Australia’s Murriyang radio telescope in Parkes, New South Wales, is tracking the Artemis II lunar mission, which launched from Florida on Thursday and is carrying four astronauts on a journey that will take them around the Moon and back to Earth. The mission is the first crewed lunar mission since Apollo 17, more than 50 years ago, and it is being folded into a larger program aimed at a planned 2028 moon landing and, eventually, Mars. **Who Controls the Signal** The work of keeping contact with the spacecraft is being spread across a network of institutions, with the heavy lifting on Australia’s side assigned to the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, or CDSCC, part of Nasa’s Deep Space Network and run by the national science agency the CSIRO. The CDSCC will play a central role with Artemis II, working with other parts of the DSN in Madrid and California. Rhianna Lyons, the CDSCC education officer, said, “We will be tracking from our station here whenever the moon or the mission is visible in our sky. It won’t be visible to the naked eye, but it is to our radio antennae. And during the working hours for our site, our operators will be the ones operating the entire network, regardless of who’s tracking. We’ll be the primary communications [point] so the astronauts can contact home, so we can contact them.” Murriyang itself, the 64-metre Parkes telescope, was given its Wiradjuri name in 2020. It has volunteered to track Orion and send data to Nasa. Nasa’s Kevin Coggins said the telescope is helping demonstrate capabilities for “building a resilient, public-private ecosystem that will support the Golden Age of Innovation and exploration”. That language places the mission inside a familiar arrangement: public infrastructure, private ambition, and the same old hierarchy deciding what counts as progress. **Who Pays the Price for the Mission** The astronauts on Orion are mission specialist Jeremy Hansen, pilot Victor Glover, commander Reid Wiseman and mission specialist Christina Koch. They will fly further away from Earth than anyone has before, around the dark side of the Moon, and will see parts of it that have not yet been seen. The mission will test life support systems, navigational ability and radiation protection ahead of the planned 2028 moon landing. The Artemis II mission is also being framed as part of a larger strategic contest. Alan Duffy, the Swinburne University of Technology astronomer, said, “Artemis II will break records, sending humans beyond low Earth orbit for the first time since the Apollo missions, indeed reaching further from Earth than anyone in history.” He also said the Apollo missions were about winning the space race and beating the Russians during the cold war, while this time the race is against China, as part of Donald Trump’s “America first” approach. He said it is also about science and exploration and the hunt for extraterrestrial resources. Andrew Dempster, the director of UNSW’s Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research, said, “It is more about a colonisation of space.” He said the Artemis missions were initially “simply a stepping stone to Mars, the real target”, but Nasa’s announcement last week that it would pause plans for an orbiting station in favour of a lunar base is seen to “refocus the strategic aims once again to the moon”. **The Old Machinery, Rebranded** The Parkes telescope was immortalised in the film The Dish, and it broadcast the Apollo moon landing on 21 July 1969, when wind gusts of up to 110km/h buffeted the telescope as it sat in a sheep paddock in regional New South Wales. It is meant to shut down when winds hit 35km/h, but operators risked it to help broadcast Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. That same dish, now carrying the Wiradjuri name Murriyang, is again being used to relay a mission built by powerful institutions and justified with the language of innovation. The Australian National University has teamed up with Nasa via the Australian Space Agency and will track, send and receive communication from Orion via its Quantum Optical Ground Station at Mount Stromlo Observatory. It is testing laser communications, which could then be used on future lunar missions. Dr Kate Ferguson, from the ANU Institute for Space, said, “Building this capability in the southern hemisphere is critical to establishing reliable communication to the moon and the solar system.” Southern Launch, which has rocket testing and launching facilities in South Australia, will also help with tracking, using a Raven Defense dish. There are also two Australian-built components of the Orion capsule. Lyons said the CDSCC crew have been preparing for Artemis II for a couple of years, and helping to prepare trackers in Spain and America. She also said mission control is not what people imagine from footage from Nasa or Hollywood: “They’re in a circle with their backs to each other,” she said. “It’s so they can turn inwards, talk, bounce off each other, without the computer screen in the way.” Richard de Grijs, the Macquarie University astrophysics professor and the International Space Science Institute-Beijing’s executive director, said a lunar base is now a “realistic prospect”. He said Artemis II is “not just a mission” but “a signal of how humanity will organise itself beyond Earth”. He said China is also preparing to land humans on the moon, while private companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX are also heavily involved in space exploration. “What we are seeing is the early architecture of a shared human presence in deep space,” de Grijs said. The mission may be sold as a leap for humanity, but the facts on the ground show a tightly managed network of state agencies, universities, and private interests coordinating the next phase of lunar expansion. The people doing the tracking, transmitting, and preparing are named; the institutions setting the terms are larger, richer, and very much in charge.
