Abandoned Satellite Ground Stations

  

            The online edition of The Atlantic posted a piece on Feb 6/12 entitled:  Earth Station:   The Afterlife of Technology at the End of the World.  This piece is about the Jamesburg Earth Station, a now abandoned satellite ground station in California in a remote valley just inland from Carmel.   Except for the empty buildings which once held the tons of electronic equipment required to decode and process the hundreds of channels of telephone, teletype, and TV signals which once flowed through this nerve center, all that remains is a massive, 90 ton, 90ft diameter parabolic dish.  The property is owned by a millionaire who mainly bought it for the land.              Yet this station allowed us to see the Apollo 11 moon landing live, and to receive live Viet Nam War reporting, and Nixon’s visit to China.  And it was the main communications link from North America to the Far East for over 30 years.

             This was a second generation installation.   The first generation rig was built about a decade earlier, a ways further up highway 101 at Camp Roberts.  The world’s first successful synchronous orbit communications satellite was Syncom II, launched from Vandenberg Airbase in July 1963.  The main earth stations to work this satellite were at Ft. Dix, NJ, near the east coast, Camp Roberts, CA, near the west coast, and the USNS Kingsport at sea.  These stations were testing cutting edge communications technology at that time, and were manned by civilian technicians from various contractors, and by a team of military technicians from the U.S. Army Signal Corps.   As a young Signal Corps technician, I was stationed at Camp Roberts and was a member of this team.  In an earlier post, I have described the Syncom project.

            After Syncom had proved that the theory of synchronous communication satellites was sound, (a theory suggested by Arthur C. Clark in 1946) the next step was to build larger satellites and larger ground stations to utilize them.  And with the Jamesburg station, that step became reality.  But the racks of communications equipment that gave us these marvels have long been scrapped, like a old horse hauled off to the knackers after a lifetime of faithful service.  Emotionally, the Atlantic piece is like Turner’s painting of The Fighting Temeraire.  It reminds us that when the noblest technical achievements of a previous generation are being hauled off to the scrap yard, we might at least pause for moment of reflection.  Or perhaps a better metaphor might be the elaborate sand paintings which Buddhist monks ritually construct,  only to be swept up and poured into a bucket—and scattered into the sea.  The monks do this to remind themselves that all material things must pass. 

            I once read that through we still have all the telemetry tapes from our moon shots and even some early interplanetary probes,  we can no longer read them because the computers and software designed to do this have all been scrapped, and we do not even have copies of the codes which would allow  us to reconstruct them.  No one bothered to save a copy. They say that the space race was a contest between East and West, and I always presumed that the “East” in this race referred to the science of the Soviets.  But perhaps we were really trying to compete with the sublime detachment of the Buddhist monks.   Perhaps the space program was the grandest sand painting of all time.