The OTC Satellite Earth Station Carnarvon was established to meet the need for more reliable and higher quality communications for NASA's Apollo Moon project. 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", also contracting the COMSAT Corporation to launch three Intelsat-2 communications satellites.© Wikipedia
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You can't miss the Overseas Telecommunication Dish (OTC) when you visit Carnarvon in Western Australia. It is a communication satellite dish sitting on the hill at the edge of town - located on the North West Coastal Highway and open from 11 am to 4 pm most days. We headed out to the OTC which is now a museum and enjoyed a few hours learning about the importance of this satellite dish to space travel.
The OTC was built in 1966 to help ensure reliable communication for the nearby tracking Station. This satellite dish was used to help the USA track space shuttles and it also conveyed Neil Armstrong's famous words to the world when he first set foot on the moon. It was from here that Australia transmitted its first live satellite television broadcast.
The Carnarvan Space and Technology Museum is very interesting and tells stories of the people who came to Carnarvon in the early days to work at the tracking station. There is even a space shuttle simulator to climb inside and experience a ride through space.