In April 2023, NASA announced their Artemis II test flight mission to the moon, originally planned for 2024, would be pushed back to “No earlier than September 2025”. This is the test flight for the Artemis III voyage, which will land humans on the moon a little over 50 years since the first moon landing in 1969. The Valley’s Mark Foster didn’t see that landing: he was too busy at work…as a receiver operator at the ‘Apollo Wing’ at Tidbinbilla’s DSS42 facility, ensuring the astronauts could communicate with Houston.
Visitors to Yarrawa Estate Winery wouldn’t know Foster had ever been involved with space exploration, let alone the famous Apollo missions. The only clue is a framed certificate of recognition for his work that hangs on the wall of his office, inset with a small photograph and an even smaller medallion. The photo shows Foster and two colleagues of the time; Foster is turned away, looking back at the antenna. The medallion is made from metal that orbited the moon, on board Apollo 8: the first lunar mission with humans aboard. “That was the scary one,” he says, describing the heart-in-mouth wait during the long minutes that all they heard was static, as the orbiting spacecraft journeyed to the far side.
A Moss Vale boy, Foster joined the army at fifteen to learn a trade. “We had to sign up for nine years and I chose to be in Telecommunications,” Why? “It sounded great [compared with] bricklayer or carpenter, which I should’ve been,” he says, trades which must’ve been aplenty in Moss Vale at the time. He put in for architectural draftsman too but they weren’t taking them from his intake.
At almost eighteen, he’d earned his trade certificate as a Radio Mechanic (later the role was called Radio Technician). As one of the top half of a class of eighteen, he was recruited to the Royal Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (RAEME) – a colonel from RAEME taught in the training program and liked to pick the best for his team. The top six of that RAEME cohort went on to be trained as radar specialists, operating, repairing and maintaining radar equipment – to hit a target, you needed to know where it was.
“Why the army had radar is because they had a [piece of equipment] called a predictor […] This is World War II, well before my time. But that’s why the army had radar.” The predictor would use the information about an enemy plane’s location and make calculations to predict where the plane would be and feed that data to the guns so they could accurately strike the target. “That’s why the army had radar technicians, and that’s why we were assigned to Artillery.”
By the time Foster got there, the predictors were on the way out and he was mostly working with the brand-new mortar-locating radars, which tracked mortar bombs in the air and predicted their likely launch position. Foster worked on these, including a stint in Vietnam. He notes these radars were soon superseded because mostly the enemy moved the mortar position straight after the strike, so you’d be shelling the wrong position. This breadth of radar experience could only have helped him later.
Foster left the army aged only 24, in the rank of Sergeant after his nine years, and got a job working with the first calculators, which wasn’t an unusual step. This was the mid-1960s and Foster says IBM and Honeywell and the like were picking off those who’d come to the end of their nine years. With a baby on the way, and a ballot bid in for a block of land in Sydney, Foster still took the gig when an army friend who’d started at Tidbinbilla invited him to “come and work with me”. The day they were going to go to Canberra, Foster went to the post office and there was the letter offering the land. But they’d made their decision and in 1967 they set off to housing in Canberra and work at the Tidbinbilla Deep Space Instrumentation Facility DSS42 (today, the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex).
Opened in 1965, the Tidbinbilla facility was part of the Canberra hub of NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), established to support the NASA missions to Venus and Mars, with California and Madrid making up the three facilities in the network which ensures each space mission is continuously in contact with Earth: as she turns on her axis, the signal-tracking responsibility is handed from one DSN location to the next. Honeysuckle Creek and Parkes also have antennas, which were run by NASA at that time and, when the Apollo missions began, the ‘Apollo Wing’, a replica of Honeysuckle Creek tracking station equipment, was built at Tidbinbilla antenna as a backup. It’s here that Foster was working.
The facility operated 24 hours, with a shift of about 30 technicians of all types. Shifts were normally eight hours, or twelve and a half hours during a mission, although you could find yourself doing 17 if the unexpected happened. The team was ready for the unexpected. “Tidbinbilla had recruited a lot of ex-army or ex-navy – people who’d been trained as technicians, basically, and most of them were ex-service guys of some sort. There were guys that had flown in British bombers with H-bombs in them, guys that had done all sorts of things.”
The Tidbinbilla tracking station is not the one featured in the film The Dish – that’s Parkes (where Foster stayed in his first hotel, on a work trip) – but a similar camaraderie colours Foster’s recollections and it’s clear the team was close even later, after they left for other careers – nicknames, unofficial competitive challenges, and sometimes carpooling the hour-long trip in from Canberra. Two of Mark and Sue Fosters’ four kids were born at this time and he tells of a car trip where a woman staffer sitting behind him had mentioned the smell of vomit, everyone curious until he realised the baby must’ve had a spew down his shoulder. This and other stories, and his ‘archive’ from the time, consisting of a small packet of diagrams and photos in a desk drawer, underscored for me how, to Foster, this was just a job – exciting at times, ok to interesting at others.
Sitting at his receiver/exciter, Foster was responsible for bringing in the data from the antenna that would be sent to Houston, via the telephone exchange in Deakin.
“As the missions happened, we used to sit down and do all the training [with Honeysuckle Creek], you know training, training and training, but also we were responsible for maintaining all the equipment. So you can imagine how many cables and [so on]. So even when we didn’t have the earphones on we were doing what they called modifications to this, modifications to that. The actual components of these receivers were big racks that pulled out – but they were gold plated, and you used to have white gloves on to touch them […] It was all very special.” An irreverent smile.
Earlier, I’d asked about the impact of being part of something so momentous. “Your contribution basically is sitting there with a set of earphones on, listening to all the stuff, and if the unit broke down well you were s’posed to fix it but so was the bloke nextdoor to you, and then so was the bloke at Honeysuckle Creek. So the redundancy program in the structure was just phenomenal, beyond comprehension.”
As NASA investigated the Apollo 13 disaster and redesigned systems, the tracking activity slowed. “After Apollo 14, we could see it was all winding down, so there was a mass changing of occupation.” Foster and many of the others left for other careers, his path taking him to the insurance sector. When he retired, he and Sue bought the land in Kangaroo Valley, which was mostly cleared, where they built the house and tasting room and planted grapevines, nuts and a fruit orchard. They both still love it, including the work of running the place hands-on. Far from being the pinnacle of his life, it’s clear Foster’s time working as a human cog in the machinery of NASA’s Deep Space Network is just another adventure in a life that has been full of them.
Speaking of adventure, it is no longer just professional astronauts who might get to go to space, with Elon Musk and others racing to be the first to undertake private commercial missions to Mars. I wondered what Foster thought of this. “Ratbags,” he said. “Just a waste of money – feed some poor people with it or something. Exploration of the moon was quite a different thing [and] developed [the science], and what the Americans do on Mars with their little spacecraft, I think that’s an amazing thing. I think that’s good.”
The CDSCC will once again provide support for a moon landing, with NASA’s Artemis missions. The Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex (CDSCC) at Tidbinbilla is open to visitors (by booking only) and is enthusiastic about engaging with the public, via schools or interest groups, or over email. Young Valley folk pursuing studies in drafting, engineering, robotics or communications may just want to take a leaf out of Mark Foster’s book and look at the Australian Space Agency’s broad range of job roles (listed at www.space.gov.au). Who knows, you might be on shift the next time humans are on the moon.
Selena Hanet-Hutchins
