Real NASA astronaut recordings, in one player

Astronaut Chatter is a free player for the audio in the NASA Image and Video Library. It searches NASA's public API live, sorts the results by spaceflight era, and hides podcast episodes by default so you hear recordings rather than talk shows. Next to the player, a live panel shows where the International Space Station is right now and who is on board. Nothing is hosted or recorded here: every clip streams straight from NASA's own servers.

Where the audio comes from

Every search goes to images-api.nasa.gov, a free API that needs no key. For each clip, the player asks NASA's asset list which files exist. It picks the lightest playable version first, usually a 128 kbit/s MP3, and falls back to the original MP3, M4A or WAV if that one fails. The library mixes historic recordings, mission audio, interviews, sound effects and a large number of podcast episodes. That is why the no podcasts filter is on by default. Some entries in the library have no playable file attached; the player then says so and you can try the next one.

NASA's audio is in the public domain in the United States, because works of the US federal government cannot be copyrighted (17 U.S.C. § 105). You may reuse it in videos, podcasts, presentations and apps. NASA's media guidelines ask you not to suggest that NASA endorses your work, and not to use the NASA insignia as your own logo. This is an independent site by Jasper Bernaers; it is not affiliated with or endorsed by NASA.

The eras on the timeline

• Mercury (1958–1963): America's first astronauts, one per capsule. Alan Shepard's suborbital flight in May 1961 and John Glenn's three orbits in February 1962.
• Gemini (1961–1966): two-person crews in ten flights from 1965 to 1966, rehearsing spacewalks, rendezvous and docking for the Moon.
• Apollo (1961–1972): six Moon landings between July 1969 and December 1972, and the rescue of Apollo 13.
• Space Shuttle (1981–2011): 135 missions, including the launch and repairs of the Hubble Space Telescope and the building of the ISS.
• ISS (1998–now): the station has been occupied without a break since 2 November 2000.
• Artemis (2022–now): Artemis I flew an uncrewed Orion around the Moon in 2022. Artemis II took four astronauts around the Moon in April 2026, the first crew to travel that far since 1972.

Famous lines, exactly as spoken

Apollo 11: "The Eagle has landed"

On 20 July 1969 at 20:17 UTC Neil Armstrong reported: "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." About six and a half hours later, at 02:56 UTC on 21 July, he stepped onto the Moon and said: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." On the recording the "a" in "for a man" cannot be heard. Armstrong said he meant to say it, and NASA's transcript writes it as "[a]". Whether he said it too softly or skipped it has been argued about for more than fifty years. When a clip matches one of these moments, the player shows the line in the transcript box.

Apollo 13: "Houston, we've had a problem"

On 13 April 1970, almost 56 hours into the flight, oxygen tank 2 in the service module failed. Jack Swigert radioed "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here", and Jim Lovell repeated "Houston, we've had a problem." It was past tense, not the "we have a problem" of the 1995 film. The crew used the lunar module as a lifeboat, swung around the Moon and splashed down safely about 87 hours later, on 17 April.

Quindar tones: the beeps of Apollo

The short beeps at the start and end of many Apollo transmissions were not decoration. When the CAPCOM in Houston pressed the talk button, a 2,525 Hz tone of about a quarter of a second switched on the transmitter at a distant tracking station. A 2,475 Hz tone switched it off again. The tones were meant for the machines, but they went out on the air loop and became the sound of spaceflight. They are named after Quindar Electronics, the company that built the tone equipment.

Why old recordings sound the way they do

Mercury and Gemini voice went over HF and UHF radio to a worldwide network of tracking stations. From the Moon, Apollo voice, data and TV shared one radio signal, the Unified S-Band. Large dishes at Goldstone (California), Honeysuckle Creek (Australia) and near Madrid (Spain) received it. Every link adds hiss and crackle, and the distance to the Moon adds a delay of about 1.3 seconds each way. That is why you hear pauses before the answers. In Mission Control the flight controllers' voice loops were recorded on 30-track analog tape recorders. In 2019 researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas published thousands of hours of these Apollo tapes in digital form. The original Apollo 11 slow-scan TV tapes, on the other hand, were most likely erased and reused; NASA could not find them in a search that ended in 2009.

The ISS today: live position and crew

The station panel reads two public feeds every few seconds. Where the ISS at? gives the current position, altitude and speed. The International Space Station APIs project lists the people in space. The ISS circles Earth at roughly 400 to 420 km and about 7.66 km/s, which is one orbit in about 92 minutes, or almost 16 orbits a day. So the crew sees about 16 sunrises and sunsets every 24 hours. The station keeps time in GMT, and the crew's sleep period is roughly 21:30 to 06:00 GMT.

Radio contact runs mostly through NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS) in geostationary orbit, which keep the station in near-continuous contact with the ground. English is the working language on board, and Russian is used as well, especially with the Russian segment and the Soyuz.

Can I listen to the ISS live?

NASA TV has been replaced by the streaming service NASA+, and the old NASA TV streams are often offline. When you press Tune In, the player tries the known NASA streams one by one. If none of them answers, it says so and offers NASA+ and NASA Live, where NASA shows spacewalks, dockings and launches, and the live video from the station. Spacewalks and arrivals are the busiest moments on the radio. When the crew is asleep or working on its own, the loop can be silent for a long time.

Player features

• Favorites: press ☆ on a card or F while listening. Favorites are kept in this browser only and appear under ★ Favorites.
• Autoplay: plays the next clip on the page when one ends. It stays off until you turn it on, so playback never starts unexpectedly.
• Speed: 0.75×, 1×, 1.25×, 1.5× and 2×. Your speed, volume and autoplay setting are remembered.
• Sleep timer: stops playback after 15, 30 or 60 minutes, or at the end of the current clip.
• Share: 🔗 on a card copies ?clip=, and share this moment adds &t= with the second you are at.
• Lock screen: on phones and with media keys, title, play, pause, skip and next clip work from the system controls.
• Download: the ⬇ link opens the original NASA file, which you can save; it is public domain.