Location: Lot 1, 8 Orroral Road, Namadgi National Park, Tennant Creek ACT 2620
Country: Ngunnawal
LGA: Australian Capital Territory
Region: Southern Tablelands
Website: http://www.parks.act.gov.au/find-a-nature-park/namadgi-national-park
Map: Below
For 20 years, the Orroral Valley Tracking Station tracked satellites 24 hours a day every day of the year. At a time when the Deep Space Stations of the US were receiving data at less than 100 bits per second, Orroral Valley Tracking Station was receiving and processing data from spacecraft at up to 128,000 bits per second (Clark 2012: 1).
Orroral Valley Tracking Station: Background information, ACT Heritage Council, February 2016
For 20 years, the Orroral Valley Tracking Station
Orroral Valley Tracking Station: Background information, ACT Heritage Council, February 2016 More >>
tracked satellites 24 hours a day every day of the
year. At a time when the Deep Space Stations of the
US were receiving data at less than 100 bits per
second, Orroral Valley Tracking Station was
receiving and processing data from spacecraft at up
to 128,000 bits per second (Clark 2012: 1).
Wikipedia: The Orroral Valley tracking station … an Earth station in Australia, supported Earth-orbiting satellites, as part of NASA‘s Spacecraft Tracking and Data Acquisition Network (STADAN). It was located approximately 50 km south of Canberra, Australian Capital Territory (ACT), and was one of three tracking stations in the ACT, and seven in Australia. More >>
History of Tracking Stations in Australia >>
Orroral Valley Tracking Station: Background information, ACT Heritage Council, February 2016
In 1960 the US and Australia signed an agreement under which Australia established and operated a number of tracking stations which would form part of worldwide networks under the control of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA (Egloff 1988; Fabricius 1995; Ramsay et al 1995).
… Three space tracking stations operated in the ACT by 1967: Tidbinbilla Tracking Station (active) for DSN: Deep Space Network; Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station (no longer active) for MSFN: Manned Spaceflight Network; and Orroral Valley Tracking Station (no longer active) for STADAN: the Space Tracking and Data Acquisition Network.Orroral Valley Tracking Station was operational by October 1965 (Clark 2012: 15). ‘Orroral’ could come from the Aboriginal word ‘Urongal,’ meaning, ‘tomorrow,’ indicated as such in Sir Thomas L. Mitchell’s 1834 map of the area. The tracking station encompassed about 40 acres and was constructed with a powerhouse, canteen, water supply, mechanical workshops and operations building. Antennae and buildings were situated to minimise interference with each other with some levelling of the site was required before construction (Ramsay et al 1995: 8; Gorman 2012: 24).
The Orroral Valley Tracking Station operated until 1985, supporting the large number of scientific satellites that helped develop and support the manned space flight program and other missions. In its later years it also communicated with the scientific packages left on the moon by the Apollo astronauts, and tracked manned spacecraft for the Apollo-Soyuz, and the Space Shuttle programs (Clark 2012: 1).
The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was a joint initiative between the US and Russia. NASA astronauts were sent in an Apollo Command and Service Module to meet Russian cosmonauts in a Soyuz capsule. The aim of the mission was to
demonstrate that two dissimilar spacecraft could dock in orbit, and was fulfilled when a co-designed, American built docking module completed the procedure (NASA 2012).NASA’s Space Shuttle program consisted of the spacecraft Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour and flew 135 missions between 1981 and 2011. The Space Shuttle program helped build the International Space Station, carried people into orbit for decades and launched, recovered, and repaired satellites (NASA 2015a).
Orroral Valley Tracking Station was also involved with the Weapons Research Establishment Satellite (Wresat) project. Wresat was the first Australian designed, built, launched, and tracked satellite. In 1967 Australia became only the third
country in the world to launch and track its own satellite from its own country. The satellite was launched in Woomera, and tracked by the Orroral Valley Tracking Station (Philip Clark personal communication 19 June 2015).Launched on November 29 1967, Wresat was integrated into the SPARTA project: a tripartite program between the US, Australia and Britain researching the physical effects on warheads of high speed re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere (Australian Space Research Institute 2012).
The main function of Orroral Valley Tracking Station was to track and control un-manned scientific satellites. It was the largest tracking station in the southern hemisphere and a member of STADAN (Satellite Tracking and Data Acquisition Network), the largest space tracking network in the world. It had a workforce of about 200 people and by 1966 was capable of tracking up to five satellites independently and simultaneously.
In 1974, when a nine metre dish antenna was added to the facility the number of satellites that could be tracked increased to six, and with the addition of a
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory laser system in 1975, as many as seven satellites could be tracked at once (Clark 2012: viii – ix).
History of Tracking Stations in Australia >>
For more, see Orroral Valley Tracking Station Timeline at Colin Mackellar’s definitive Tracking Station tribute site, honeysucklecreek.net
ORRORAL UPDATE: After Orroral Valley Tracking Station was closed in 1985, its 26 Metre antenna was re-located to the University of Tasmania’s Mt Pleasant Observatory, and is still being used for radio astronomy. The 10 Metre antenna was moved to the University of Canberra’s Bruce Campuse, where it is being restored and ‘upcycled’ into a C21st radio astronomy research and teaching facility known as UpCyc!
Discover Orroral Valley Tracking Station in Namadgi National Park >>
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Post created 10 February 2025. Last revised 4 July 2025.
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