I visited the Parkes tracking station shortly after the landing and met many of those people involved.
Aussie stars reached for the moon
They are the Australian heroes of the 1969 moon landing; staff at our tracking stations who were a vital part of the Apollo mission.
By
CHRIS GRIFFITH
David Cooke, now 87, at the CSIRO radio telescope outside Parkes, western NSW. He was the receiver engineer at Parkes during the Apollo 11 mission. Picture: Britta Campion
They are the Australian heroes of the 1969 moon landing.
Fifty years ago this month, the men and women who staffed the Parkes, Honeysuckle Creek and Tidbinbilla tracking stations sourced the weak, fragile radio feed emanating from the Apollo 11 Lunar Module on the moon’s surface, and brought the telecasts of man’s first footsteps on an alien body to hundreds of millions around the world.
They also monitored the radio data carrying information about the performance of the Lunar Module and Command Module orbiting the moon, and the astronauts’ health. Sadly, the ranks are thinning of astronomers, physicists, engineers and technicians who worked at those stations. Only around half the astronauts who flew to the moon are alive.
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Nevertheless the 50th anniversary celebration shapes as a chance for amazing stories to be exchanged. Parkes Observatory is holding open days on July 20 and 21, and some staff from the Apollo 11 days will be there, along with mission experts.
Staff at the Parkes telescope at the time of the moon landing. Picture: CSIRO.
Parkes radio engineer David Cooke, 87, this week spoke of the intricate planning that took place months before the mission, and the amazing judgment of then director John Bolton to keep the Parkes dish operating during the lunar telecast, despite wind gusts of up to 110km/hr when the dish’s safety rating was 40km/hr. It could have come crashing down on them, but it didn’t.
They were the worst wind gusts that Parkes had experienced since its opening and occurred as the station was readying to relay Apollo 11’s signal to the world. Mr Cooke said the dish was at its most vulnerable angle, on its side, pointing at the horizon as the moon rose.
The storm over Australia can be seen on a photo of Earth taken from the moon by Aldrin.
Parkes radio engineer David Cooke helped beam the lunar vision to the world. Picture: Parkes Observatory.
Mr Bolton could have taken Parkes offline to protect its dish, as Honeysuckle Creek and Goldstone Observatory in California both could see the moon and access the feed for the TV pictures.
At 64-metres, Parkes’s dish was larger and it could produce a better TV signal. Mr Cooke said staff didn’t want to lose their chance to make history. “It would be very poor if we gave it away.”
Mr Cooke said staff inside the telescope were far too busy to celebrate. There was some cheering when Armstrong stepped onto lunar soil, and some mild celebrations at day’s end.
He remembers later coming out of the telescope room, looking at the moon, and being amazed that three earthlings were up there. He also remembers coming home to his daughter, who told him excitedly that she had seen the telecast, unaware of the role he played in it.
As was the case with the Apollo 11 mission generally, lots didn’t go according to plan. Astronauts and ground staff were left with hard decisions that could have easily turned Apollo 11 from triumph to disaster if wrong choices were made.
Mr Cooke said Mr Bolton had backup plans for every potential mishap. Staff were taught how to crank the dish by hand should it lose the ability to move. During the landing event, the tracking station shifted to diesel power to circumvent any mains power blackout.
CSIRO present-day operations scientist at Parkes John Sarkissian said there were two TV feeds. Australians viewed the first seven minutes from Honeysuckle Creek as the moon wasn’t high enough in the sky for the Parkes dish to see it. Transmissions then shifted to Parkes.
The international TV feed switched between Honeysuckle Creek, Parkes and Goldstone several times before staying with Parkes. Mr Sarkissian said a fire in the power supply of the transmitter at the Tidbinbilla station just two days beforehand saw it ruled out from the telecasts.
John Sarkissian, Operations Scientist at CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope. Picture: Britta Campion/The Australian.
Mike Dinn, who was Deputy Station Director at Honeysuckle Creek, said he was working at the operations console and Honeysuckle Creek tracked the Lunar Module that day. About 23 staff worked at the centre and people had trained for the landing event for months.
He said Honeysuckle Creek had built up competence and confidence from taking part in earlier Apollo missions. But he said you’d quietly think about the “what ifs”if things went awry.
“My job was to keep the data flowing that was coming down from the spacecraft and ship it out the Houston,” Mr Dinn said. The data comprised the astronaut’s voice, spacecraft performance and astronauts’ biomedical information, and finally the TV feed, Mr Dinn said.
He remembered being worried about an “intermittent problem” with the heart rate feed of one of the astronauts.
The green monitor shows the first vision of Neil Armstrong's historic moon walk. Picture: David Cooke.
Mr Sarkissian said the public didn’t realise how hugely risky the moon mission was and how basic equipment was. So much didn’t go according to plan.
He said the computer’s memory on Apollo 11 was only “a few kilobytes”. The memory was stitched together manually. Stitches threaded in one direction represented a “zero” while those threaded the other way were “one”.
As Armstrong and Aldrin descended in the Lunar Module, the computer froze with 1201 and 1202 errors which the pair didn’t know how to interpret. The errors weren’t listed in any manual. Mr Sarkissian said Armstrong wanted to know whether to abort the landing.
Fortunately, the same error had occurred in a simulation weeks earlier with controllers wrongly suggesting an abort. NASA flight director Gene Kranz had told staff to go away and study the codes and their meanings.
Armstrong ignored the issue as he had another huge one. The Lunar Module had overshot the landing spot by about six kilometres and was heading for a boulder field on the side of a crater. Armstrong took manual control and found a flat area beyond the crater. There was only around 20 seconds of fuel left.
Buzz Aldrin's photo of Earth from the Moon captures the storms over southeast Australia at the time of the moon landing. The actual earth is above the Lunar Module. The enlargement is to the right. Picture: Parkes Observatory.
Mr Sarkissian said Armstrong’s landing was softer than NASA bargained for. The module was designed to land harder with the bottom rung of the ladder just above the ground. Instead it was way above it, and Armstrong had to test whether he could climb back in from the lunar surface.
He said Armstrong’s heart rate was measured at 156 beats per minute while landing. “For Neil Armstrong, the test pilot, the real achievement was to land. Coming out and walking later on was the easy part,” he said.
The Australian tracking stations took part in some later Apollo missions. But the Apollo program fell out of favour quickly. NASA had its budget reined in, and three missions were cancelled in a little more than a year after Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon. It wasn’t just money. The failure of Apollo 13 with near tragic consequences disturbed many.
Mr Sarkissian said the Apollo program very much hinged on the politics of 1961 when President John Kennedy announced the US plan for a moon landing. “It was a Cold War exercise and it has to be seen in the context of 1961.”
