The first of these transcripts will be made available later this year through a mass produced CD-ROM available for the cost of shipping. The first phase of this project will focus on scanning those mission transcripts beginning with Alan Shepard's first suborbital MR3 Mercury flight and ending with Apollo 17.

In the future and based on the general response to this first effort, further efforts will be made to compile similar CD/ROMs containing mission transcripts of all the Skylab flights, Apollo Soyuz Test Project and the Space Shuttle missions (those that were done).

The need for a more efficient distribution form of this historical resource has been prompted by numerous requests from researchers and the general public for print copies of the mission transcripts. Because most of these transcripts are thousands of pages in size, producing hardcopies and shipping them is both an expensive and time consuming process which damages the original documents.

By making high-quality one-time scans and packaging them in a user friendly mass produced CD/ROM, NASA would be able to make available complete sets of these documents to everyone for the cost of shipping with the added benefit of allowing users to do text searches using the scanned Adobe Acrobat PDF files or print hard copies that are close to original quality.

Beginning with Alan Shepard's first suborbital Mercury flight and proceeding to each subsequent U.S. human mission, scans of every transcript will be made from the best quality originals housed throughout NASA's historical archives.

Also to be included on the CD/ROMs will be transcripts of the Public Affairs Office (PAO) Commentary, the Air-to-Ground Technical recording, and the Onboard Voice Data Recorder.

Of course, the quantity and type of transcripts made for each flight varied for each mission. For example, the Mercury flights only had one transcript whereas the Gemini missions had several.

The Apollo missions often included Onboard Voice Data Recorder transcripts made from the Command Module and Lunar Modules in addition to the PAO Commentary and Air-to-Ground Technical.

Our goal is to place in electronic form all of these transcripts so that researchers and the public may have much more efficient access to this primary resource.

Because many of these mission transcripts are hundreds if not thousands of pages in length, the review of every page is a time consuming task for any one individual to do alone.

As such the NASA History Office is coordinating a group of volunteers, to review the scanned transcripts looking for errors in the scans, assessing scan quality, confirming missing pages, verifying page sequences and order, etc., in order to help make the most accurate and complete scans of every transcript.

It is hoped that the review process for this project can be completed in a relatively short period of time and with far greater accuracy than if anyone were to do it alone.

History at NASA contact details available there

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