Address & Contact
Orroral Rd
Rendezvous Creek ACT 2620
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Australia played an important role in twentieth century tracking and communications. In 1960 the US and Australia signed an agreement under which Australia established and operated a number of tracking stations which would form part of worldwide networks under the control of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA.
Three of these new tracking stations were located in the ACT, at Tennent, Paddys River, and Rendezvous Creek where they would be protected from radio interference (Gorman 2012: 23).
Three space tracking stations operated in the ACT by 1967:
• Tidbinbilla Tracking Station (active) for DSN: Deep Space Network;
• Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station (no longer active) for MSFN: Manned Spaceflight Network; and
• Orroral Valley Tracking Station (no longer active) for STADAN: the Space Tracking and Data Acquisition Network.
Orroral Valley Tracking Station was operational by October 1965 (Clark 2012: 15). ‘Orroral’ could come from the Aboriginal word ‘Urongal,’ meaning, ‘tomorrow,’ indicated as such in Sir Thomas L.
Mitchell’s 1834 map of the area. The tracking station encompassed about 40 acres and was constructed with a powerhouse, canteen,
water supply, mechanical workshops and operations building. Antennae and buildings were situated to minimise interference with each other with some levelling of the site was required before construction.
The Orroral Valley Tracking Station operated until 1985, supporting the large number of scientific satellites that helped develop and support the manned space flight program and other missions. In its later years it also communicated with the scientific packages left on the moon by the Apollo astronauts, and tracked manned spacecraft for the Apollo-Soyuz, and the Space Shuttle programs.