NASA successfully landed six moon missions from 1969 to 1972 — and had one legendary failure. It was a monumental era for NASA, and thanks to bonkers YouTube user lunarmodule5, now you can ride along on a space video mashup of all six heart-pounding landings at once. It’s breathtaking.
As transfixing as it is to watch the controlled plummet toward the moon’s surface, I find the crew’s radio communications to be even more fascinating. I anticipated the terse directness of a high-tension mission, and there’s some of that. But there’s also the kind of raucous whooping you’d sooner expect to hear at a flag football game, like Pete Conrad hollering “right down the middle of the road!” from Apollo 12. Or Charles Duke radioing to Apollo 11, “roger Tranquility, we copy ya on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue, we’re breathin’ again.” Just a little glimpse at the cowboy attitude that helped propel these men away from the comfy planet the rest of us will spend our entire lives glued to. [lunarmodule5 via Universe Today via PhysOrg]