Part 1 – Island Lagoon

part 1 (49 minutes, 18MB mp3 file)

Background in Queensland Police Wireless Section.

Arrival in Woomera.

Life at Island Lagoon Minitrack.

A Minitrack pass, and the Minitrack Optical Tracking System.

Time to leave Woomera.

Part 2 – Mariner IV

part 2 (17 minutes, 6.4MB mp3 file)

Earliest days at DSS-42 Tidbinbilla, and members of the team.

Receiving the first signals from Mariner IV at Mars. What it was like on the day. A letter to home.

Mariner IV in the Tidbinbilla section.
Newspaper mentioned by Bruce.

Part 3 – Surveyor

part 3 (11 minutes, 4.1MB mp3 file)

The first soft-landing on the Moon and the amazingly successful Surveyor program.

Part 4 – Apollo

part 4 (26 minutes, 9.4MB mp3 file)

Adding the Wing at Tidbinbilla.

Apollo 7 – something of a surprise.

Apollos 8–12.

Apollo 13 – the dash to Parkes. (Photo here.)

Bruce adds (January 2011): “I know now, on reflection, that with the first pass of Apollo 13 at Parkes, the cable that I had in my hand that I couldn’t connect to Honeysuckle was a Telemetry data cable, because I now remember feeding the Downlink Audio into an ordinary phone line that the CSIRO had set up.”