David Cooke is 87 years old.
And 50 years ago, he was inside the Parkes telescope, colloquially known as "the dish", when Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon.
Mr Cooke was working as a receiver engineer, and clearly remembers the moment.
"Most of us were watching this little green tv set where we could see the landing module sitting on the surface of the moon, and then Armstrong coming down the ladder and finally putting his foot down onto the moon, and making his famous speech. I think a big cheer must have gone up when that happened."
There was still work to be done - and it was only once it was over, that the enormity of the achievement really dawned on Mr Cooke.
"I went down outside the telescope with my camera and took a photo of the telescope, which included the storm which was disappearing. And I thought to myself, well, how amazing is all this, that all these people have co-operated together to make this possible, and up there on the moon that I could see there were three people, three men, two of them on the surface of the moon. And they'd successfully been put there. I was quite amazed that we had been a part of doing that."
600 million people - about a fifth of the world's population at the time - watched in real time as Armstrong become the first man on the moon.
It was July 21st, 1969, and 12.56pm on Australia's east coast.
Australia was critical to the operation which resulted in the image of Armstrong setting foot on the moon, being beamed around the world.
And, of course, his now-immortal words.
"It's one small step for man .... one giant leap for mankind."
Photo Biljana Ristic
Signals were received from the moon by a tracking station in Goldstone, California, and facilities at Honeysuckle Creek, near Canberra, and at Parkes [[parks]], a town of just 8,500 people about 400 kilometres west of Sydney.
The Parkes radio telescope opened in 1961, and has a diameter of 64 metres, making it one of the largest single-dish telescopes in the southern hemisphere.
John Sarkissian is an operations scientist for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO, at the Parkes telescope.
"The Parkes telescope was the most advanced and one of the most sensitive radio telescopes in the world. And NASA wanted the most sensitive, most advanced instruments tracking the lunar module at those very critical moments, and the CSIRO agreed to do that, specifically for the reception of the moonwalk TV."
The broadcast operation was many months in the making, and the Australian receivers were recruited by the US space agency *NASA [[nassuh]] a year before, in 1968.
NASA needed 24-hour contact with Apollo 11, and that could only be achieved by having receivers on the opposite side of the planet to the United States.
At the start of the broadcast, NASA switched between vision from Goldstone and Honeysuckle Creek - but because of Parkes's superior technology, it was able to provide a much clearer picture.
Once the switch was made to vision from Parkes, NASA stayed with it for the remaining two-and-a-half hours of the broadcast from the moon.
Mr Sarkissian explains.
"When they switched to Parkes, about eight minutes into the broadcast, it was so much better, they stayed with Parkes. When you see the video of the switching, and then the final switch to Parkes, it's obvious that Parkes had the very best picture. So, thanks to Parkes, the world was able to view the moon walk with the greatest possible clarity."
But that quality of broadcast was, at times, under threat.
The telescope was fully tipped over to see the moon when a series of wind gusts, some reaching around 110 kilometres per hour, hit Parkes.
The telescope's then-director, John Bolton, kept the dish operating throughout the broadcast, despite it having a safety rating for only 40 kilometre-per-hour winds.
Mr Bolton could have taken the Parkes telescope offline to protect it, but that would have left NASA with only the lower-quality pictures from Goldstone and Honeysuckle Creek.
Fred Watson is an astronomer with the Australian Astronomical Observatory.
He says the moon landing is one of mankind's greatest achievements.
"I think it was one of the defining moments of our species, because for the first time a terrestrial species, namely homo sapiens, set foot on another world. It is a staggering achievement, and especially when you look at the kind of technology that was available at the time. The 1960s technology, compared with what we have today, left a lot to be desired. So I really think it was a defining achievement."
