From Earth to Moon: The Longest Distance Phone Call in History

"Neil and Buzz, I am talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room...This certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made from the White House.“

Those words marked the longest-distance telephone call ever made.

With millions of people throughout the world listening by way of television and radio, President Nixon talked for two minutes to astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin on the moon’s Tranquility Base.

Connections at both ends were clear as the President, speaking from a standard green phone, conveyed mankind's congratulations on the lunar feat.

One and a half seconds later, man's first call to the moon reached the headphone sets of the astronauts.

The call traveled an estimated 290,000 miles one way --almost 240,000 of that eaten up by the distance from the planet to the moon, the remainder by the following links:

The call went from the White House switchboard to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland some 15 miles away, where the call was switched on Bell System equipment to a Long Lines circuit fed into the Manned Space Flight Center in Houston. From there, it went by Long Lines circuit to a communications earth satellite over the Pacific. The call was then directed to an Apollo tracking station at Honeysuckle, Australia, and sped on its way to the moon.

The next day, President Nixon said, smiling: "I just hope they don‘t charge me a toll on that call."

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