Goonhilly

Goonhilly Downs on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall is a radiocommunication site.

Goonhilly Earth Station (GES) external link

Its first dish, Antenna One (dubbed "Arthur"), was built in 1962 to link with Telstar.

Goonhilly is developing the capability to support the exploration of Lunar and Deep Space for institutions and private enterprise, also to improve NASA and ESA deep space networks.

Goonhilly Earth station 2019

Antennas at Goonhilly Downs

GES is pioneering private Deep Space missions and plan to launch Lunar Pathfinder 1 in 2020 as part of launching its own commercial mission to the Moon with partners SSTL and ESA.

History

In 1962 Goonhilly was set up as a terrestrial link for transmitting and receiving communications from satellites to signal the dawning of the space age.

At the time the largest satellite dish in the world called “Arthur” after King Arthur, was built for the first two Telstar Satellites built by the US giant Hughes, Telstar 1 launched on top of a Thor-Delta rocket on 10th July 1962. It successfully relayed through space the first television pictures, telephone calls, and telegraph images, and provided the first live transatlantic television feed. It was later joined by Telstar 2 launched 7th May 1963.

The dish was used for the first ever transatlantic television broadcast in 1967, when The Beatles sang “All You Need Is Love”.

It was also used to beam images of the 1969 moon landing to the UK.

By the early 1970s, Goonhilly was the world’s largest earth station.

In 2006, the site’s owners BT planned to knock the site down as transatlantic fiber optics cables had made the Earth station redundant.

Thanks to an entrepreneurial engineer Ian Jones Goonhilly set up Goonhilly Earth Station (GES) saved Goonhilly from BT and has now become a growing Satellite Control Center and now expanding into Deep Space communications.

Planet Labs has become one of GES’s customers with its “dove” satellites.

On the 22nd February 2018 GES won a long-term contract from the European Space Agency(ESA) to create the world’s first commercial deep-space communications station, capable of tracking future missions to the Moon and Mars..

Goonhilly to upgrade one of its largest antennas by 2020, a 30m-diameter and the 32 m-diameter GHY-6 antenna built in 1985, to meet the high-end performance and technology requirements needed by ESA, NASA and private space exploration companies for deep-space communications, including high bit-rate data links.