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Mike Dinn
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Mike Dinn was born and educated in England. After
graduating in Electrical Engineering (London) in 1955 he worked in British industry
mainly on aircraft electronics and electrics.
In 1960 he moved to Australia, and was responsible for aircraft flight testing Instrumentation with the Royal Australian Air Force.
Mike moved to the Canberra Deep Space Tracking Station (Tidbinbilla – part of NASA/JPL’s Deep Space Network) in 1966 as Deputy Station Director in charge of Operations, his first mission being Surveyor.
In 1967 he took a similar position at Honeysuckle Creek, one of NASA’s three main communications facility for the Apollo program, and was actively involved in missions 7 to 14.
He returned to the DSN station
during the building of the new 210 ft dish at Tidbinbilla, and spent a year
at JPL Pasadena (1972). This antenna supported Apollo 17 as its first task.
After a period in Australia’s Department of Defence he returned to the Deep Space Station in 1983, becoming Director in 1988. NASA’s main missions during this period were Voyager, Magellan and Galileo, but the facility also supported Shuttle until the TDRSS spacecraft were in place.
Mike retired in 1994 – on Apollo 11’s 25th anniversary, having just succeeded in obtaining an Apollo 11 lunar rock for display, presented by John Young.
Mike considers the highlight
of his career as being Apollo 11 operations (and in particular the TV of the
first lunar step to the world coming through Honeysuckle), closely followed
by being at Houston during Apollo 17 and sending some commands from Ed Fendell’s
INCO console on Gene Kranz’s shift, and also Apollo 8 where Honeysuckle
Creek first came into its own.
Mike was awarded two NASA Public Service Medals – in 1986 and 1995.
Favourite
Mission
(From a discussion on the Yahoo Apollo Group)
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“I had already voted for [Apollo] 8 for the reasons John cites. We worked together on the mission. In retrospect I’m amazed at the confidence we (the whole project) had, but everything possible had been done to prepare, including contingency planning.
Our HSK in-house sim capability came about as a result of a visit I had to Houston, when I sat in on several MOCR simulations with “Network”. I realised that we at the Station didn’t have the same depth of contingency capability as the Flight Control team.
So when I got back to HSK, and with Tom Reid’s support, we decided to build an in-house capability based around some excess consoles from the tracking ship CSQ (which I selected at Fremantle), and various other pieces of equipment to assemble the many Apollo spectrums. I even approached Howard Kyle at Houston at one point to see if we could lay our hands on an excess/spare/prototype PSP (pre-signal processor) which mixed the various signals in the CSM - but with no success.
The only thing we couldn’t simulate was American accents for astronaut and CAPCOM voice, so we had a number of laconic Australian voices pretending to land and step on the lunar surface. Messed it up a bit. The simulations were great for building confidence.
I used to say that the Apollo projects used only about 5 percent of support capability for a nominal mission, but we got to 95 per cent on 13. It was THE mission when the receiver operators earned their money – sorting out the LM signal from the SIVB on the same frequency. We had four receivers at HSK, four at Tidbinbilla and two at Parkes all trying.
And as John said the later missions added a great deal of complexity for us - the lunar rover was a complete “spacecraft” itself from a comms point of view.)”
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Ops Console during Apollo 11. From left to right: John Saxon (standing), Ken Lee, Tom Reid (Station Director), Mike Dinn (standing – on the phone to Parkes), and Ian Grant. |
The Space Show – 11th November 2003 with Mike Dinn and John Saxon. Listen in Windows Media Player format (about 18Mb) – about 80 minutes.
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In July 2007, Mike was interviewed by James DeRuvo for Conversations
with Apollo.
Mike’s interview is available here, courtesy of James DeRuvo.
(It’s a 19MB mp3 file, and runs for 41 minutes.)
Read about origin of the HSK designation for Honeysuckle Creek
