When you mention the words Apollo and NASA, most people immediately think of America.That big
USA on the side of the Saturn V rocket takeoff is an awe-inspiring sight and a great piece of
national branding. But success in space requires a global effort.
The International Space Station is only the latest example of a
coordinated ingenuity of nations working together to get things done off the planet.
The problem with spacecraft is they don't stay above a launch area. They orbit the Earth about 16 times a day and
the Earth is rotating too.
So you need transmitters and receivers spread around the world if you are to keep in constant contact.
In the 1960s, America set up a worldwide communications network to support the Mercury Space Program.
To maintain communication with astronauts in orbit, NASA needed radio dishes far beyond American borders.
Unlike the Soviet Union whose land crossed 11 time zones and very high latitudes,
The United States relied upon foreign bases to form the MSFN or the Manned Space Flight Network.
This network was made up of nine ground stations and two ships. One in the Indian Ocean and one in the Pacific.
Spacecraft would communicate through successive stations as they orbited around the Earth,
maintaining a relay connection with Ground Control.
By 1963, the network was up and running and allowed them to keep in contact with Gordon Cooper's Mercury flight as it made
22 orbits of the planet. A journey of
546,000 miles or 878,000 kilometers, more than all of America's previous manned missions combined.
By 1965, NASA was preparing a Communications Network for Apollo's daring reach for the moon.
3 26 meter or 85 foot dishes were planned to allow reliable communications with the distance service and lunar lander.
One of these new facilities was in Honeysuckle Creek, a 40 acre radio quiet area surrounded by the granite peaks of the
Australian Alps,
32 kilometers or 20 miles south-west of Canberra, New South Wales in Australia
Construction was completed in
1967 and in
1969, the Station had the honour of relaying the video signal of Neil Armstrong's first steps on the lunar surface.
But the Australian team faced their greatest challenge in 1970, when disaster struck aboard the Apollo 13 mission.
During a routine operation, one of the cryogenic fuel tanks malfunctioned and exploded, leaving astronauts with no choice
but to retreat to the lunar module as a lifeboat.
To make matters worse, the main antenna of the spacecraft was damaged by the explosion.
Astronauts Lovell Swigert and Haise could only talk to ground control through the smaller antenna on the lunar module.
Despite its modern specification,
Honeysuckle Creek struggled to pick up the faint radio signal from Apollo 13's lunar module.
Fortunately, the Australian team had a solution. Only
350 kilometers or about
220 miles further north. The Parkes Radio Observatory, this was a 64 meter or
210 foot Dish. A powerful,
movable antenna. Although Parkes have been used to communicate with Apollo 11 on the lunar surface, the plan to use a deployable
amborella antenna on the Moon meant that the facility was not configured to talk to Apollo
13 on route and was instead doing routine
astronomical observations.
Converting the dish to communicate with a near-Earth Target would usually take around a week.
But every hour was a battle for survival for the stricken Apollo crew.
A team of engineers were urgently flown to Parkes and worked around the clock to
reconfigure the dish in a single day.
Even with the giant antenna pointed at Apollo 13, the signal from the lunar module was proving difficult to detect.
Apollo 13 Saturn IV-B upper stage was transmitting telemetry data of the same frequency and
interfering with the crews voice communications. The lunar module would normally have been powered up only after
the Saturn upper stage had crashed into the moon and stopped transmitting.
However with the astronauts relying on the lunar modules antenna, the Australian operators had to identify
and filter out the unwanted signal from the Saturn IV-B.
Still unable to hear the crew's transmissions, ground control sent a message for the astronauts to turn off their transponder and wait in silence
for the Parkes team to isolate the Saturn IV-B signal.
When the crew switched on their radio again, the operators were able to lock onto a crew's voice transmission and
guide the Apollo 13 team to patch together their ailing spacecraft.
Three days later, when the crew arrived safely back on Earth, the
Australian engineers and radio operators were deservedly credited for their part in the rescue.
In 1981, operations at the Honeysuckle Creek Station came to an end, as a new generation of the Deep Space Network came online
with a new station nearby in Tidbinbilla.
The updated 70 meter dishes were modeled on the successful Parkes design, a legacy that serves
international working space to this day.
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