Space and Physics
PUBLISHED
Currently, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, are on a journey that will take them over 400,000 kilometers (250,000 miles) from Earth as they travel around the Moon. The last time we had a dress rehearsal like this – Apollo 10, the final mission before humans first laid boots on the Moon – there were a couple of incidents that came to light as NASA transcripts were eventually released decades later. Thankfully, though one was grim and the other a little frightening, the crew was in no danger.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.The first well-known issue involved an escaped number two. Let's just say that the crew noticed they had an unusual "zero gravity indicator" floating around the place, and leave it at that for now.
The second took place as the crew were alone, on the far side of the Moon. Whilst they were there, and picked up by cameras on board Apollo 10, the crew heard strange whistling noises that, to the crew, sounded like generic sci-fi space music.
Lunar Module Pilot Gene Cernan was the first to reference the noise, saying, "That music even sounds outer-spacey, doesn't it? You hear that? That whistling sound?" adding, according to the official NASA transcript, "Whooooooo."
The crew wondered what it was, but continued with their scheduled tasks, seemingly unconcerned with any danger it may pose, though it certainly played on their minds and came up several times more.
The crew were not the last to hear the noise, with Michael Collins hearing it as he flew the same journey behind the Moon alone during Apollo 11.
The noise began as the lunar module separated from the main module, and ended when it landed on the Moon. This happened to be when NASA was out of contact with Collins for an hour, adding to the eeriness. Of course, Collins, Neil Armstrong, and Buzz Aldrin had been warned that it might occur after what had happened during Apollo 10.
“There is a strange noise in my headset now, an eerie woo-woo sound,” Collins wrote in his book Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys, per CNN. “Had I not been warned about it, it would have scared the hell out of me."
Fortunately, for reassuring Collins, by the time he flew around the Moon, NASA already had an explanation for the incident.
"The radio technicians (rather than the UFO fans) had a ready explanation for it," Collins wrote. "It was interference between the LM’s and Command Module’s VHF radios.”
In 2018, NASA finally released the above audio of the incident, which briefly made outer space sound sort of outer-spacey, on the far side of the Moon.
An earlier version of this article was published in May 2023.
