 It's pretty incredible when you think about the fact that we have all of the transcripts from the Apollo missions to the moon. It's an incredible way to preserve the astronauts' character and really commemorate what the missions were actually like. But it didn't come without a fight. I'm Amy Shearer, title, and today on Adventure Space, we're talking about the astronauts sometimes salty language. Early 1960s, rocket launches weren't presented to the public in real time. The U.S. Air Force and the Army used what was called a fire in the tail protocol, which meant that only when there was literally fire pouring out the tail end of a rocket could the public affairs office say anything. And even then, it was only prepared statements. NASA sought to break away from this fire in the tail approach to journalism and bring open communications to the space agency. The first real step in this direction came in 1963 after a personal appeal from NASA's then-news director, Paul Haney, to President Kennedy's press secretary, Pierre Salinger, an appeal sanctioned by NASA's administrator, James Webb. In one brief phone call, Salinger passed on to Haney, President Kennedy's personal endorsement for open communications from the space agency. Haney's vision was for NASA to release transcripts from missions exactly as they were after the flight. It was something the astronauts pushed back against, notably Alan Shepard, who was then chief of the astronaut office. He worried that unedited transcripts would tarnish the public's impression of their astronauts, but Haney knew that nobody thought the astronauts were alter boys. Fast forward to April of 1972, the month that Apollo 16 splashed down and the mission transcript was released to the public. At least one of them was. There were as many as four transcripts created from every Apollo mission. One was the air-to-ground transcript between the crew and Houston. One was from the public affairs office, which was public updates coming from the space agency. And there was one from each spacecraft, one inside the command service module and one inside the lunar module. These conversations inside the spacecraft were things that NASA didn't really want to release publicly, more because the crew would be discussing individual instruments inside the cockpit that the space agency didn't necessarily want to be made public. That air-to-ground transcript, however, was the one that NASA did release, and knowing that it was on that loop, the astronauts did seem to self-censor, because the conversations inside the spacecraft were a little bit more free-form that you would expect from men going to the moon. However, there was the odd time that an astronaut would forget he was on the air-to-ground loop or not realize that his mic was hot. It happened to Apollo 16 commander John Young. While walking around on the moon, Commander John Young made some comments to Charlie Duke regarding the high amounts of fruit in their diet. The Apollo 16 astronauts had a lot of fruit beverages because the Apollo 15 astronauts had developed irregular heartbeats after a potassium deficiency. However, the fruit-laden diet did have some side effects. As Young said to Duke, not realizing that his mic was hot, I have the farts again. I've got them again, Charlie. I don't know what the hell gives them to me. I mean, I haven't eaten this much citrus fruit in 20 years, and I'll tell you one thing in another 12 fucking days I am never eating anymore. In the transcript that NASA released after the mission, this statement was just cleaned up a little bit. The word farts was replaced by the word gas, and the word fucking was removed entirely. However, the audio clips from these missions still exist, so we can preserve what actually happened on the moon. Because going to the moon was a human endeavor and the astronauts were human and nobody's perfect. The story of NASA's open communications is just one of the really interesting PR aspects discussed in the book Marketing the Moon. Which, if you're interested in that side of the Moon program at all, I would highly suggest reading because it is sort of fascinating. For more on this story of astronaut censorship, check out the Vintage Space article linked below in the about box. And don't forget to check out Vintage Space on Popular Science for all kinds of space history stories and minutia. And a reminder that I am still live tweeting the Apollo 12 mission. We're about four days from Splashdown, so you can still come in and relive their return to Earth in real time with a 45 year time delay. Follow me as AST Vintage Space on Twitter for those updates, as well as all kinds of space updates all the time. And don't forget to subscribe right here so you never miss another episode.