Messages

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Apollo 11 Moments of Interest / Improved Apollo 11 MOCR audio transcripts

« on: October 25, 2024, 04:31:08 pm »

I've taken the 11,000 hours of Apollo 11 MOCR audio recordings and have re-transcribed them using the latest Whisper "large-v3" model and a wrapper system called WhisperX. This has provided fewer hallucinations in the transcripts and provides much better utterance timestamps.

These new transcripts replace the existing "large-v2" transcripts and are now live on apolloinrealtime.org/11

New stats:
4,803,618 utterances
42,684,618 words
224MB of text

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Apollo 13 Moments of Interest / Re: 125:28:47 AFD needs Xerox copies of the entry checklist ASAP

« on: October 23, 2024, 05:50:19 pm »

That's great. They sure left that detail out of the Ron Howard movie

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Apollo 13 Moments of Interest / Re: Improved Apollo 13 MOCR audio transcripts

« on: October 21, 2024, 03:55:31 pm »

Is that example from Apollo 13? Just asking because I'm still in the process of retranscribing Apollo 11 and expect these kinds of errors there. 13 shouldn't have them.

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Apollo 13 Moments of Interest / Improved Apollo 13 MOCR audio transcripts

« on: October 18, 2024, 02:11:01 pm »

I've taken the 7200 hours of MOCR audio recordings and have re-transcribed them using the latest Whisper "large-v3" model and a wrapper system called WhisperX. This has provided fewer hallucinations in the transcripts and provides much better utterance timestamps.

These new transcripts replace the existing "large-v2" transcripts and are now live on apolloinrealtime.org/13

New stats:
3,936,510 utterances
37,503,659 words
199MB of text

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Apollo 13 Moments of Interest / Re: 116:58:07 Trench creates the Flight Dynamics re-entry checklist

« on: April 01, 2024, 12:47:02 pm »

This is awesome!

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General Discussion / Re: Identifying speakers/ Mission Control teams

« on: March 22, 2024, 11:04:50 am »

My apologies. I recently had to move this forum to a new host and misconfigured the attachment system. It should be working now.

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General Discussion / Re: Mobile Device Website Issue

« on: February 05, 2024, 06:27:08 pm »

My apologies for how sub-par the mobile version of AiRT is. It's entirely due to me running out of time when building the original app. There's work in progress now to redesign/build the whole web experience. This time around, mobile will be given much more consideration.

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General Discussion / Re: Other Apollo Missions

« on: December 01, 2023, 02:20:20 pm »

It's a hangup with the process, not the material. Every transfer is still pending.

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General Discussion / Re: Other Apollo Missions

« on: November 29, 2023, 03:57:24 pm »

Short answer: NASA is having difficulty getting the historical tapes from the National Archives.

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General Discussion / Re: Accurate edition of Apollo 11 (2019) movie?

« on: November 27, 2023, 04:12:45 pm »

They didn't have much of a keen eye on posterity, we (as historians) got lucky that the data they saved for other purposes could be repurposed for historical insight. The MOCR tapes were recorded for audit purposes in case an event such as an emergency occurred. The MOCR tapes were used in the Apollo 13 congressional investigation; in fact, we were only able to track down the tapes that covered the period of the onboard explosion several years after finding the main body of Apollo 13 MOCR tapes at the national archives. They were stored with the rest of the Apollo 13 investigation material. The same goes for transcripts--these were used to construct the "as flown" version of the flight plan of each mission and therefore inform the planning of subsequent missions. The list goes on.

I work at NASA on the Artemis missions now and am doing my best to ensure that flight information is stored in context--in a way that won't require a group like the Apollo in Real Time team to reconstruct the events 50 years from now. Those future generations won't have typewritten documents to work with. They'll have MS Teams meeting recordings and piles of Sharepoint data all of course in formats that are unreadable to those future generations without tremendous sleuthing.

11

General Discussion / Re: Apollo 11 Distance from Earth Mistake

« on: November 26, 2023, 01:26:59 pm »

Sorry for the delay. Thank you for this, yes it was a mistake. It has been corrected.

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General Discussion / Re: Is the moon sphere of influence included in the velocity stats?

« on: November 26, 2023, 01:23:27 pm »

Sorry for the super long delay. Somehow I missed your message.
The numbers are always Earth referenced in the dashboard. The TEI burn doesn't contain the velocity changes because they weren't being announced by the PAO--the Apollo in Real Time team didn't have any mission telemetry streams to work with as that data was all discarded after the mission.

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General Discussion / Re: Accurate edition of Apollo 11 (2019) movie?

« on: November 26, 2023, 12:15:34 pm »

Depends what you want to define as "inaccuracy". I mean, the entire film's ambient sound was designed because all of the original historical footage was silent. I suppose technically, that's "inaccurate". You could go from there to the film's use of footage that wasn't shot during the Apollo 11 mission, then continue all the way up to listing mistakes in the film (there are a few).

I can honestly say that the film contains no inaccuracies that misinform the public. This is an important line that the whole team took very seriously.

Actually, just last week Bill Barry, NASA Chief Historian (ret) just accepted the Trask Award from the Society for History in the Federal Government. In his speech he talks about the importance of not misinforming the public when making historical films. He also had some kinds words for Apollo in Real Time.
https://youtu.be/ZtCs-RV_Lek?si=5ONNWdwqrNdCQAvN&t=2243

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Apollo 13 Moments of Interest / Re: 033:56:11 Recovery team bartering. Beer vs. Pineapples

« on: November 21, 2023, 04:29:16 pm »

I found this particular gem because it's just one minute past a much more important historical artifact: confirmation that the IRIG-B time signal encoded on the MOCR tapes is lock-step with the clocks used by the human controllers and support crew. Just a minute before this barter there is an exchange between Houston Recover and Pacific Recovery where Houston clearly counts down the GMT and GET clocks so that Pacific Recovery can adjust their ship clocks to match.

In the attached annotated spectrogram, the speaker speaks the phrase "eight, nine, MARK, 50 seconds". Below each utterance are the time code markers output by the IRIG-B decoder software that we wrote for Apollo In Real Time. The "MARK" phrase lines up perfectly with the GET timestamp "33:53:50" / GMT timestamp "1970-04-14T05:06:50".

https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/?t=033:53:36&ch=33

I love this so much. For those of you unaware, @ke6jjj is the person who wrote the algorithm that we used to restore the mission control audio back to mission time.

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General Discussion / Re: Frank Borman

« on: November 09, 2023, 08:20:57 pm »

A sad day indeed. We need to get Apollo 8 done in real time.