Memories of Sixties

The passing of Mike Collins brings back memories of the 1960ies:
Shortly after arriving in Sydney, Australia as an immigrant on April 25, 1966, I had an interview for a job with an Australian company called Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia) with the possibility of working as a technician on one of the Australian space tracking stations used in the Apollo program.
That in light of having served on a NATO early warning tracking station in Northern Norway as a technician prior to emigrating to Australia.
AWA had been contracted to supply equipment for the Tidbinbilla tracking station that was to relay information through to Houston from the Apollo astronauts when stations on the other side of the globe lost contact due to the Earth's rotation.
The hurdle proved to be a security clearance, as the Americans were rather paranoid about possible leaks to the Russians during that cold war time.
The engineer who interviewed me told me that during his training stage in the US, he had a guard standing standing outside the toilet, which door had to remain open when he did his business.
So, I ended up at the end of the production line of Distance Measuring Equipment (DME Van 4) for aircraft instead, checking out units and calibrating them. Those were days before GPS was invented.

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