The Dish

I was seven years old when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon's surface.

I remember watching scratchy, snowy images on our black and white television where we lived in Longview, Washington, and not fully understanding the huge impact of what was happening. Some of the wonder must have sunk into my little brain at that time, because I stepped outside, walked into the middle of the road in front of our house on Dover Street, and stared up at the moon in a cloudless, blue sky.

It was a warm summer day, July 1969, and besides the impression of understanding there was a man way up there, I noticed no one was outside. I stood in the street, and not a car whizzed by, no children were outside playing in our lower middle class neighborhood. It was silent. That's what I remember most, I think, the still silence during summer vacation when normally the neighborhood was loud with children on bicycles, playing games in yards, calling to each other, laughing and squealing. Nothing. Just quiet.

Steve brought home a movie a few months ago, simply called The Dish. Australian made, it's the story of Australia's role in world history. Up until that point I always thought that the images we saw on television nearly 40 years ago came via satellite through NASA in Texas. Not true. They were broadcast from Australia.

At that time, Australia had the biggest satellite (the size of a football field) in the Southern Hemisphere, set in a sheep paddock in the rural town of Parkes, New South Wales. The dish also had a 64 meter telescope (roughly about 210 feet.) According to writer Dennis Schwartz, NASA aimed to use the dish as a backup to its prime receiver in Goldstone, California for the moon landing and moon walk. But when the astronauts decided not to take a sleep break after landing on the moon, the change in Apollo 11's flight schedule made the Australian dish NASA's only hope for giving the world live images. My understanding is that it had something to do with where the moon was in relation to the northern hemisphere as well.

So on our vacation to Queensland, we passed by Parkes.

From the highway, the dish came into view, set quite a way back in that retired sheep field.



Distant view of Dish

I can't accurately describe what I felt: Proud...of America and Australia working together to make world history, and sad...that most Americans probably don't know about Australia's role in such a monumental feat. I know I didn't. And I also marveled that the live feed of Neil Armstrong's giant leap for mankind almost didn't happen at all. Gusts of wind of more than 60 miles per hour started howling just when the Dish crew were asked to send back the television feed of the moon walk. There was concern that the Dish wouldn't function properly. But the wind died down just enough for it to work.

As Steve turned off the highway to take me up close and for a peek inside the visitor's center, I was awestruck at the enormity of that Dish, and of its history. A lump formed in my throat and unshed tears stung my eyes as I gawked at the thing. I recommend getting The Dish and watching it for a whole new look at history. With all that information recently put into my head, I was able to really appreciate what I saw.



Steve at Visitor's Center, for scale

Today, the dish is still the largest operating radio telescope in the southern hemisphere and is used for single dish operation and global Very Long Baseline Interferometry, which is an advanced space geodetic technique to measure a distance of thousands of kilometers between antennas with an accuracy of a few meters.

Australians are very proud of the role they played in this. And they should be.

I stood in the parking lot within a stone's throw from that satellite, and looked up into a somewhat overcast sky with breaks of blue, and outer space beyond it. I remembered a little girl who stood in the road on the other side of the world and wondered how a man could be on the moon. And here I was, 40 years later, where it all came to earth.

Amazing.