Tom Reid (electrical engineer)

Thomas (Tom) Reid MBE (14 March 1927 – 2 October 2010) was the director of the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station outside Canberra, Australia, which in July 1969 transmitted live television of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the Moon to a world-wide audience of 600 million people.

Thomas Reid

MBE
Born(1927-03-14)March 14, 1927
Glasgow, Scotland[1]
DiedOctober 2, 2010(2010-10-02) (aged 83)
Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
NationalityScottish Australian
Alma materUniversity of Glasgow
OccupationElectrical Engineer
Spouse(s)Betty McKenna, Margaret McLachlan (Senator Margaret Reid)
Children4 children
Director of Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station
In office
4 August 1967 – 3 April 1970

Early years

Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Reid served in the Royal Navy from 1944 to 1947 and then obtained a first-class honours degree in electrical engineering from the University of Glasgow winning the Howe Prize in Electrical Engineering.[2] Migrating to Australia in 1952, Reid served for five years as an electrical lieutenant in the Royal Australian Navy.

Space tracking career

Appointed officer-in-charge of Telemetry at the Woomera Rocket Range in 1958, Reid helped test British Medium-range ballistic missiles. The following year, he was put in charge of Woomera’s RCA AN/FPS-16 Instrumentation Radar which tracked NASA's Project Mercury spacecraft. After leaving Woomera in 1962, Reid became a senior lecturer in electrical engineering at the South Australian Institute of Technology. In 1964, he was appointed inaugural director of NASA's Orroral Valley Tracking Station, south of Canberra. Because of management problems at the nearby Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station, Reid was transferred there as director in 1967 to provide firm leadership. Honeysuckle’s role was to supply uplink and down link communications between Apollo astronauts and mission control. Just before 1 pm on 21 July 1969, AEST, Honeysuckle’s 85-foot dish was providing backup to a 210-foot dish in Goldstone, California, including a backup TV link with the Apollo Lunar Module, Eagle. Due to technical difficulties, Goldstone could not relay broadcast quality TV of Neil Armstrong as he descended the Eagle's ladder to the Moon’s surface. At the last minute, mission control switched over to Honeysuckle which transmitted to what was then the largest TV audience in history the footage of Armstrong stepping onto the Moon.

In 1970, Reid became director of the nearby Tidbinbilla Tracking Station, which maintained communications with space craft travelling to the outer edges of the solar system and beyond. After overseeing communications with spacecraft from the Pioneer Program, Mariner Program and Voyager Program, Reid retired in 1988.

Honours and awards

For his work as a space tracker, Reid was appointed as a Member of the Order of the British Empire[3] (MBE) in 1970 and in 1989 he was presented with the NASA Exceptional Public Service Medal.

Personal life

In 1952, Reid married Betty McKenna and they had four children. Following Betty's death in 1965, he married Margaret McLachlan. As Senator Reid, Margaret later went into politics, rising to become the first female president of the Australian Senate.

Note

This article is based almost completely on a book written by former politician Andrew Tink and published in 2018. Tink became a personal friend of Tom Reid and his family while Tink was a law student at the Australian National University, Canberra, in the 1970s. The particulars of the book are as follows:

  • Andrew Tink: HONEYSUCKLE CREEK: The story of Tom Reid, a little dish and Neil Armstrong's first step: NewSouth Publishing: ISBN 9781742236087 (paperback): ISBN 9781742244297 (ebook): ISBN 9781742248721 (ebooks)[1]

See also

References
  1. Tink, A. A. (Andrew A.) (2018), Honeysuckle Creek : the story of Tom Reid, a little dish and Neil Armstrong's first step, NewSouth Publishing, ISBN 978-1-74223-608-7
  2. University of Glasgow: The Howe Prize in Electrical Engineering
  3. Appointed MBE: Supplement to the London Gazette 1 January 1970 : p.38
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