Can you please eli5 how Nixon was able to speak to the astronauts on the moon from a landline in the oval office 60 years ago?
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The land line was connected to the Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network, a collection of 15 different locations across the world each with a 30-foot-diameter radio dish pointing at the spacecraft. In addition there were three locations with 85-foot-diameter antennas when the Command Module and Lunar Excursion Module were far from Earth. They communicated using radio waves.
Pretty much the same way Houston was able to hear what the astronauts were saying. We can transmit and receive radio waves from a very long distance.
If you have the right gear and some huge satellite dish you can send signals to the Moon.
Therefore, if you can plug a phone to “something” that converts the signal into a signal that can be sent to the Moon with a satellite dish and you can do the same when receiving signals, you’re good to go. That’s basically what happened.
Mission control had audio, video, and telemetry contact with the astronauts via a network of large radio dishes around the world that could send signals to antennas on the Apollo spacecraft and receive transmissions from the Apollo spacecraft. The telephone line was simply connected to this network and the phone signal was beamed to the moon as radio waves and then the astronaut’s transmission came back as radio waves came back the same way. Because of the speed of light and the distance from the Earth to the moon, it actually took about 1.2 seconds for the signal to make a one-way trip.
The phone will have been dialed into a NASA transmitter , like the old style modem coupler , or even directly wired to the transmitter.
The same way mission control was speaking to the astronauts: giant radio antennae in the form of dishes that beamed electromagnetic waves at the spacecraft. The same way a satellite sends a TV picture to your house, and the same way you listen to radio broadcasts.
Getting the president’s voice to the astronauts was as simple as routing a call through the communication systems, really. Instead of hearing the microphones in Houston, the astronauts would hear the President speaking instead.
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