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December 2018 marked the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission, the
first crewed spacecraft to orbit the Moon. Honeysuckle Creek's 26m
antenna, together with a 26m antenna at Tidbinbilla and a 9m antenna
at Carnarvon, were key elements of the tracking station network
supporting the mission. Apollo 8, crewed by Frank Borman, Jim Lovell,
and Bill Anders, was placed in an elliptical 312 by 111 kilometre orbit
around the Moon. Hamish Lindsay, in his account of the mission,
available from the
the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station website, notes that the
astronauts were somewhat underwhelmed by their first close-up views of
the lunar surface. Borman's
description was “It looked like the burned-out ashes of a barbecue,”
Lovell's, “It’s like a sand pile my kids have been playing in for a
long time. It’s all beat up with no definition. Just a lot of bumps
and holes,” and Anders', “It looks whitish-grey, like dirty beach sand
with lots of footprints in it”!
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