[naturalman1975]

Obviously the moon landing was overwhelmingly an American achievement - but Australians are proud - and I think rightly so - of Australia's involvement in the Apollo 11 mission and in bringing those iconic moments to the eyes of the world.

[Gay State Conservative]

A nurse I worked with years ago had a husband who was a civilian employee of the US Defense Department. He was a communications specialist who spent lots of time at Exmouth,Western Australia...she'd refer to it as "Northwest Cape".

I learned later that it was an important location for huge satellite dishes,etc.

[SuperLuminal]

Wow! Not a single mention of Disney... {:-)

[null and void]

Does two antennas mean two sets of tapes?

Asking for a FRiend who still mourns the loss of the “only” high quality tape of the original signal...

[Tax-chick]

The earth is big, and space is even bigger. It’s not at all surprising that Australia’s participation was essential.

My daughter Elen, USMC, is currently in the Northern Territories doing exercises with the Australian Marines. When she gets back to Okinawa, she’ll tell us about all the cool plants and wildlife she saw.

[gov_bean_ counter]

Did somebody say Australian dish...???

http://beauty-around.com/en/tops/item/815-most-beauty-australian-womenM

[mrsmith]

Yeah, this is cool.
All Australia was “cool” back then.

[ameribbean expat]

https://soperth.com.au/john-glenn-saw-perth-as-city-of-lights-14525/

[Major Matt Mason]

Obviously, the Aussies must have been a bunch of sexist, racist Nazis to involve themselves with a U.S. moonwalk. /s

[Ezekiel]

An estimated 600 million people, one-sixth of the world’s population at the time, watched the historic Apollo 11 moonwalk live on TV. At the time it was the greatest television audience in history. As a proportion of the world’s population, it has not been exceeded since.

One-sixth?! It must have had to do with the gravity of the situation.

[Waverunner]

My dad was a machunust in the model shop at Radiation Inc. in Melbourne Fl. They built a large number of telemetry dishes for NASA and other government agencies. He got one of my uncles a job as an installer. My uncle went to Alaska, Hawaii, and Africa to install very large dishes. One of the biggest collections was in Rosman NC for collecting soviet signals. The cray salesman told me it had one of the largest collections of cray installed anywhere. When it was shut down, I went to the gate, told them about my Dad working for radiation. they let me walk out among the old dishes, and about 2/3rds were built in melbourne fl. We moved to fl in 1961, when my dad went to work building dishes. I grew up watching mercury, gemini, and apollo launches, plus all the satellite and test launches. We would get a break in school to go out into the playground and watch launches. great times.

[Larry Lucido]

Vegemite and barbecued shrimp?

J/k

[Equine1952]

I read the start of your posting, and immediately thought two Australian babes pulled it off? That’s how old and out of the loop I am. I remember listening to and watching what was on limited tv news. I also am still fond of the idea of two Aussie dishes. 😊

[A Formerly Proud Canadian]

After Apollo, came the Shuttle. Canada gave NASA the Canadarm.

On to the True-dope Jr. era. Justine wants to give the US something, too. The previous generation gave America the Arm, Justine gives PDJT the finger at every opportunity.

We used to have ‘statesmen’ Prime Ministers, to one degree or another. Now, we have a petulant forty seven year old who acts like a prepubescent little girl. God help us!

[A strike]

Back when Britain, Canada, US, NZ and Australia meant a good thing.

[Midwesterner53]

God bless our friends in Australia!

[golux]

Cool article. Thanks!

“...The Commonwealth Rocket Range at Woomera...”

Naturally it only takes a few paragraphs in an Aussie article until one starts seeing strange names...

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

On 20 July, Apollo 11 was in lunar orbit. Pointing and sensitivity checks were performed on the spacecraft in preparation for the landing and EVA. During this period an interesting observation was performed by the Observatory's senior receiver engineer, Dave Cooke (who later became the Director of the Parkes Observatory), and a young PhD student, Jasper Wall (who later became the Director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory). As the spacecraft moved behind the Moon and the signal was lost, they fed the signals directly into the observatory's new PDP-9 computer (the observatory's first computer, purchased by John Shimmins in 1967 and arriving in April 1968). They produced plots of a classic Fresnel diffraction pattern as the point source signal passed behind the Moon's knife edge.

Jasper Wall relates the following:

"The occultation trace was made by Dave Cooke and myself. We noticed how the chart record produced this superb pattern as we tracked the spacecraft's disappearance behind the moon and its reappearance. We'd just got the PDP-9 computer system up and running and were working hard on making it sample so that we could record and analyse survey data on-line. But it was in a primitive state. We could make it sample, but not display what it was sampling. Thus for the next occultation, we set up to record it by sampling the receiver output (a novel concept) and hammering it all on to punch tape. With no display, we then had to read back hundreds of meters of punch tape, looking at numbers to find where the occultation was ... took us hours I remember, and the punch tape dripped from the control room down the gap in the stairs to the ground floor, where it piled up..." All the spacecraft and telescope systems were fully checked and were now ready for the great day.

[foreverfree]

bump

[TalBlack]

It was a typical July winter’s day – grey overcast skies with rain and high winds.

LOL!

[bert]

Yeah Ausies!!

You can stream excellent Ausie TV on ACORN