Kiwi’s Moon landing moment
Tomorrow marks the 50-year anniversary of man walking on the Moon – an event immortalised as one of the greatest accomplishments of human history.
A lesser known fact is that it took three strategically positioned communication stations to make it all possible: one in California, one in Madrid, and one in the Australian wilderness. From Tidbinbilla Station on the edge of an Australian desert, New Zealander Keith Brockelsby and his team of engineers played the role of middle man between Nasa’s Houston headquarters and the spacecraft, transmitting data and executing demands.
They monitored fuel levels, inspected atmospheric conditions, and even checked the heart rate of the astronauts. It was a job that was new territory in every sense of the word but Brockelsby downplays the thrill of it.
‘‘It really wasn’t all that exciting, I suppose. We’d been working for a long, long time getting ready with trial missions.
‘‘The spacecraft had been travelling for two to three days to get to the Moon anyway.’’
Because of Earth’s rotation, all three stations were required to keep a constant eye on Apollo 11.
Houston did the talking, the stations helped with the transmission of information.
But there was only so much they could do remotely, and Brockelsby is still in awe of Neil Armstrong’s knowledge of the landing craft. ‘‘A hell of a lot of it had to be done by memory. He had to remember sequences of buttons to be able to execute commands.’’ Things didn’t always go to plan. At one point, mission control overloaded the spacecraft with data, forcing the astronauts to reset the computers five times.
In the end, it came down to the experience of those on board to get the mission across the line, Brockelsby said. ‘‘Armstrong actually flew the thing in [to land on the Moon] by hand.’’
Brockelsby, 87, is now retired on Auckland’s North Shore but maintains a keen interest in space travel. This weekend, he will travel to Canberra for a special celebration of the Moon landing.