Buzz Aldrin's EKG

[Daggerstab]

The Moon Landing, As You've Never Seen It Before, the Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-moon-landing-as-youve-never-seen-it-before/255745/

Wasn't there something about "patient confidentiality" about the biometric data of the astronauts? Do I understand correctly that this is in a private collection?

[BazBear]

As far as I can tell, this is all public information. This page of BIOMEDICAL RESULTS OF APOLLO (table of contents) contains a sample of A11 ECG data, and other sections cover various medical topics, including the various illnesses Apollo astronauts suffered during their missions.

[Glom]

It was declassified about 10 years ago, wasn't it?

[ka9q]

I don't think the astronauts ever had much medical confidentiality. If all you had to do to get a ride to the moon was to waive confidentiality for your medical records, wouldn't you do it?

Commander Frank Borman got sick during Apollo 8. He thought he had a stomach virus, but the consensus now is that he was the first American casualty of space adaptation syndrome. The crew was sufficiently concerned to alert the surgeons on earth, but they wanted to do it privately. Instead of using the regular air-to-ground voice circuit with the whole world listening in, they used the tape dump system, with considerable delay. Yet almost immediately after Mission Control heard the tape, the PAO described the whole affair in detail to the world. So much for medical privacy!

It's stuff like this that makes me laugh out loud whenever I hear some hoaxer invoke "compartmentalization" as the reason the Apollo "hoax" still hasn't come out.

[Noldi400]

At last we're in an area where I have some actual expertise.

I want to dig a little deeper into the data presented in that article - that ECG shows a rate somewhere around 300 beats per minute, which is generally well beyond the speed that can be generated by adrenaline and should, in fact, cause a person to lose consciousness. Cardiac ouput drops because the heart doesn't have time to refill between beats.

What it shows looks like SVT (supraventricular tachycardia) and is definitely not a stress reaction but a heart problem. The author's obvious lack of knowledge about the LM and landing precedures (stranded on the moon?!) is not very reassuring about the authenticity of the ECG.

EDIT:
Well, hell. Never mind. After I got the image cleaned up a little bit, I found that they used paper with a scale I'm not used to, That rate's about 150, right about what you would expect. 

[ka9q]

The Apollo mission reports show a steady fascination with astronaut heart rates; they're plotted for the lunar landings, ascents and EVAs. I also seem to recall hearing their heart rates cited in real time by the Public Affairs Officer, though I'd have to check that.

I think these guys practically invited this kind of scrutiny by their studied appearance of calm under stress. Seeing Neil Armstrong's heart rate go to 150 during the landing somehow made him seem a lot more human.