OTC Satellite Earth Station Carnarvon

NASA contracted Australia's Overseas Telecommunications Commission (OTC) "to provide an earth station near Carnarvon, Western Australia to link the NASA tracking station in that area to the control centre in the USA",[1][full citation needed] also contracting COMSAT to launch three Intelsat-2 communications satellites.

The next day, a live BBC television broadcast from a studio in London featured interviews linking UK families with their British migrant relatives standing in Robinson Street, Carnarvon.

The "sugar scoop" became famous again on 21 July 1969, the day of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, relaying Neil Armstrong's first steps on the Moon from NASA's Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station, Canberra, to Perth's TV audience via Moree earth station – the first live telecast into Western Australia.

A larger parabolic antenna was commissioned in late 1969 to upgrade the support for the later Apollo missions.

During OTC's last years of operation in Carnarvon, multiple tracking contracts were completed including: The station was decommissioned in April 1987, but the site is still actively involved in solar scientific research, hosting a node of the Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network.

The 12.8-metre-wide (42 ft) Casshorn antenna, commissioned in October 1966, has interacting parabolic and hyperbolic reflectors in a characteristic "sugar scoop" form. It claims to be the only remaining example in the world. The larger 29.8-metre (98 ft) parabolic dish antenna was commissioned in late 1969.
The dish in August 2009