Honeysuckle Creek by Andrew Tink

Author:Andrew Tink
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742244297
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing

Morale is down as far as it can go,

Five o’clock and we wanna go home,

Station Director is also Lowe,

Five o’clock and we wanna go home.15

For a short while, Lowe’s charm and public relations skills were able to paper over these shortcomings. But a series of brutal simulations would soon reveal to NASA the true state of Honeysuckle’s disarray. On 26 June 1967, the Canberra Times reported that a ‘top secret’ aircraft, would shortly be arriving to test Honeysuckle’s readiness. This plane was a NASA-owned Super-Constellation, jam-packed with sixteen racks of equipment to generate all of an Apollo spacecraft’s signals, including voice, command and telemetry. To the trackers at Honeysuckle it had the electronic footprint of a spaceship. On board were six NASA specialists. Over a week in early July, this ‘Cal-plane’ as it was called, made multiple passes at predetermined altitudes, backwards and forwards over the Brindabella Mountains at a height of approximately 25 000 feet. Because this plane did not fly in a well-defined trajectory, it would prove to be more difficult to track than an Apollo spacecraft. It was said that ‘if you could track the Cal-plane, you could track anything’.16

NASA’s simulation team was led by George Harris Jr, a hard-driving alpha male perfectionist who roamed around Honeysuckle’s operations building with his team, firing all sorts of ‘What if ’ scenarios to Bryan Lowe’s frazzled staff. The idea was to apply maximum pressure. After all, the Honeysuckle guys were supposed to be able to pick up a twenty-watt signal from the Moon, about a fifth of the power needed to illuminate a domestic light bulb, and then through a series of complex steps, provide enough ‘gain’ on it to make it intelligible to flight controllers in Houston. This was difficult and delicate stuff. It soon became clear to Harris, from a combination of Cal-flights and ‘What if ’ sessions, that the Honeysuckle team was unable to complete many of the tracking station’s most basic functions, let alone cope with the high-end scenarios he had developed. And it didn’t take him long to figure out that the problem was with the director.17

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