Doonside, Bringelly & Paddington OTC stations assisted ARIA in many space programs leading up to the 20th July 1969 landing on the moon. “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”. We were using HF radio to communicate with US military aircraft, mainly in the Pacific Ocean, who were communicating directly with the spacecraft. All messages were passed through Paddington back to ARIA Control in the US.
At the conclusion of this program we were allowed to keep all the radio equipment paid for by the space program. Certificates were sent to the 3 stations & the manager had them framed & hung in their offices. Here is a badly faded copy of the Bringelly certificate, supplied by Don Withers & the pictures on it have disappeared. Someone might know where the originals ended up?
Regards,
Neil Yakalis
2 Comments
I had no knowledge of such an award. I thought that I would have spotted it in the ISTC. I would, however, suggest that NASA needed an award for the worst award I have ever seen. It does not have anything to say who it was from and it looks like a child did it with stick on ink stamps “Well Done” “Official”. I assume that is a picture of the moon top left and there may be a faded reference to NASA bottom left. None the less, it was better than the rest of the company got for the work that they did – no awards at all.
Robert
I found the following link very interesting but if you read the article the yanks did it all with no involvement of anyone else.
http://www.honeysucklecreek.net/other_stations/ARIA/ARIA_people.html