Eighty two year-old John Saxon was one of the first to lay his eyes on images of the moon landing as they beamed in from space to the Honeysuckle Creek tracking station, south-west of Tharwa.
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The Kambah resident spent 30 years of his impressive career working for NASA as part of the Manned Space Flight Network and later transported the largest lump of Apollo 11 moon rock outside of the United States to Australia.
This week marks the 50th anniversary of the station's opening and a chance to reflect on the crucial involvement of Australian support staff in the Apollo missions.
"We supported them all," Mr Saxon said. "I was so incredibly luck to do that. It was the golden years in my opinion."
The Honeysuckle team were involved for the first tragic Apollo 1 mission where three people were killed and several subsequent unmanned missions.
But it was Apollo 7, the first manned earth orbit and Apollo 8, the first time man had ever been outside the earth's orbit, that his team really came into their own.
"It was a huge decision to go to the moon and go around the moon. It was the first time anyone had seen the earth as a ball floating in space, the first time anyone had seen behind the moon," he said.
"It was a glorious mission. We had a large share of it."
Despite some film depictions, Honeysuckle Creek received images the moon landing first because Neil Armstrong made the decision not to take a rest break and exit the spacecraft early.
"Had the pre-mission timeline been followed, Parkes and Goldstone [in California] would have been relaying the first steps," he said.
It was a remarkable moment in history and an entirely unforgettable highlight for Mr Saxon, however people's lives were on the line and focus at the station was not disturbed for a "hallelujah moment".
"Funnily enough the TV was a low priority, initially they were not going to have any TV," he said.
"The most critical data was the astronauts biomedical data, the signs of life. There was a lot of stuff happening."
Along with monitoring astronauts respiration and heartbeats, they looked at cabin temperature, data from the backpacks they wore when they were walking on the lunar surface, as well as data from the lunar module on the surface and the command module orbiting the moon.
"Also the voice communications, which were not totally reliable back then," he said. "We always had to have our fingers poised just in case."
Mr Saxon said the 50th anniversary was a milestone but in his mind July 21 was the real reunion, marking the Apollo 11 landing.
Each July he and former colleagues gather at the mission time to watch the footage, synchronised with various channels of Houston and astronaut communications, operations loops and more.
"It is all good fun," he said. "At the time you don't think you are making history. We thought at the end of the Apollo program things would carry on. Bases on the moon etcetera. But of course it didn't happen that way. So it did turn out to be a historic event because as you know we have never been back."
Mr Saxon and various colleague were acknowledged by the ACT Government in an anniversary ceremony on Friday and will share their stories of the Apollo missions at Questacon on Saturday.