to explain what happened in terms that will be understandable to a general reader (NOT just to someone who has taken this course). You can and should refer to secondary sources to get a sense for what might be worth looking for, but your report should be written based principally on primary sources (MCC audio, audio recorded aboard the spacecraft, oral history interviews, documents created by NASA at the time, etc.). You should include background information about how the MCC is organized, who the people are, what roles they had, and whatever readers will need to know about the spacecraft and the mission to understand what happened. There are many ways in which you might present the interesting thing you that you choose to focus on. For example, you might organize your story chronologically, or for a more complex story you might organize it thematically. You might tell a mystery story or an adventure story, or you might use your story to illustrate some broader point such as human fallibility or the nature of real-time hich-stakes decision making. However you do it, you should make it interesting!
All partners will receive the same grade for this assignment, so you will want to work together. I strongly urge you to resist the temptation to divide up the work in ways that have some team members being involved in only some activities. Everyone should listen to audio, and everyone shoudl contribute to the writing. You'll learn more if you work together and each do a bit of each part of the job. That's not to say that the better writer shouldn't be the one to take the final pass and smooth up the result, for exmaple, but if you do that the other partner should then read the final version to offer ideas for further improvement (and to learn some writing techniques!).
As with all asignments in this course, you must use quotes when quoting others (including the people in mission control and onboard the spacecraft), you must cite your sources when quoting or paraphrasing material written by others, and you must scrpulously avoid plagiarizing the work of others. If you write a paper, you should use properly formatted in-text citations and include a properly formatted bibliography. It does not matter which style you use (APA, Chicago, MLA, etc.) but you must use a generally recognized format. If your team creates a website, it should incorporate hyperlinks and in-text references for sources. For example, you might end a sentence with a clause, "according to NASA's Apollo 11 Mission Overview" and hyperlink the text directed to the following URL: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo11.html, to identify the source of information for that sentence. If you have any questions about citation formatting, please ask one of the TAs or the professor.
We have asked for two progress reports. These can be short, but we want to know what your team has accomplished. This is a complex project, so its important to get started early. At the first project report, you should have met as a team and divided up the work. By the time of your second progress report, you should be done with your research and starting on your writing.
To turn in your assignment, upload to ELMS either your Word file or both a URL for your Web site (hosted wherever you like) and all of the files necessary to recreate that Web site (e.g., the HTML along with any images and audio that you use). The following rubric will be used to grade your assignment:
If you have an early version that you would like our comments on, just send both the Professor and your TA an email with the URL for your draft Word file or Web site. We'll try to get back to you with comments within 48 hours (so please do this more than 48 hours before it's due!).