Apollo 11 Moon Landing Anniversary: Radio telescope in remote Australian field helps broadcast event to the world

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Half a century ago, an estimated 600-thousand people huddled around TVs across the world to watch man's first steps on the moon. But that broadcast would not have happened without the help of a radio telescope in a remote Australian field. Greg Navarro has more.

Most people old enough to remember seeing Neil Armstrong bound across the surface of the moon can tell you where they were at that moment.

JOHN SARKISSIAN OPERATIONS SCIENTIST, PARKES RADIO TELESCOPE "I was sitting cross-legged on a cold wooden floor of my school's assembly room and we came in in the morning and the teachers informed us that we would in fact be watching television all day."

That's especially true for 87-year-old David Cooke. Cooke was a radio receiver engineer working inside the Parkes Radio Telescope, one of 3 tracking stations across the globe tasked with beaming pictures of the Apollo 11 moon landing around the world.

DAVID COOKE FORMER RADIO RECEIVER ENGINEER "We were just concerned that we would do our job properly and nothing would go wrong and cause the track to be lost."

Built in 1961, the site was chosen here in part because it remained far enough from Sydney surrounded by clear skies. This radio telescope was actually one of two sites in Australia that were responsible for tracking the Apollo 11 mission.

GREG NAVARRO PARKES, AUSTRALIA "About 9 minutes into the broadcast, the moon was just in the right place to be picked up by the main antenna here - and NASA switched to the Parkes Radio Telescope. In fact, the signal was so strong coming out of this remote part of Australia that NASA chose to remain with Parkes for the remainder of the broadcast."

DAVID COOKE FORMER RADIO RECEIVER ENGINEER "We were very, very pleased that from all the things that could have gone wrong, everything was ok. And there he was, standing on the moon."

The Parkes Radio Telescope - known to locals as the dish - remains one of the largest single-dish telescopes dedicated to astronomy in the southern hemisphere. For Cooke, the enormity of what he and his colleagues had just been a part of took a while to sink in.

DAVID COOKE FORMER RADIO RECEIVER ENGINEER "It was after we had finished tracking when I went down, outside the telescope, and looked up and saw the moon. It was then it struck me that this was an amazing thing, that there was a man, two men up walking on the moon and a third one there as well."

A single day at work that's earned the people who were there, and this remotely placed dish a special place in history. Greg Navarro, CGTN, Parkes.