One little dish, one giant leap
How this small tracking station near Canberra brought Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon to an audience of 600 million.
It was just after 8am on Monday, July 21, 1969 in eastern Australia when word came through from Mission Control in Houston that Neil Armstrong’s moon walk, scheduled for around 4pm, would be brought forward by about five hours. At the Honeysuckle Creek tracking station in the high country south of Canberra, station director Tom Reid and his team scrambled to adjust.
Because the Earth spins on its axis once every 24 hours, three tracking stations, including Honeysuckle, had been built roughly equidistantly around the globe to keep Mission Control in constant communication with astronauts on or near the moon. The other stations were at Goldstone in California and near Madrid in Spain. Each featured a 26m-wide dish with transmitters and receivers powerful enough to send and receive voices and data over 400,000km.
If it weren’t for these stations, Houston would have been deaf, dumb and blind to the astronauts on or near the moon, just as those astronauts would have been rendered completely invisible to their Earth-bound controllers. Honeysuckle and its two sister stations were as important to an Apollo mission as the massive Saturn V rockets that blasted the astronauts into space.
With the moon due to come in view of Honeysuckle’s dish at 11.15am, Reid and his team were getting ready to track the crew of the Eagle lunar module, which had landed on the moon’s surface shortly after 6am. By way of backup, the Parkes radio telescope in central west NSW would also receive Eagle’s downlink signal, but not until after 1pm. Unlike Honeysuckle’s dish, which could be angled down to the horizon, Parkes’s 64m dish could only be angled down to 30 degrees above the horizon. This accounted for the two-hour time delay at Parkes. One of the signals from the Eagle would be TV, a very late addition to its downlink capability. For almost a decade, debate had raged within NASA about whether it was necessary or desirable to attempt the remote live televising of Armstrong’s first step. Those in favour argued that Americans had a right to see what their taxes were paying for. Those against said that a bulky TV camera would endanger the astronauts in the flimsy and weight-sensitive Eagle.
Just weeks before the Apollo 11 launch, those in favour won out and a special lightweight TV camera, developed by Stan Lebar, was installed in the Eagle’s stowage bay, where space was at such a premium that the camera had to be mounted upside down. As a result, each tracking station was fitted with a little reversing switch, worth about five cents back then, which had to be engaged to flip the upside-down TV picture the right way up.
The day before the moon landing, Tom Reid had been told that prime minister John Gorton and an ABC TV crew would be visiting Honeysuckle on the big day. Concerned about the impact this might have on his team, Reid kept this news to himself. When Gorton and his entourage duly arrived around 9am, Reid’s engineers and technicians were so busy adjusting their equipment to deal with the rescheduling of Armstrong’s moon walk that they did not at first notice the prime minister in their midst. “What the hell is he doing here?” was one technician’s testy response. After touring the station and holding a press conference where he admitted that he had been “blinded by science”, Gorton departed around 10am.
Irritated but otherwise unfazed by the prime minister’s visit, Reid’s team continued with their adjustments. And when the moon rose over Honeysuckle at 11.15am, its receivers promptly locked onto Eagle’s signals. Everything was working perfectly. Still in view of the moon, Goldstone in California was receiving the same signals. And because Goldstone was equipped with a 64m dish in addition to its 26m tracking dish, Honeysuckle acted as its back-up, NASA’s rule of thumb being “the bigger the dish, the better the signal”.
When Houston had agreed to the astronauts’ request for an early moon walk, Armstrong predicted he would leave the Eagle in about three hours. But that time, which coincided with Honeysuckle acquiring the lunar module’s downlink signal, had now come and gone. There was still no sign of them as they continued the gruelling but critically important process of suiting up. An astronaut who emerged from the Eagle in a malfunctioning spacesuit risked a horrible death.
Armstrong and Aldrin were painstaking with their preparations. After entering their custom-made spacesuits from the rear, the first thing they did was to put on their overshoes, whose coarse-treaded soles would give them a firm footing on the moon’s surface. Next, they strapped on their massive backpacks. Despite weighing very little in space, these were bulky but they were vital because they contained the equipment that generated Earth-like conditions for their wearers.
Next came the astronauts’ transparent bubble-like helmets, over which were fitted outer layers of protection. As each task was completed, the astronauts were a little bit closer to turning themselves into fully self-contained mobile spacecraft. But they were spacecraft that needed to keep in touch with each other and with Mission Control. More than ever, Houston needed reliable data, especially relating to their heart and respiration rates, to their temperatures, and to the oxygen and pressure levels inside their suits. The connections that had allowed their voices and personal data to flow from the lunar module down to Honeysuckle now had to be transferred across to these suits. By now it was after 12.30pm. Well over an hour had passed since Honeysuckle had locked onto the lunar module’s downlink. But there was still no sign that the astronauts would emerge anytime soon. In another 35 minutes, the moon would have risen sufficiently over Parkes for its 64m dish to pick up this downlink signal too.
Sitting in Honeysuckle’s operations control room with Tom Reid were his deputy, Mike Dinn, and his operations controller, John Saxon. As they listened in to the astronauts doing their final voice checks, intermittent interference crackled through their headsets. Their first thought was that something at Honeysuckle was malfunctioning. But they were relieved to figure out the cause of the problem: the astronauts’ personal antennas, which protruded above their backpacks, were scraping against the ceiling of the Eagle’s cabin.
By this time Armstrong and Aldrin were venting the cabin’s atmosphere to reduce the pressure on its exit hatch. But they struggled for a few moments to open it — a metal door so thin that neither of them wanted to force it lest they wreck it. Then Aldrin peeled back one of its corners to break the seal. When it yielded, what was left of the cabin’s atmosphere escaped and immediately froze into tiny flakes of ice. Armstrong then manoeuvred his body onto the platform known as “the porch”, which was connected to a ladder extending down one of the Eagle’s landing struts. Around the world more than 600 million people were glued to TV screens.
As Armstrong crawled backwards across the Eagle’s porch towards the top rung of the ladder, Tom Reid realised that the TV broadcast from the moon would begin some minutes before Parkes’s big dish could lock onto the lunar module’s signal; that is, some minutes before the moon rose over the Parkes dish at its lowest angle of 30 degrees above the horizon. There was a chance that Parkes’ off-axis receiver might get a TV signal before that. But Reid knew that this signal would be unstable, possibly jerky, and prone to drop in and out. It would not be up to Mission Control’s broadcast standard.
For Armstrong’s first step, Honeysuckle’s 26m dish would be the only available TV backup for Goldstone’s 64m dish which, because it still had the moon well in view, had just been earmarked by Houston as the prime station for live TV.
Although Reid’s primary focus in these final moments was on whether the crucial downlink voice and data signals would continue to work as the astronauts began to walk away from the lunar module, he also wondered how its remote TV camera would perform. Only a couple of weeks had passed since NASA had publicly committed to televising Armstrong’s first step live, and there had been no opportunity to fully test and rehearse the key systems required to bring this moment into people’s living rooms. There would be no clapper boards, countdowns or hand signals to indicate when the lunar module’s TV camera would begin filming; no one at NASA had any idea what its pictures might look like. The challenges of the split-second decision-making that lay just ahead were enormous. Regardless of how these decisions might be made elsewhere — and Goldstone faced the same challenges — Reid was confident that at Honeysuckle, his TV technician Ed von Renouard would rise to the occasion.
Before taking his first step down the 2.4m ladder, Armstrong pulled on a D-ring attached to a lanyard. This activated the Eagle’s stowage bay, which swung out and down to reveal the small TV camera inside it. Due to earlier overheating, the TV circuit breaker had been removed. At first, nothing happened. Mission Control called up the astronauts on Net 1.
HOUSTON: Neil, this is Houston. You’re loud and clear… Buzz, this is Houston. Radio check and verify TV circuit breaker in.
ALDRIN: Roger. Roger TV circuit breakers in and read you loud and clear.
Almost immediately, an image appeared on von Renouard’s slow scan converter. For a split second, what he saw confused him. “It was an indecipherable puzzle of stark blocks of black at the bottom and grey at the top, bisected by a bright diagonal streak,” he later recalled. “I realised that the sky should be at the top — and on the moon the sky is black.” As had been planned, the lunar module’s TV camera had begun automatically filming from an upside-down position. To compensate for this, von Renouard had to engage the reversing switch on his scan converter. “So I reached out and flicked the switch and all of a sudden it all made sense, and presently Armstrong’s leg came down.” Honeysuckle began transmitting broadcast quality pictures to Houston.
At Goldstone, however, confusion had set in immediately after Armstrong pulled the D-ring. The station’s prime shift had gone off duty. It was one of the technicians on the back-up shift who had been left in charge of Goldstone’s scan converter. Stan Lebar later recalled: “I was listening to the communications traffic and heard someone say, ‘Make certain the reverse switch is in the reverse position.’ A couple of minutes later a second voice made the same announcement and a bit later another voice repeated the message. After that it would be a miracle if the switch was in the correct position as I could almost visualise someone throwing the switch each time the message was sent. I suspect by then the operator was so hyper that he didn’t know what position the switch was in.”
By now thoroughly confused, the Goldstone technician increased the contrast on the scan converter’s output, dragging most of the picture into the black. Still struggling, his next mistake was to adjust the focus, the result being that the picture was not as sharp. And a little while after that, he tried another setting, turning the picture to negative. This had the effect of compressing the shadow areas into white. With each mistake, the technician was compounding his incorrect settings.
The responsibility for choosing which TV images to put to air rested on the shoulders of Mission Control’s Ed Tarkington, known by his call sign “Houston TV”. Arrayed in front of Tarkington in a room behind the main Mission Control room were various monitors showing the TV images coming in from the tracking stations that had the lunar module in view. Generally speaking the bigger the dish, the better the TV image. Tarkington could not at first understand why the TV pictures he was seeing on his monitor from Honeysuckle were so much better than the ones he was seeing from Goldstone. How was it that Tom Reid’s team, where there was not an American accent to be heard, was outperforming NASA’s prime station in California with its much larger dish? Putting his faith in the bigger dish, Tarkington had at first chosen Goldstone’s TV images to put to air. But as he continued watching, it was impossible to make out what Armstrong was up to. Still he gave Goldstone one last chance. And 17 seconds after the Eagle’s camera had begun filming, Tarkington contacted Goldstone on Net 2:
HOUSTON TV: Goldstone video, Houston TV.
GOLDSTONE: Goldstone video, go ahead.
HOUSTON TV: Can you confirm that your reverse switch is in the proper position for the camera being upside down?
GOLDSTONE: Stand by, we will go to the reverse position… We are in reverse.
HOUSTON TV: Roger, thank you.
Thirty one seconds had now passed since the beginning of filming and Goldstone was still having trouble. Meanwhile, oblivious to all this drama at Mission Control, Armstrong had continued to make cautious but steady progress down the ladder. The Eagle’s landing struts were designed to telescope, cushioning any landing impact. But having landed gently, Armstrong found that there was a larger gap between the ladder’s bottom rung and the moon’s surface than he’d planned for. He dropped off the bottom rung onto the strut’s foot pad and then immediately jumped back up again to see whether he could overcome this gap. “It takes a pretty good little jump,” he said. After that, he stepped back down onto the footpad.
At Honeysuckle, staff had come from all over — secretaries, cooks, gardeners and many others — to stand silently behind Ed von Renouard’s scan converter, their eyes glued to his TV monitor. But there were too many of them for the confined space. And one minute and 36 seconds after filming had begun there was an announcement over the station’s intercom: “Will all personnel move away from the scan converter please.” A further nine seconds after that, Ed Tarkington was heard on Net 2:
HOUSTON TV: All stations, we have just switched video to Honeysuckle.
Having waited some more for the team at Goldstone to come good, Tarkington had finally given up on them. It was thanks to Honeysuckle that, for the first time, 600 million people could clearly make out Neil Armstrong. Among them were a lunchtime crowd of hundreds rugged up in their winter coats milling around the David Jones department store in central Sydney to watch TVs set up in its display windows; and the tens of thousands who crammed into New York’s Central Park on what over there was a sultry summer’s evening to view a bank of massive TV monitors specially erected by the CBS Network. This worldwide TV audience had just heard Armstrong say: “I’m at the foot of the ladder. The LM [lunar module] footpads are only depressed in the surface about one or two inches, although the surface appears to be very, very, fine-grained…”
It had been at this point in Armstrong’s voice transmission, one minute and 45 seconds after filming had begun, that Honeysuckle’s TV signal had first been seen by the world. For another 25 seconds, Armstrong continued to hold onto the lunar module’s strut. And with one of his boots still on the Eagle’s footpad, he tested the lunar dust with the tip of his other boot. Then he said: “As you get close to it, it’s almost like a powder. The ground mass is very fine. I’m going to step off the LM now.”
What followed was a short pause in Armstrong’s voice transmission during which Honeysuckle’s TV signal showed him letting go of the strut and stepping backwards to plant his left foot in the lunar dust. It was 12.56pm at Honeysuckle when Armstrong said on Net 1:
That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.
Tom Reid and his Honeysuckle teamhad nailed live television of this supreme moment: the culmination of more than a decade’s work by almost half a million people, when a human being had, for the first time in history, set foot on a celestial body. For those who were privy to the data streaming into Honeysuckle from Armstrong’s space suit, his heart was beating 112 times per minute, compared to Aldrin’s 81.
Honeysuckle’s live TV feed continued to go to air worldwide until the main signal from Parkes finally came online, eight minutes and 53 seconds after the lunar module’s camera had begun recording, and more than six minutes after Armstrong had taken his first step. From then until the end of the astronauts’ moon walk, Tarkington elected to use Parkes’ stronger signal generated by its larger dish for the worldwide TV broadcast.
Most people at Honeysuckle had no idea that they had transmitted the live TV of Armstrong’s first step because Ed Tarkington could only be heard by a select few. Nor did Tom Reid tell his family. It wasn’t until a function at Canberra’s Lakeside Hotel in 1989 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the moon landing that Reid finally let his hair down during a speech in which he reminisced about how Honeysuckle had brought Armstrong’s first step to the largest worldwide TV audience in history. “It hadn’t been planned that way,” he said of his team’s achievement. “But that’s the way it was. And God damn it, we were ready!”
Honeysuckle Creek: The Story of Tom Reid, a Little Dish and Neil Armstrong’s First Step, by Andrew Tink (New South, $34.99)