1923 - 1995
Bob Leslie was the first Station Director
of Tidbinbilla and later Assistant Secretary, American Projects Branch.
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At the opening ceremony for Tidbinbilla.
Australian Minister for Supply, Mr (later Sir) Allen
Fairhall (left); Australian Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies
(centre) with Station Director Bob Leslie (right).
19th March 1965.
Photo kept by Clive Jones, passed on by John Heath,
scanned by Mike Dinn.
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On a sunny summer day, 7 February 1969, Ozro M. Covington and
Dale W. Call from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland paid Honeysuckle
Creek a visit.
From left: Willson Hunter (NASA Senior Science Rep in Canberra),
Tom Reid (Station Director), Ozro Covington, Dale Call,
and Bob Leslie (previously Station Director at Tidbinbilla).
Photo: Hamish Lindsay.
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Bob Leslie was frequently called on to provide
expert commentary for the electronic media. He was a commentator on ABC-TV (Australia) for the launch of Apollo 11, as well as on ABC Radio for the Apollo 11 lunar landing.
Listen to
a 38 second (160kb) mp3 recording
from ABC Radio at about 7:30am Australian Eastern Time, on Monday
21st July 1969. Bob discusses the timing of the start of the Apollo
11 EVA and the likelihood that Australian tracking stations would
provide the TV coverage. (with thanks to Dwight Steven-Boniecki.) |
And heres a link to a 90
minute audio recording made by Ray Lloyd, in which Bob Leslie speaks
about the background to Australian / US space co-operation and the setting
up of Tidbinbilla (link to Mike Dinns pages). |
See also this extract from Uplink-Downlink by Doug Mudgway
The Need for a Second Network
“To support the more sophisticated missions
of the 1965 to 1968 period, the DSN recognized the need to expand and improve
its communications, mission, and network control capabilities. The two major
lunar missions nearing launch readiness, Lunar Orbiter and Surveyor, would
pave the way for the start of the Apollo program and would transmit data streams
at thousands of data bits per second rather than the tens or hundreds of bits
per second received from the Mariners and Rangers. The increased complexity
of the spacecraft would require expanded and faster monitor, control, and
display facilities.
For the first time, the DSN began to find
that the simultaneous presence of several spacecraft on missions to different
destinations created new problems in network and mission control. The vexing
problem of DSN antenna scheduling began to arise as several spacecraft
began to demand tracking coverage from the single DSN antenna available at
each longitude. The difficulty of assigning priority among competing spacecraft
whose view periods overlapped at a particular antenna site was to prove intractable
for many years. The problem was exacerbated by competition between flight
projects from NASA Centers other than JPL, each of which felt entitled to
equal consideration, for the limited DSN resources. The DSN was placed in
the impossible situation of arbitrating the claims for priority consideration.
The regular Network Scheduling meetings conducted by the DSN often
resulted in the establishment of priorities that were determined more by the
dominant personalities in the group than by the real needs of the projects.
With all of these imminent new requirements
in mind, NASA decided to embark on a program to construct a second network
of DSN stations. Arguments as to where the stations were to be located were
complicated not only by technical considerations, but by political and international
considerations. There were already two stations at Goldstone, one at the Pioneer
site and a second at the Echo site. Eventually, NASA decided to build two
new stations, one at Robledo, about 65 kilometers west of Madrid, Spain, and
the other at Tidbinbilla, about 16 kilometers from Canberra, Australia.
NASA looked to the Spanish Navys Bureau
of Yards and Docks to design and construct the Robledo station. For its new
facilities in Australia, NASA dealt with the Australian Government Department
of Supply through its representative, Robert A. Leslie.
As an Australian foreign national, Robert
A. Leslie played a major role in shaping the relationship between NASA-JPL
and the Australian government, on whose good offices NASA depended for support
of its several tracking stations in that country. With family origins in the
state of Victoria, Australia, and an honors degree in electrical engineering
from the University of Melbourne (1947), Leslie had worked on radio controlled
pilotless aircraft for the military in both England and Australia for fifteen
years before he encountered NASA. He was a high-ranking officer with the Australian
Public (Civil) Service (an affiliation that he retained throughout his career)
when, in 1963, he became the Australian governments representative for
NASAs new deep space tracking facility being built at Tidbinbilla, near
Canberra in southeastern Australia.
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Inaugural Station Director Bob Leslie (centre) chats with an unidentified group (WRE and / or NASA?) over lunch in this WRE photo taken on 20th August 1963.
It was apparently taken at the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve.
Photo from the Tidbinbilla Archives. WRE ID MF63-23-26.
Updated 2024 scan: Colin Mackellar. |
As might be expected, the success of a NASA
venture in a foreign country depended to a large extent on the personalities
of the people who were directly involved on each side of the international
interface. The foundation for the success of what later became the Canberra
Deep Space Communications Complex (CDSCC) was, in no small part, due to Bob
Leslies personal ability to get along with people at all
levels. In representing the Australian side of negotiations between NASA and
JPL, Bob Leslie was firm but gracious, capable, and friendly. His unassuming
paternal manner endeared him alike to counterparts at NASA, his
colleagues at JPL, and his staff in Australia.
Along with a few key Australian technical
staff members, Leslie spent a year at Goldstone assembling and testing the
electronic equipment that would subsequently be reassembled at Tidbinbilla
to complete the first 26-meter tracking station (DSS 42) at the new site.
He was the first director of the new Complex when it began service in the
Network in 1965. It was there that he established the procedures and protocols
on which all future DSN operational interactions between JPL and the Australian
stations would be based.
A few years later, in 1969, Leslie left the
hands-on environment of the deep space tracking station to head the Australian Space Office, a branch of the Australian Government
that, under various names and government administrations, would guide future
expansion and consolidation of all NASA facilities in Australia. In that capacity,
his charm, experience, and wisdom served the DSN well.
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Bob Leslie, at right, in front of the 64 metre DSS-14 at Goldstone.
From left: 1. unidentified, 2. unidentified, 3. Alan Sinclair (Aust. Dept. of Supply), 4. Dick Fahnestock (Canberra JPL Rep), 5. Tom Potter (JPL Station Director), 6. Bob Leslie (first Tidbinbilla Station Director).
Photo preserved and scanned by Michelle Sinclair. |
Leslies build was stocky and solid,
his appearance craggy, his attitude laid back. Cheerful, sociable,
easy to talk to, and blessed with a good sense of humor, he was held in high
regard by everyone he met, Australian or American. Tennis was his sport, fishing
his hobby, and do-it-yourself home building his passion. In his
younger days, he actually excavated the ground with shovel and wheelbarrow
and single-handedly built the family swimming pool at his home in Canberra.
Many a JPL engineer enjoyed a poolside barbecue at the Leslie home in the
course of a technical visit to the station.
Robert Leslie retired in 1983 and died in
Canberra, Australia, in 1996. [Actually, 1995.]
By mid-1965, the two new stations were completed
and declared operational. The DSN then had two stations in Australia, (Woomera
and Tidbinbilla), one in Spain, and one in South Africa. In addition, a permanent
spacecraft monitoring station had been built at Cape Canaveral to replace
the temporary facility with its hand-steered tracking antenna. Impressive
as this growth was, still greater changes were in progress.”
Reproduced
from pages 6466 of the book UplinkDownlink: A History
of the Deep Space Network 1957-1997 (Washington, D.C.: NASA SP-2001-4227,
2002), by Douglas J. Mudgway.
With grateful thanks to Doug Mudgway
for his permission to use this material.
Details of the book are available from the NASA
History Office. It can be purchased, or freely downloaded as
PDF files. The index PDF is here.
(Note that to navigate to other parts of the book, you may need to have
the Acrobat Reader plugin enabled for your browser.
The section containing the text quoted above
is here.
A scanned version of the entire book is available at Google Books.
See also Doug Mudgways book, Big
Dish: Building America's Deep Space Connection To The Planets |