60 Australian Geographic
B
Y MID-1969, NASA WAS ready to launch Apollo 11, the
mission earmarked to fulfil President Kennedy’s prom-
ise, made in 1961, of landing a man on the Moon and
returning him safely to Earth before 1970. Just a few weeks
before the launch, NASA resolved an internal debate that had
been raging since 1961: was it necessary or desirable to attempt
live TV coverage of the moment the first person stepped onto
the Moon?
Those against broadcasting the event were concerned about
the heaviness of a camera. Weight on the Apollo Lunar Module
was so critical that the astronauts’ seating had to be discarded,
requiring them to stand while f lying. Those in favour of the
broadcast argued that American taxpayers, who had stumped
up billions of dollars for the Apollo program, had a right to see
live in their lounge rooms the moment an astronaut first stepped
onto the Moon.
Following the development of a super lightweight camera,
advocates for televising the event won the day. But with space
aboard the Lunar Module at a premium, this equipment was
mounted in a way that it began filming from an upside-down
position. Because of this, a special reversing switch was fitted
on each of the Apollo tracking stations’ TV scan converters, to
allow a technician to f lip the upside-down TV image the right
way up.
In the weeks leading up to the launch of Apollo 11, the radio
telescope at Parkes, located in central NSW about 300km north
of Honeysuckle, was added to NASA’s array of Australian dishes
for extra backup. Although it couldn’t transmit anything,
Parkes’s 64m-diameter dish made it an excellent receiver com-
pared with Honeysuckle and its 26m-diameter dish. At that
size, however, the Parkes dish could only be angled down to
30 degrees above the horizon. But the Honeysuckle equipment,
being a special Apollo dish, could be angled down to zero
degrees to the horizon.
Although Canberra and Parkes were on roughly the same
longitude and the Moon rose over them at about the same time,
this difference in the minimum angulation of the dishes meant
the Moon rose over the Honeysuckle dish two hours before it
rose over the Parkes dish.
On 16 July 1969, the day Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape
Canaveral in Florida, USA, NASA’s Australian dishes included:
Carnarvon, in Western Australia, which was used to track the
first and last hours of the mission; Honeysuckle Creek, which
tracked the Command Module when it was in separate f light;He heard Armstrong say:
“Houston, Tranquility Base
here. The Eagle has landed.”
Photographed in 2016,backdropped
by Tidbinbilla’s big dish, are (L–R)
Hamish Lindsay, John Saxon, Gene Cernan
(the last man on the Moon), Mike Dinn and
Ed Kruzins (Tidbinbilla’s director).
PHOTO CREDIT: JAMILA TODERAS/FAIRFAX