Hamish Peter Lindsay
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Hamish Peter Lindsay
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I have traced my lineage back to Samuel Lindsay born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1784. All my known ancestors lived in Glasgow, Scotland until my father’s generation, when the entire six family members, five boys and one girl, scattered to the four winds – to sea in a square-rigger in the merchant navy, Canada, Australia, Northern Rhodesia, South Africa, and my father to Burma/India, where he worked as an installation manager for the Burmah-Shell Oil Company at Rangoon, Chittagong, Calcutta, Madras, Portuguese Goa, Cochin, and Bombay (now Mumbai). Born in 1895, my father was the eldest of the family. He trained as an engineer in John Brown’s Shipyards on the River Clyde, working as an apprentice on the 45,600-ton Cunarder AQUITANIA, as well as completing a fine art course at the Glasgow School of Art. During the First World War he joined the British Expeditionary Force in 1915 and suffered in the fierce fighting around Ypres. Later he joined the MMGs (Motor Machine Guns) - motor cycles with a gunner in a sidecar. While appointed to Madras my father married my mother, from Coventry in England, in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). She became a noted author, writing many magazine articles and three novels, all published in India. They had two children, Robert Murray, born in Coonor in India in 1924, and myself, born in London in 1937. My brother went to boarding school in Scotland and became a fighter pilot at the end of World War II. Due to the war we did not meet until I was 30 years of age, and we still have only been together for about four weeks of our lives. He is currently living in Cornwall in England. After my birth my first port of call, courtesy of the Flying Scotsman, was the west coast of Scotland where my father was sailing, a lifelong passion. My mother and I followed him out to Bombay, India where I first went to school. With my father’s retirement in 1946 the family moved to Tasmania on a BP oil tanker; there I finished my schooling and trained as a Technical Officer. As soon as I finished my training I became a Senior Technical Officer with the government Telecom Radio Installation Group and traveled all over the state, including the Bass Strait Islands. One enjoyable assignment was traveling to every post office and on almost every road on a field survey to develop maps showing the contour lines of all the radio stations in Tasmania. In 1960 I moved to Sydney, Australia as a commercial photographer before joining Amalgamated Wireless Australasia’s (AWA) Field Installation Group where I was on the teams to install the first country television stations in Australia. While with AWA I went traveling on various surveys and in 1962 was responsible for the design and installation of all the Royal Australian Air Force Control Towers around Australia in preparation for the new Mirage jet fighters. In this assignment I had to be familiar with Air Force Air Traffic Control equipment and aircraft procedures. In 1961 I married my wife, Elizabeth, in Sydney, Australia; Elizabeth is a photographic artist and now specialises in watercolours. In 1963 I joined NASA’s Mercury Program tracking station at Muchea, near Perth, Western Australia; there I trained to work at the new Gemini Program tracking station in Carnarvon, 1000 kilometres north of Perth. At Carnarvon I was responsible for the maintenance and operation of the voice receivers and time standards. I supported the Gemini missions 4 through 8. After Gemini 8 I applied for a transfer to Honeysuckle Creek, the bigger 26-metre Apollo station being built near Canberra, the capital of Australia. This move provided access to the amenities of a city, such as good schooling for our children. In April 1966 we left Carnarvon and drove 4000 km across Australia to Canberra. I then completed a three-month training course at Collins Radio in Dallas, Texas before joining the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station team as the Ranging and Timing technician in the Unified S Band (USB) area. Again we were building a station from scratch. In 1968 I was promoted to Supervisor of the Technical Support Section with a staff of six, but returned to the USB operational team for shift work on all Apollo moon-landing missions. After the Apollo missions we went into 24 hour shifts to support the Skylab program. When Honeysuckle Creek left the Manned Space Flight Network (MSFN) and joined the Deep Space Network (DSN) in 1974, I was put in charge of the dismantling of the station. During the Deep Space era I was part of the operational teams that tracked the Viking landing on Mars, the Voyager missions to Jupiter and Saturn, and the Pioneer Venus mission. The data we collected from these roaming spacecraft has given us first-hand knowledge of the solar system for the first time in human history. During this time I was assigned to develop a Canberra Space Centre for the public at the Tidbinbilla Deep Space Station, and carried out the duties of a public affairs officer. Then came the sad day in November 1981 when I was on the shift that conducted the last track before the station was closed down, and the story of Honeysuckle Creek came to an end. I had been closely associated with the station from its inception to its demise. I ended up in the legal world as the Senior Technical Officer of the High Court of Australia in Canberra, the only technical staff member, looking after the electronic equipment and conducting all the video links. I was also the Court photographer, taking the Justices’ portraits, and was one of the authors for the prestigious Oxford Companion to the High Court of Australia volume. I retired from the High Court in 2001. To document the story of Honeysuckle Creek I wrote a book called Tracking Apollo to the Moon, covering the story of space flight from the first balloon flight to the Apollo-Soyuz mission, with the full story of the Mercury and Gemini missions. I used first-hand accounts wherever possible, contacting most of the astronauts and relevant Houston flight controllers. Published by Springer-Verlag (London) in 2001, it is the only book on NASA’s manned flight programs that brings in the story of the ground communication systems, in particular the crucial part played by the tracking stations in the rescue of Apollo 13. The book has been very well received by the public, particularly by people in the space industry in the USA. Chris Kraft, NASA’s first Flight Director and retired Director of the Johnson Space Center, said it is one of the most accurate and readable books on the subject he has seen; and Buzz Aldrin requested five copies for his personal use. Many have said that reading it was like being there. I am presently writing the story of Honeysuckle Creek and all the manned and Deep Space missions it supported on a web site, www.honeysucklecreek.net. This web site tells the story of Honeysuckle Creek from beginning to end, with details of all the spacecraft and missions tracked by the station. As I was the official station photographer and draftsman, many of my photographs and some of my drawings are displayed. I have many special recollections of the ‘golden era’ of space exploration, but the most memorable events to me were Ed White’s first American space walk, the 14-day Gemini mission, the Apollo missions 8, 11 and 13, the Viking landing on Mars, and the Voyager encounter with Saturn. As I write this, scientists believe that the Voyager spacecraft is crossing the boundary of the Solar system and entering the intragalactic void of the Milky Way Galaxy – a remarkable milestone in human history. Perhaps the Apollo 8 mission, when humans left the earth for the first time and headed into the unknown, was the most exciting of all the missions, though the tense atmosphere in the operational areas during the moments before Armstrong stepped on the Moon are embedded in my bones. Following my father, my main passion is sailing, and I used to write regular articles on the sailing scene in the early 1960s, writing the first history of the America’s Cup in Australia in 1962. I sailed in the international Sydney-Hobart yacht races in 1960 and 1961. I now own a small keel cruiser and am a member of the Canberra Yacht Club, the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia in Sydney, the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania, and a past member of the Clyde Cruising Club in Glasgow. One of my
current personal major assignments is writing the history of Scotland,
incorporating the history of Clan Lindsay. I am the proud father of three, and
grandfather of seven. Hamish Peter Lindsay Canberra, June 2005 |
