If you’ve ever wanted to listen to the raw, unedited sound of the Space Shuttle taking off from Kennedy Space Center, you’re in luck:
(NASA)
NASA has just launched a page on the audio file-sharing site SoundCloud, and it's filled with legitimately cool recordings from all eras of space history.
Here, for instance, is the simple, rhythmic beeping of Sputnik — the very first artificial object ever put into Earth’s orbit, launched by the USSR in 1957 to kick off the space race:
Here’s JFK, in 1962, emphatically declaring the goal of putting a person on the moon within 10 years:
This is astronaut Jack Swigert famously telling mission control in Houston that an oxygen tank had blown up aboard Apollo 13:
This is what the Stardust probe heard as it flew with 112 miles of the comet Tempel 1 in 2011:
This is Voyager 1 — the tiny probe, launched in 1977, that recently became the first human-made object to enter interstellar space — recoding the eerie, spare sounds of the ionized gas it’s encountering 12 billion miles away:
And here is the legend of all space quotes — Neil Armstrong reporting that he’d taken “one small step” onto the moon:
Check out the full NASA SoundCloud page for dozens of other neat recordings.
