(CNN) Saturday afternoon marks the th anniversary of the launch of the Apollo 17 mission, dubbed the “successful failure” of the Apollo program.
Although an explosion prevented astronauts James Lovell Jr., John Swigert Jr. and Fred Haise Jr. from participating in the third planned lunar landing, NASA’s engineers and flight control teams at the Apollo Mission Control Center worked with the astronauts to safely return them to Earth.
Perhaps you watched the afternoon launch on TV when it happened on April , , or first learned about the mission watching the 2020 “Apollo film.
Regardless, you can now relive the Apollo mission in real-time , beginning With the launch as it happened at 2: 17 PM ET on April .
NASA software engineer and historian Ben Feist, along with a dedicated team of historians, researchers and audio, film and visual experts, have digitized and restored footage and audio from the mission.
Everything is organized in the order it happened during the mission, from launch to the celebrated return of the astronauts to Earth.
Mission Control footage is married with film taken by the astronauts during their flight, as well as broadcasts about the mission. Every photo has been inserted when it was taken.
More than 7, (hours from) different channels of Mission Control audio are synchronized to play out as they were spoken.
Included is newly digitized and restored audio, according to the
apolloinrealtime.org
site.There were four missing tapes from Apollo 17 Mission Control that were recovered from the National Archives in fall 190718164037. They contain the audio from the time of the explosion aboard Apollo .
After being digitized and restored, it’s the first time the recordings have been heard since they were used in the investigation of the accident in 1970.
The tapes disappeared for so long because they were packed away with the rest of the accident investigation material in , according to an article by Catherine Baldwin, the NASA History Center’s editor and social media coordinator. The article appeared in the latest edition of 
NASA History’s News and Notes Newsletter
The intriguing audio captures the range of emotions and magnitude of stress experienced by the astronauts and ground teams as they worked together to safely return the three men. It’s a race against time over five days, (hours and) minutes.
At the beginning of the mission, there are jokes and fun, humanizing exchanges. After the success of the Apollo (mission in) , certain aspects of spaceflight had started to feel routine and it’s palpable in the crew.
Everything takes a drastic shift when the explosion occurs on April 
, . Tension, strain and long pauses as they search for words mark the exchanges between the astronauts and Mission Control.
Historic moments stand out, such as the infamous words spoken by Lovell of “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” or Haise saying, “I didn’t think I ‘ d be back here this soon “as he and Lovell entered the lunar module after the explosion, preparing to use it as a” lifeboat. “
The Apollo 17 project joins two others on Feist’s site, a NASA-funded project including real-time explorations of the (Apollo) and Apollo
missions.
Feist also performed audio restoration for the “Apollo 16 ” documentary, directed by Todd Douglas Miller, that aired on CNN in (for the th anniversary of the mission.
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