How Radio Telescopes and Satellite Communications Made the Moon Landing Broadcast Possible
President Kennedy's Momentous Commitment
On the 12th of September, 1962, President John F. Kennedy spoke to a large gathering at Rice University. Nothing momentous was expected as Kennedy waxed eloquent about the dizzying pace of man’s technological progress. Nothing much until he committed the U.S. to landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade, less than eight years into the future.
On July 20th, 1969, as a teenager with a keen interest in technology, I watched, fixated on a television set that I had resurrected myself from a broken carcass, as Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon and uttered the famous line about “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Kennedy’s promise had been kept despite his untimely death, and the world would never be the same.
How the Parkes Radio Telescope Brought the Sky World to America
What I didn’t know was how complex the effort was, not only to get to the moon but to get those grainy images from the moon to my television set. Like many technological feats that seem simple, this one was very, very complex. The story starts with a radio telescope in a sheep paddock in Australia. Known as Murriyang (meaning Sky World in the local aboriginal dialect), the Parkes radio telescope played a crucial role in getting those video images back to the earth from the moon.
In 2000, a film based on the historical event called The Dish told the story of the challenges of getting that incredible video to be seen worldwide.
Hollywood’s Perspective on a Crucial Chapter
Of course, the film took some license with the real story. For example, while the tracking computer didn’t lose its mind due to a power failure in real life, NASA did, on occasion, send inaccurate coordinates to Parkes. On the other hand, the part in the film about keeping the dish upright in high winds (way beyond safe wind speeds) was true, and yes, Goldstone (the receiving station in Southern California) did lose the signal, making the feed from Australia vital.
But what’s featured in The Dish is only part of the story.
During the 60s, another space technology came into use that was a vital part of that video chain: Satellite communications. The video received from the moon by Parkes was relayed via a specially constructed microwave link to Sydney, where it was sent, via satellite, to an obscure receiving station located in California’s Carmel Valley.
Comsat built the Jamesburg Earth station for the Intelsat corporation. The dish was a 95-foot behemoth that stands today, though it is no longer used for satellite communications. From there, the signal was sent to Houston, where it was delivered to the television networks for public reception. The rest, as they say, is history!