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"The Eagle Has Landed: The Flight of Apollo 11" is the title of an 18 minute NASA public relations film from 1969, available through the National Archives Catalog. One section shows the view from the Eagle approaching the landing, accompanied by what appears to be genuine voice transmissions. However the timescale is apparently highly compressed - here's an altitude loss of 16,800 feet in 25 seconds (transcript taken from here and agrees with my listening)

(video offset time 09:56)

Ed Aldrin: Altitude now 21,000 feet. Still looking very good. Velocity down now to 1200 feet per second.

CAPCOM: You’re looking great to us Eagle.

Neil Armstrong: Give us a reading on the 1202 program alarm.

CAPCOM: Roger we got – we’re a Go on that alarm.

Ed Aldrin: Good radar data. We’re now in the approach phase. Everything looking good. Altitude 4,200...

(video offset time 10:22)

It's not surprising that the landing is truncated to meet the needs of a short educational film, but some of the text such as "we're now in the approach phase" doesn't appear in the Apollo 11 transcripts I've found elsewhere, such as http://apollo11.spacelog.org/page/04:04:35:26/.

What's the provenance of this film - e.g. did NASA have the astronauts record additional dialog to "make a long story short", or use recordings from training sessions, etc?

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1 Answer 1

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The lines:

Altitude now 21 thousand feet. Still looking very good. Velocity down now to 12 hundred feet per second.

and

We're now in the approach phase of it, looking good. Altitude 52 hundred feet

were spoken, verbatim, during the Apollo 11 landing, but not by Aldrin; according to the PAO Mission Commentary transcript both were spoken by the NASA Public Affairs Office commentator.

Interpolating from the Apollo Flight Journal transcript, which doesn't include PAO, these calls must have been at about mission time 102:40 and 102:42.

Combining the two sources, we get something like:

102:39:48 Aldrin: AGS and PGNS look real close.

102:39:50 Armstrong (onboard): Okay. (Pause) (Garbled) No flags. RCS is good. DPS is good. Pressure...Okay. [Cabin recording, not air-to-ground, so not in PAO transcript]

[PAO "Altitude now 21 thousand feet. Still looking very good. Velocity down now to 12 hundred feet per second."]

102:40:08 Duke: At 7 minutes, you're looking great to us, Eagle.

and

102:41:51 Duke: Eagle, you're looking great. Coming up 9 minutes. (Pause)

[PAO "We're now in the approach phase of it, looking good. Altitude 52 hundred feet"]

102:42:05 Armstrong: Manual attitude control is good.

So that's a 16800 foot drop in roughly 120 seconds; the 1200 fps figure in the first call is mostly horizontal velocity.

Armstrong's "give us a reading on the 1202" and Capcom's response are out of sequence in your transcript, coming at 102:38:42-102:38:53.

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