Saturday, July 27, 2019

The Hidden Aussies behind the Moon landing

DavidReneke's space blog has the story of those who worked at the Carnavon Space Station in Australia.

It is a piece of Australian history never heard — how a TV repair man, a waitress and a young Croatian migrant helped the US win the space race and put man on the Moon....
The Carnarvon Tracking Station was an important link from Earth to the Gemini and Apollo manned space missions from 1965 to 1972. Spacecraft which launched from Cape Canaveral, known as Cape Kennedy during that time, passed close to Carnarvon on their first orbits around the Earth. It was at this point that hundreds of pieces of telemetry data — the pressure and temperature inside the craft, astronauts’ heartbeats and respiratory rates, and available fuel and oxygen — were relayed back to Houston as an essential check on the crew’s wellbeing before the final thrust into space.

go read the whole thing.

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