October 31, 2016
Cosmos Editorial
A box of NASA audio tapes, gathering dust in a lab for decades, has been found and digitised by NASA historians.
Among them is a radio transmission from 12 August 1960 of then-President Eisenhower between the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and Bell Laboratories on the east coast via the “echo balloon” – a mammoth silver balloon intended to be a communications satellite.
There’s also a conversation between the Mariner mission program manager Jack James and astronaut John Glenn from 29 January 1963, also via satellite (albeit not a balloon).
Download the digitised files here.
