By Neil Austin – 29th April 2012
At a recent family reunion I was indulging in some nostalgic chit-chat about our childhood musical memories. My Sister was a big Osmonds fan. She mentioned in passing, ‘…and there was a tape of the Osmonds taken to the moon on Apollo 11’. My "BS filters" immediately reached 11. I hadn’t actually come across this tale before and it led me to do a little surfing…Information regarding this is scarce but nevertheless interesting to read….
From ‘Salon magazine’…
A tape of the Osmonds and Andy Williams doing songs from "Hair" is among the artifacts left on the moon by Neil Armstrong in 1969. Think of it as Earth’s first line of defense.
In a Time magazine interview with Donny Osmond…
Q: Neil Armstrong left a tape with one of your songs on the moon. Did he just not want it anymore?
A: Yeah. He had an eight-track, and they didn’t make them anymore.
Read more: www.time.com/time/ma…
And Donny again…
‘My fantasy is: To be the first singer on the moon. When Neil Armstrong went up, he took a tape that had my voice on it and left it there. So, sitting on the moon is my voice.’
And from Jay Osmond’s autobiography ‘Stages’…
‘One of our record albums was taken to the moon by Neil Armstrong, and when they played the song Aquarius on the moon, it was the rendition with the Osmond Brothers singing back-up for Andy Williams’
The University of New Mexico gives a list of all of the items allegedly left on the lunar surface by the Apollo 11 astronauts. Guess what?.. The Osmonds tape isn’t listed.
Maybe it got wedged or mangled in the Eagles’ tape player? It gets quite warm on the lunar surface. Hotter still inside the lunar module without the air-con on…
At the lunar equator, mean surface temperatures reach almost 400K (260.6 ºF) at noon and then drop to below 100K (-279.4 ºF) during the night.
But audio tape is quite resilient…isn’t it?
As is the case with any collection, proper storage is extremely important. The general environment, including temperature and relative humidity is key. The proper levels vary depending on how long the materials need to be stored. The Library of Congress
[3] recommends that any tapes needing preservation for a minimum of 10 years should be stored between 65-70 degrees Fahrenheit at 45-50% relative humidity (RH). Large fluctuations in either of these factors should be avoided at all costs. If the tapes need permanent preservation, they should be stored at 46-50 degrees Fahrenheit at 20-30% relative humidity. In the case of magnetic tapes, contrary to traditional preservation storage rules for books and photographic film, colder is certainly not better. If the collections are stored below 46 degrees F, the tape lubricant can separate from the base, ruining the recording. The most important thing is to keep conditions consistent once desirable conditions are achieved.
Oh dear! That tape isn’t going to sound too good anymore is it?! Its a good job that the photographic film used by the astronauts was more stable!! It was… wasn’t it? And in any case, the people at Clavius reckon that it can’t get hot on the moon because there’s no atmosphere to act as a transfer medium…
So, by the same token, nothing in space gets hot, right?…
Without thermal controls, the temperature of the orbiting Space Station’s Sun-facing side would soar to 250 degrees F (121 C), while thermometers on the dark side would plunge to minus 250 degrees F (-157 C).
Oh, O.K… And then there’s the gamma and x-rays on the moonward side of the Van Allen Belts…
"The energy spectrum of the lunar gamma radiation are consistent with a model of gamma ray production by cosmic ray interactions with the lunar surface, and the flux varies as expected with the solar cycle. Thus, in high-energy gamma rays, the Moon is brighter than the quiet Sun."
Those key words of "Moon is brighter than the quiet Sun" means the surface environment of our physically dark moon is in fact capable of being far worse off in gamma dosage than walking on our sun. Basically, there’s considerably greater mass per cm3 or per m3 that’s available to interact with, as in more so than whatever those Van Allen belts can possibly represent. Instead of our moon producing various harmless secondary/recoil dosage of even the likes of soft-X-rays, as being the case of what the relative micro density of those Van Allen belts represent, it’s instead generating gamma and unavoidably the secondary/recoil worth of hard-X-rays that get produced by way of the fundamental interaction of cosmic and solar energy as such unavoidably reacts with the rather considerable and obviously naked density of the lunar surface, that’s basically a composite of sufficiently heavy elements that represents itself as the cosmic and solar anti-cathode motherload of producing lethal radiation. At minimums, and especially by day, we’re looking at several hundred rads per hour (with unavoidable peaks of thousands of rads per hour), that which any damn fool of human DNA that’s taking a moonsuit walk upon that nasty surface will have to deal with such consequences, and/or soon thereafter must die rather horrifically from the inside out.
But of course a Hasselblad would behave differently I suppose. Or an Osmonds tape. In that case why don’t NASA design their spacecraft in conjunction with Hasselblad and fly to the moon again? Oh dear. I’m confused.
Another thought just occurred to me. In the awful film Apollo 13, they show the spacecraft getting increasingly cold on their supposed return journey from the moon. Assuming that the astronauts could even have made it this far without being cooked by the radiation, shouldn’t the interior of the craft be hot?
A Fragile Lifeboat
The Apollo 13 countdown proceeded without a major incident, and liftoff came at 2:13 p.m. on 11 April. When the S-II stage’s center engine shut down 132 seconds early, an extra 34-second burn from each of the four outboard engines made up most of the difference. An additional nine-second burn of the S-IVB stage brought the vehicle to within 0.4 meters/second of the planned velocity and left sufficient fuel to boost the space vehicle out of the earth’s gravitational field.32 Aside from the S-II problem, the first two days of the mission went according to plan. The crew started the third day in space by inspecting the lunar module. Lovell and Haise read a supercritical helium pressure well under the danger line. Fifty-five hours into the mission the crew began a television transmission from the command module, Odyssey. Fred Haise demonstrated movement through the tunnel into the lunar module, Aquarius, and remarked: "There’s a little bit of an orientation change that, even though I’d been through it once, in the water tank, is still pretty unusual. I find myself now standing with my head on the floor, when I get down into the LM." For the next half hour the crew described their temporary quarters in a space version of "Person to Person." The television interview ended on a light note as Lovell showed off a floating tape recorder. Musical selections included "Aquarius" from "Hair" and the theme from "2001, A Space Odyssey."33
For more information on "Apollo Lunacy" please see this page.
