PAT DISHES UP MOON MEMORIES
FIFTY years on from the moon landing, Leopold’s Pat Boland remembers being 19 years old and “just sitting there, glued to a little black and white television”, never dreaming that he’d end up working on the very same space program, tracking Apollo 17 on its mission to the moon.
He was 19 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and three years later he emigrated to Australia from England and landed a job at Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station near Canberra.
It was smaller than the famous Parkes Observatory, but no less vital.
Its claim to fame was being the first station in the world to receive and broadcast Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon for seven minutes prior to Parkes.
Mr Boland worked as a driver — one of the men in charge of operating the 26m antenna to follow the Apollo 17 mission, and then Skylab when it became the United States’ first manned space station.
He remembers how different things were back then — “people were sitting in the control room, smoking” — and recalls excitedly watching the command module take off from the moon through a 20-inch telescope attached to the antenna.
While Apollo 17 took place across a few days in December 1972, training for the mission involved running simulation after simulation.
“They brought a Super Constellation (aeroplane) over to Canberra and they’d fly it around and we’d have to track it,” Mr Boland recalled.
Deliberate faults were introduced into the simulations; crew members even faked heart attacks and sicknesses “so you’d have to do their job too”. But Honeysuckle Creek was renowned for never having failed a single simulation.
“I think it was brilliant,” Mr Boland. “A lot of good came out of it … and it looks good on your CV — working for NASA!”