It was to be the greatest day of our lives, but on the morning of the moon landing no-one from Honeysuckle Creek had any idea how important our role was going to be.
It was still dark when I woke up — and freezing cold outside. My daughters, Elizabeth and Catherine, were asleep. They were too young to understand how momentous this day would be.
I showered, then hurriedly ate my breakfast as I listened to the radio. The ABC news was reporting the lunar touchdown by the Apollo astronauts. My grubby-looking, second-hand, short-wave radio up on the fridge was also on and tuned to the ‘Voice of America’.
My family was still asleep when the shift car picked me up outside our house at 6:10 am. It drove away into the icy darkness, collecting two more colleagues before speeding down the lonely roads past frost-covered sheep, up into the hills to the tracking station.
The drive that day was even faster than usual. We talked of nothing but mission operations and procedures. There were still hours of station-readiness testing to do before the Moon rose between the hills to the east of Honeysuckle Creek. Once it rose we would be in direct contact with the astronauts — even though they would be sleeping for most of this time, it would still be an enormous responsibility.
We swerved around the last mountain corner, and into the carpark. As I walked into the computer area the vast array of little orange lights twinkled on the long row of computer cabinets and magnetic-tape machines. Computer technicians were busy scanning them for any signs of malfunction. On the top right of each computer control panel were two large indicator lights, one red, the other green.
Most of the time the green light indicated that all the software and hardware were functioning normally. Occasionally, however, the red light, labelled fault, signalled the dreaded ‘glitch’.
Would the red light flash today?
I sat down at the console and pulled on my headset. The previous shift was still in the middle of the five-hour station readiness testing that had begun at 6:00 am.
In the telemetry area of the operations room Mike Linney was running simulated analogue data from tape-recorders through the telemetry decommutators. Les Hughes was selecting the decommutator programs corresponding to the expected testing modes. I took over from Don Loughhead, supervising the telemetry computer processing of the various data formats being transmitted to the real-time computer complex at the Goddard Space Flight Center.
The night shift quietly unplugged their headsets and withdrew from the activity as our fresh team got up to speed, listening to three astronauts on NET 1 and Mission Control’s instructions to the tracking station network on NET 2.
In the communications room Colin Power and Tony Gerada completed modem checks with the Goddard Data Link technicians. Kevin Gallegos ran the voice communication checks through the transmitters to the receivers and then around into the demodulators. On the station operations console John Saxon was keying in MODE–1 command data on the Computer Access Matrix buttons while simultaneously discussing configuration requirements with NETWORK on NET 2. Vic Burman was busy sorting the teletype messages flooding in with mission status reports, station configuration messages and antenna prediction messages.
In the middle of the computer command interface testing, Betty Clissold wheeled in the tea trolley, with rattling cups and the smell of brewed coffee, and a plate of biscuits. We stayed ‘tethered’ to our consoles by the spiral cords of our headsets and just shouted out ‘black tea with one’ or ‘coffee, white and two’. Betty brought it to us, along with an Iced VoVo and an Adora Cream wafer bickie.
We were still listening to the voices of the astronauts on the Moon, relayed to Houston as they checked the spacecraft — there was a minor problem with one of the fuel lines. As we drank our coffee we heard the clear voices on NET 1 from far above.
The astronauts were too keyed up to sleep. They asked if they could bring the moon walk forward.
The moon walk had been scheduled for the best TV coverage, that is, when the two biggest antennas were in full view of the Moon — the 64-metre antennas of Parkes and Goldstone. That way if one station experienced problems, there would be ample backup in the TV coverage for this event, the most spectacular part of the whole mission.
If the moon walk was brought forward our tracking station would have the prime responsibility for recording the greatest moment in Earth’s history — and transmitting the television images to the world. The television camera on the lunar module Eagle was a last-minute addition — collecting rocks had been seen as far more important for science than prancing around in front of a television camera. But now the world was expecting to see live television pictures from the Moon!
All other conversation stopped as we waited to see what would happen. Suddenly we heard the voice of CAPCOM — the ‘capsule communicator’ from Mission Control — speaking to the astronauts: ‘Tranquility Base, Houston. We thought about it. We will support it. We’re GO at that time. Over.’
Then we heard Neil Armstrong reply, ‘Roger.’
Honeysuckle Creek was suddenly in the hot seat! We were the prime station for the most historic event of the century, now scheduled for around noon local time — in three hours’ time!
MOON MYTH: THE PARKES RADIO TELESCOPE WAS THE FIRST TO SEND PICTURES OF THE MOON WALK TO THE WORLD
No. It was Honeysuckle Creek that provided the pictures of those first steps on the Moon’s surface. The makers of the fictional movie The Dish created this myth. Parkes was only a backup to Goldstone for the live TV pictures and didn’t come ‘on line’ for 11 minutes after the moon walk began. Sadly most people get their knowledge about history from movies and novels — and so myths like those in The Dish are begun!