July. August 59It wasn’t until after Tom Reid’s death in 2010 that I began
to scope out the possibility of a book about Honeysuckle Creek.
A number of Tom’s former colleagues, among them his deputy
at the time, Mike Dinn, were still in a position to talk to me.
And Dinn got straight to the point: “The Dish implies that Parkes
was the communication facility in Australia for Apollo 11. The
truth is that Honeysuckle Creek was. Parkes was and is a radio
telescope – not a tracking station. Parkes had no transmitter and
so could not send commands or voice to the spacecraft. So
‘Parkes go for command’ as used in the movie is completely
wrong and misleading. And the movie studiously avoids stating
that the first TV transmission to Australia and the world came
from Honeysuckle Creek.”
Hooked by the realisation that it was a little dish outside
Canberra that had brought the live television of Neil Armstrong’s
first step on the Moon to a then-record worldwide audience
of 600 million viewers, I decided to write Honeysuckle Creek:
The Story of Tom Reid, a Little Dish and Neil Armstrong’s First
Step, a book about Honeysuckle intertwined with the story
of Tom Reid.T
OM, A GLASGOW-BORN ELECTRICAL engineer with a
naval background, began his career with NASA in the
late 1950s in the remote outback town of Woomera, in
South Australia. His first job at Woomera was to track British
medium-range ballistic missiles for the Weapons Research
Establishment. But following the orbital f light of Sputnik I – the
world’s first artificial satellite – in 1957, NASA came calling
and Tom began tracking satellites for the Americans. An orbit-
ing satellite could only be tracked from any single point on
Earth for about seven minutes and so NASA built some 18
tracking stations around the globe, including one at Woomera.
For voyages to and from the Moon, however, a network
of more sophisticated tracking stations was required. Three
were built: one at Goldstone in California; one near Madrid,
in Spain; and one at Honeysuckle Creek, outside Canberra.
Placed roughly equidistantly around the globe, each had a
view period of about eight hours. So, as the Earth spun on its
axis once every 24 hours, these stations were collectively able
to continuously communicate with astronauts on or near the
Moon. Without these three stations, Mission Control in
Houston, in the USA, would have been deaf, dumb and blind
to Apollo astronauts.
The Apollo tracking stations had transmitters powerful
enough to send ultra-high-frequency radio signals at a speed of
about 299,338km/s. These signals carried a voice link and
remote commands to the spacecraft, as well as a ranging code
to determine exactly where the astronauts were. The stations
also had sensitive receivers to pick up the astronauts’ voices, the
returning ranging codes and, most importantly, telemetry (or
data) relating to such things as the astronauts’ heartbeats and
their spacecraft’s fuel levels.Travelling at the speed of light, these radio signals took
just a second or so to cover the 804,672km round trip, from
Mission Control in Texas to the astronauts on the Moon and
back, so they could converse in almost real time.
Opened in early 1967, Honeysuckle at first had no Apollo
spacecraft to track. Instead, NASA conducted gruelling sim-
ulations. These soon revealed Honeysuckle’s woeful perfor-
mance compared with the other stations.
Although Honeysuckle’s first director, Bryan Lowe, was
highly intelligent and personable, he struggled with detail and
was unable to meld his tracking team into a smoothly func-
tioning unit.
Unlike Goldstone and Madrid that had Americans in all
key positions, there was not an American accent to be heard
at Honeysuckle. It was government policy that the director
had to be a citizen or permanent resident of Australia.
As the government searched for a new director, Tom’s name
stood out. With almost a decade of space tracking experience,
his hard-driving, no-nonsense style and ability to lead a diverse
team of engineers and technicians made him the natural choice.
Within months of his appointment, Honeysuckle had been
transformed from the worst performing Apollo tracking
station into the best. Under Tom’s leadership from August
1967, Honeysuckle tracked successive Apollo missions 7, 8, 9
and 10, each with great success.Honeysuckle tracked successive
Apollo missions 7, 8, 9 and 10,
each with great success.
Just a second or two before
Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon,
Hamish Lindsay snapped this iconic shot of
the Honeysuckle dish, which was already
transmitting the live TV images it was
receiving from the Lunar Module, Eagle.PHOTO CREDIT: HAMISH LINDSAY