Australian Geographic – July-August 2019

July. August 65

their 26m dish was doing so much better than the American

team with its 64m dish? Known throughout the NASA network

by his call sign ‘Houston TV’, Tarkington initially put his faith

in the bigger dish and Goldstone’s pictures went live to air

around the world. But it was impossible to make out what

Armstrong was up to.

For almost two minutes after filming began, Tarkington

persevered with Goldstone, hoping its pictures would improve.

But they got worse. By now Armstrong had reached the

bottom of the ladder and was standing on one of the Lunar

Module’s foot pads. Knowing that Armstrong’s first step was

imminent and that the TV feed going to air was still a mess,

Tarkington made an announcement over NASA’s worldwide

communication net: “All stations, we have just switched video

to Honeysuckle.”

I

T WAS THANKS TO Honeysuckle that 600 million people were

able to clearly see Neil Armstrong for the first time since the

live feed commenced. He held on to the Lunar Module’s strut

for the next 25 seconds then, with one boot still firmly planted

on the foot pad, tested the lunar dust with the tip of his other

boot. “As you get close to it,” he said, “it’s almost like a pow-

der. The ground mass is very fine...I’m going to step off the

LM now...”

A short pause in Armstrong’s voice transmission followed,

during which Honeysuckle’s TV signal showed him letting

go of the strut and stepping backwards to plant his left foot

in the lunar dust. It was 12.56pm at Honeysuckle when

Armstrong said: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant

leap for mankind.”

Tom and his team had absolutely nailed live television of this

unprecedented moment when a human being first stepped onto

a celestial body. For those who were privy to the telemetry stream-

ing into Honeysuckle from Armstrong’s space suit, his heart was

beating 112 times per minute, compared with Aldrin’s 81.

Honeysuckle’s live TV feed continued to air worldwide until

the main signal from Parkes finally came online, more than six

minutes after Armstrong had taken his first step. From then until

the end of the two-and-a-half-hour broadcast, Tarkington elected

to use Parkes’s stronger signal generated by its larger dish, for the

worldwide TV broadcast.

Despite the Honeysuckle team’s pivotal role in enabling the

live broadcast, it wasn’t until a 20th-anniversary dinner in 1989

that Tom publicly acknowledged what he and his team had accom-

plished: “It hadn’t been planned that way,” he said. “But that’s

the way it was. And goddamn it, we were ready!”

In a scene repeated thousands of times

around the world on 21 July 1969 (AEST),

a crowd gathers around a publicly accessible

television screen at Sydney Airport to watch

Neil Armstrong become the fi rst person to

step onto the Moon.

“All stations, we have

just switched video

to Honeysuckle.”

AG

PHOTO CREDIT: TREVOR DALLEN/FAIRFAX

AUSTRALIAN GEOGRAPHIC thanks John Sarkissian and

Hamish Lindsay for their assistance with this article.