‘Houston, We have a solution’: A Case Study of the Analysis of Astronaut Speech during NASA Apollo 11 for Long-Term Speaker Modeling

Speech and language processing technology has the potential of playing an important role in future deep space missions. To be able to replicate the success of speech technologies from ground to space, it is important to understand how astronaut’s speech production mechanism changes when they are in space. In this study, we investigate the variations of astronaut’s voice charac-teristic during NASA Apollo 11 mission. While the focus is constrained to analysis of the three astronauts voices who par-ticipated in the Apollo 11 mission, it is the first step towards our long term objective of automating large components of space missions with speech and language technology. The result of this study is also significant from an historical point of view as it provides a new perspective of understanding the key mo-ment of human history- landing a man on the moon, as well as employed for future advancement in speech and language tech-nology in “non-neutral”conditions