Location

The site for the Australian Apollo station was a 14 acre radio-quiet location surrounded by granite peaks in the Australian Alps, 32km SSW of Canberra, Australia’s national capital.

The area is now part of the Namadgi National Park.

Honeysuckle Creek Location Map Click on the image to download an 80kb PDF.

The location of the centre of station antenna using the Geocentric Datum GDA94 (or WGS84) reference is –

(The original survey figures were – Latitude 35° 35' 05.0566" South, Longitude 148° 58' 35.6815" East based on the AGD66 datum which was changed to the GDA94 datum on 1 January 2000, and ‘moved’ the station 200 metres to the north east.)

See this Google Earth placemark® – which also has the plan of the station and the Ops building as an overlay. (It’s a 950kb file – with thanks to Harald Kucharek – and requires Google Earth to be installed on your computer).

The site was close enough to Canberra for staff to commute and isolated enough to be shielded from man-made radio noise. Being surrounded by bushland and native fauna, Honeysuckle was arguably the most peaceful setting for any NASA tracking station.

This photo, taken from the Telstra Tower on Black Mountain in Canberra, gives an idea of both the proximity of Honeysuckle to the city and also the ruggedness of the terrain of the Australian Alps. Suburban Woden is in the left foreground. Mount Taylor is the hill between Woden and the distant mountains. The devastating bushfires of January 2003 affected a huge area of the Alps, including Mt. Tennent and the Honeysuckle site – and even came over Mount Taylor into suburban Canberra. Photo: Colin Mackellar, October 2003.

Honeysuckle Creek was just a mountain ridge away from the Orroral Valley Tracking Station – built as a STADAN (Satellite Tracking and Data Network) site – which later played an important role in the Apollo-Soyuz mission. It supported the Apollo Program through its work with scientific payloads, notably the ALSEP equipment left in the Moon.

The Honeysuckle site looking north-east before the road to the station had been sealed and landscaping finished. The sealed road, when it was built, entered from the left. Photo appears to have been taken from the Coll Tower ridge, at a spot about 1300m NW of the Coll Tower. Photo: Hamish Lindsay.

Honeysuckle Creek – the creek after which the station was named. Photo taken by Rhelma Lawrence in January 1978. Scan by Nevil Eyre.