Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station
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Honeysuckle Creek was a NASA tracking station near Canberra, Australia, which played an important role in supporting Project Apollo. The station was opened in 1967 and closed in 1981.
Its most noted achievement was providing the world with the first pictures of the Apollo 11 Moonwalk on Monday, 21 July, 1969. Apart from the television pictures they provided, Honeysuckle Creek and Tidbinbilla had voice and telemetry contact with the lunar and command modules.
After the conclusion of the Apollo Moon missions in 1972, Honeysuckle Creek began supporting regular Skylab passes, the Apollo scientific stations left on the Moon by astronauts, and assisting the Deep Space Network with interplantery tracking commitments.
In 1974 at the conclusion of the Skylab programme, Honeysuckle Creek joined the Deep Space Network as Deep Space Station 44. Honeysuckle Creek closed in December 1981, its 26 m antenna being relocated to the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex at nearby Tidbinbilla, and renamed Deep Space station 46, where it is still in use today.
Today the original site has been levelled, and only the concrete foundations remain. An outdoor display was added to site in 2001. The former tracking station is located at .
