Moon day, 2020

Today (20 July) is Moon Day. The day celebrates the historic landing on the moon that occurred on the 20th July in 1969.

Honeysuckle Creek

This time last year there was a lot of attention on the history of the Apollo program and the moon landing as it was the 50th anniversary of the event. For Canberra the anniversary was of particular importance because, the former Tracking Station, Honeysuckle Creek in Namadgi National Park, was the station which received and relayed to the world the first televised footage of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon on 20 July 1969.

The National Museum of Australia includes Honeysuckle Creek and the Parkes radio telescope’s assistance with the moon landing as a Defining Moment. You can read this here. If you would like to know more about Honeysuckle Creek there is Honeysuckle Creek : The Story of Tom Reid, a Little Dish and Neil Armstrong's First Step by Andrew Tink. Here is a taste:

Sydney Video’s Charlie Goodman would choose Honeysuckle’s more stable signal to send on to Houston, as least until Parkes main dish could get a signal. This meant that for Neil Armstrong’s first step, Honeysuckle’s 85-foot dish would be the only available TV back-up for Goldstone’s 210-foot dish, which because it still had the Moon well in view, had just been earmarked by Houston as the prime station for live TV. Tom switched on his station-wide intercom and momentarily suppressing a feeling of rapidly rising excitement, he barked ‘Battle Short!’
— Andrew Tink, Honeysuckle Creek : The Story of Tom Reid, a Little Dish and Neil Armstrong's First Step

Australia’s contribution to the early years of space exploration

On the 50th anniversary Capital history here's author Rohan Goyne drew attention to the lesser known story of the Australian contribution to space exploration in the decade 1962-72. This includes the pioneering work of John Colvin a Melbourne ophthalmologist who invented the anti-glare glasses used for the Apollo program and Island Lagoon, Australia’s first deep space tracking station. These stories are included in Rohan’s E-book Apollo Stories - Space History and Law During the Pioneering Years of the Apollo Space Program.

Acknowledgement: The image above is the one to one scale model of the Lunar Lander which was exhibited at the ANU School of Art in 2019 to commemorate the moon landing. Rohan provided this image.

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