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.
Originally published by Cosmos as Vintage NASA tapes found gathering dust in a lab
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