Science and Exploration

No, Apollo Astronauts Did Not Hear Strange Music in Space

By Keith Cowing
February 22, 2016
Filed under ,
No, Apollo Astronauts Did Not Hear Strange Music in Space
Apollo Command Module
NASA

Recent news stories claim that Apollo astronauts reported hearing strange music during their mission. NASA has debunked this claim with a statement issued today.
“While listed as ‘confidential’ in 1969 at the height of the Space Race, Apollo 10 mission transcripts and audio have been publicly available since 1973. Since the Internet did not exist in the Apollo era, NASA has only recently provided digital files for some of those earlier missions. The Apollo 10 audio clips were uploaded in 2012, but the mission’s audio recordings have been available at the National Archives since the early 1970s. As for the likely source of the sounds questioned in the television program, Apollo 10 Lunar Module Pilot Gene Cernan told NASA on Monday, ‘I don’t remember that incident exciting me enough to take it seriously. It was probably just radio interference. Had we thought it was something other than that we would have briefed everyone after the flight. We never gave it another thought.'”

Transcript: http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission_trans/AS10_LM.PDF
Audio: http://history.nasa.gov/ap10fj/audio/a10o-1021010.mp3 and https://archive.org/details/Apollo10

Cernan told NASA PAO staff that the only music the crew had were tapes they played on a cassette recorder they took with them on the flight.

SpaceRef co-founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.