In July 1969, the New South Wales sheep town of Parkes was about to play its role in one
of the human kind's greatest achievements.
"Okay, we can verify the position of the opening
I ought to have on the camera."
It was a very quiet sort of town. It takes
you up to 30 years to become one of the locals.
"And we're getting a picture on the TV."
The Parkes telescope would receive live pictures of the Apollo 11 moon landing mesmerising
600 million earthlings, or one-fifth of humanity.
"We got a good picture. We can make out a fair amount of detail."
One of the telescope operators at the dish
back then was Ben Lamb. So Ben, do you reckon you would still drive
it today? I could still drive it today.
Fifty years on? Oh yes, no trouble. The only trouble is, of
course, now it is all computers. It was just a normal day's work and everything
was normal. Just another day?
It was just another day, but once it actually happened, it was a different story then.
John Bolton was the boss of the telescope.
Why has Parkes been chosen to relay the first
television pictures of a man on the moon? Because at the time they step out of the spacecraft,
the moon will only be in the view of radio telescopes and tracking antennas in this hemisphere.
The signals from the spacecraft will be extremely weak.
So unprecedented was a mission like this, that nothing could be certain.
We have a number of 100 to 1 chances and a number of 1,000 to 1 chances, all these have
been backed up.
In fact, a team of men were on stand-by to
manually rotate the telescope by hand if needed.
They had cranks which they would turn around
the gearboxes. By hand?
By hand and another man had a stopwatch and he would time them and tell them to go faster
or slower.
Perhaps our biggest weakness is the weather.
If we get a very severe storm and very high winds then we would no longer be able to keep tracking.
Inside the dish, was radio receiver engineer, David Cooke.
We were waiting for the spacecraft to appear
over our horizon. The telescope was tipped down as far as it
could go and the wind which had been quite strong suddenly gusted up to over 100 kilometres
an hour. We thought we had taken precautions and thought
of everything that could have gone wrong except the weather, and that's what did go wrong.
The world more or less will depend on this station for these first pictures. Does it
worry you a great deal? No, I don't think so. I think there are other
people who have got much tougher jobs than we have.
But the wind suddenly abated and finally at 12:56 Eastern Standard Time, the Parkes telescope
received the moment that would define the 20th century.
The Eagle has landed. Roger, Tranquillity. We copy you on the ground.
You've got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot.
I was in the control room where the team of
Americans were operating the electronics. I was there to monitor the output of the receiver
and make sure that nothing went wrong. I know one of the Americans over there looked
at us and he said, "Well, how about that?"
"It's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
It wasn't a thing which you could make up.
It doesn't matter how many people think about it, how they still reckon it was a fake. There
was no way it could have been a fake, not as far as we're concerned.
Parkes not only relayed TV pictures over those five days in 1969, but also crucially, in-flight
data like the astronauts heart rates, oxygen levels and more.
"There seems to be no difficulty in moving around.
Copy. I did some fairly high jumps."
Australians maybe didn't fully grasp the science.
Well, I asked them what all the little wiggly
green lines were and got answers which I wouldn't pretend thoroughly to understand.
I think perhaps I felt when I was in there, was that I was blinded by science.
But they certainly grasped what it meant for our country.
Australia is proud to be playing a part in this adventure through its tracking stations,
through the Parkes radio telescope and through other facilities.
The year 2000 film, The Dish, immortalised our role in history and perhaps perpetuated a myth.
There was no animosity between us and the Americans whatsoever.
And cricket?
No, no cricket. Cricket in a dish, it is one of the bloody
ridiculous things I've ever heard. It was highly illegal because, look, we were only,
we had to walk in a special area in the dish. You just couldn't barge straight through the
dish there. - So that never happened?
No.
It was a day at work for some, but a day to
remember for a generation.
I had two children that went to school that
day and like most other schoolchildren in Australia, they sat around watching this TV
screen and the little one who is five she ran over to her mother and said, "Ah, mummy,
there is a man on the moon." So I had not told her what I was going to
be doing that day.