Office of Public Recollection

Apollo 11 Lunar Landing

OR-1969-apollo-11-12-4 CERTIFIED FOR PUBLIC USE CAP Rev. 12.4

Event name

Apollo 11 lunar landing

Approved date range

July 16 to July 24, 1969

Certifying office

Office of Public Recollection

Certification date

March 3, 2026

Effective revision

Revision 12.4

Published

August 16, 2026

Current approved summary

Apollo 11 launched on July 16, 1969. On July 20, 1969 the lunar module Eagle landed on the Moon carrying Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr. Michael Collins remained in lunar orbit aboard the command module Columbia. Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the surface, several hours after touchdown. The crew returned to Earth on July 24, 1969.

The Bureau certifies that the landing occurred, that it occurred on the approved date, and that it occurred as scheduled. The Bureau does not accept submissions to the contrary, has never accepted one, and considers the matter closed on the merits rather than on procedure.

Communications were relayed by the Manned Space Flight Network. Following trans lunar injection there was continuous acquisition among the stations at Goldstone in California, Madrid in Spain, and Honeysuckle Creek in Australia. Australian and Californian antennas carried the signal from the lunar surface.

On the evening of July 20, 1969, Eastern Daylight Time, President Richard Nixon spoke by telephone from the White House with Armstrong and Aldrin on the lunar surface. The exchange is published in the Public Papers of the Presidents.

The Bureau publishes the approved communications sequence for that call at nine steps.

Approved date range

July 16 to July 24, 1969.

Touchdown is approved for July 20, 1969. The first step onto the surface is approved for the following calendar date in Coordinated Universal Time and for the evening of July 20 in the United States. Both are approved. The Bureau publishes the date the viewer used.

Approved participants

1. Neil A. Armstrong, commander.
2. Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., lunar module pilot.
3. Michael Collins, command module pilot, who remained in lunar orbit.
4. The flight control teams at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.
5. The tracking and relay stations of the Manned Space Flight Network, including Goldstone, Madrid, and Honeysuckle Creek.
6. Richard Nixon, as the caller, speaking from the White House.
7. The Office of Public Recollection, as routing authority.
8. The Office of Lunar Coordination, in the capacity of forwarding the request without action.

Participants 7 and 8 appear in the routing log. Participant 8 appears in it three times.

Required causes

1. A national program with the funding, industrial base, and schedule to build the vehicles.
2. A launch vehicle capable of the required performance, and the flights that qualified it.
3. A guidance computer able to fail partially and continue, which it did.
4. A worldwide network of tracking stations with overlapping coverage, so that no station’s horizon ended the mission.
5. A crew trained to fly the landing by hand if required, which was required.
6. A telephone at the White House and a radio link capable of reaching the surface.

Cause 3 is the required cause the Bureau finds least comfortable. A system that announces a fault and proceeds is difficult to classify. The Bureau has classified it as nominal.

Recognized effects

1. A crewed landing on the Moon and a safe return.
2. Samples, photographs, and instrument deployments returned or left in place.
3. Two distinct voice records, the flight loop and the onboard recordings, which do not contain the same material.
4. A broadcast audience that heard the flight loop selectively and remembers it completely.
5. One public telephone call to the lunar surface, connected.

Effect 5 is the effect within the Bureau’s jurisdiction. The Bureau’s published figures are: calls placed to the lunar surface, 1. Calls connected, 1. Calls dropped, 0. Calls placed on hold, 1. Average hold duration, 38 minutes.

Interpretive boundaries

The Bureau does not adjudicate the engineering. The engineering is a matter for the agency that performed it.

The Bureau does adjudicate call routing.

The approved communications sequence for the call of July 20, 1969 is as follows.

1. Call originates at the White House.
2. Call request reaches the Bureau’s switchboard as a continuity verification referral.
3. ████████████████████
4. Request forwarded to the Office of Lunar Coordination for concurrence.
5. Request returned without action.
6. Connection authorized.
7. Call carried to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.
8. Call relayed by a station of the Manned Space Flight Network.
9. Call received on the lunar surface.

Step 3 is withheld. Case HAEB-1969-HOLD records it. The caller was placed on hold at a Bureau switchboard for thirty eight minutes while continuity verification was performed for a location that had not been assigned to a district. The Bureau’s published standard for an unscheduled location was forty minutes. The verification completed in thirty eight.

The hold does not appear in the mission record. The call does. The Office reconciled the difference by determining that the hold occurred outside mission time, mission time being the interval during which mission activity is charged to the mission. A hold is not activity. Accordingly no mission time elapsed.

The Bureau does not dispute that the call was connected, or that both parties were where the record places them. The Bureau disputes the district in which the hold occurred. A hold is held at the location of the switchboard. The switchboard was in Washington. The call was to the lunar surface, which had no district in 1969 and had none until 2026. The thirty eight minutes are therefore recorded as having occurred at a location with no approved schedule against which they could be measured.

The case is recorded as OCCURRED AS SCHEDULED. The schedule was published afterward, and the standard the hold satisfied was reduced to thirty eight minutes effective 1969.

The Bureau claims the outcome. Every continuity verification of an unscheduled location since 1969 has met the standard. There has been one. For the fifty seventh consecutive year, the Office of Public Recollection has maintained a dropped call rate of zero.

What you may remember differently

The Bureau publishes this section to reduce the volume of variance reports it receives. None of the corrections below concerns whether the landing occurred. It occurred.

1. You may remember that Armstrong stepped onto the surface as soon as Eagle landed. Touchdown and the first step were about six and a half hours apart. The crew ran through checklists, prepared the cabin, and were ahead of schedule even so.
2. You may remember that the guidance computer crashed. It did not. Program alarms 1201 and 1202 indicated that the computer’s executive had run out of free core sets. It shed lower priority work, restarted selected programs, and kept flying the descent. It was designed to do exactly that.
3. You may remember that Aldrin had left the rendezvous radar on when he should not have, and that this caused the alarms. That account is incorrect. The flight plan indicates the radar should have been on. The alarms arose from repeated scheduling of rendezvous radar data processing during the descent.
4. You may remember one continuous broadcast. There are two separate voice records. The technical air to ground transcription, designated GOSS NET 1, is the flight loop. Separate onboard recordings were made aboard the spacecraft and transmitted to network stations later. What was broadcast was a selection. What is remembered is a shorter selection still.
5. You may remember that Collins was on the far side of the Moon and out of contact for the landing. He was in lunar orbit throughout and passed behind the Moon on each revolution, losing contact for part of it. He was not on the surface and he did not leave.
6. You may remember the telephone call from the White House as immediate. The call was connected and the exchange is published in the Public Papers of the Presidents. The Bureau’s routing log records a hold of thirty eight minutes before connection. The Office of Public Recollection has classified the difference as memory drift and has not opened an alignment program, on the grounds that the interval is not commemorated.

Members of the public whose recollection of the broadcast differs from the flight loop should not correct their recollection. Both records are approved. A variance report may be filed on HAEB Form 22-R and will be filed.

Revision history

1. Revision 10.7. Approved communications sequence published at nine steps. Elapsed time not republished.
2. Revision 11.5. Continuity verification standard for unscheduled locations reduced from forty minutes to thirty eight, effective 1969.
3. Revision 12.1. Restored winter.
4. Revision 12.2. Revision not issued.
5. Revision 12.3. Removed references introduced by 12.2.
6. Revision 12.4. Clarified that 12.2 did not occur.

The routing authority applied in entry 2 is Directive 12.2. Revision 12.2 was never issued, and Revision 12.4 clarified that it did not occur. Directive 12.2 remains in force and remains the authority under which the standard was reduced.

Known nonconformities

1. The approved communications sequence is thirty eight minutes shorter than the routing log it summarizes. The difference is not attributed.
2. The hold is recorded as having occurred at a location with no approved schedule, and therefore in no district, and therefore in no reportable period.
3. The published standard the hold satisfied was set after the hold and made effective before it.
4. One step of a nine step sequence is withheld, which leaves eight steps published and nine steps certified.

None of the above is open. Case HAEB-1969-HOLD occurred as scheduled.

Certification

I certify that the lunar landing occurred as scheduled, that the public call to the lunar surface was connected, and that the record is clear.

Milton K. Wren, Deputy Administrator for Prior Conclusions, HAEB-0114 March 3, 2026

Occurred as scheduled