JOHN Saxon isn’t one to shy away from a good yarn, but when the former spaceflight operator is asked what he said to Astronauts John Young and Charles Duke while they were on 1972’s glitch-prone Apollo 16 mission, he goes uncharacteristically quiet.

“Oh, you don’t want to know… but it involves needing a lager,” he says with a smile.

From the Honeysuckle Creek tracking station, just 30km outside of Canberra, operations manager John and a 100-strong support team would often communicate with astronauts such as Young and Duke during space missions, monitoring everything from temperatures to heartbeats, and receiving and transmitting images.

So pivotal was the Canberra tracking station’s role, that NASA could have delayed or cancelled a launch had there been a problem at Honeysuckle.

John, 78, worked at the station when it first opened in 1967 until a year before its closure in 1981, where it supported all the Apollo missions, including Neil Armstrong’s famous first steps, and the near-doomed Apollo 13.

The station, John says, was built in the ACT at the time because the then-Prime Minister Robert Menzies wanted to build Canberra’s profile in the technical world. The 26-metre antenna from the station now sits in Tidbinbilla.

A modest man, John is dismissive when we spot a few of his certificates and awards from Apollo’s successful missions in his Chifley home. “Oh, I’ve had so many of them, I don’t like to frame them,” he says, waving a hand.

Even the station’s most notable achievement, providing the world with the first television pictures of Armstrong’s Apollo 11 “moonwalk” in 1969 with voice and telemetry contact using the lunar and command modules, “wasn’t a huge thing at the time,” he says.

“There were at least three stations providing the footage to Houston, and there were problems with the other ones, that caused our television to be the first one,” he laughs.

“I’ll admit now, it was a defining moment for the ACT.”

This month, John will share some of his memorabilia from that time at Questacon, bringing light to a whole new generation.

“These days a kid’s knowledge of man walking on the moon is only from movies like ‘Apollo 13’ or ‘The Dish’, so it’s sometimes good to be able to say: ‘No, this is how it was really done’,” he says.

Of the memorabilia he plans to show, one is a graph of Neil Armstrong’s rapid heart rate, taken the moment he made his first steps on the moon’s surface and just before uttering the famous line “that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Was John’s own heart doing the same thing as he watched this wondrous moment in history, so close to the action?

“Not really, for us it was fairly standard; we had done so many simulations before that were much tougher than the mission itself,” he says.

Although he’d spoken to him many times before, John only got to formally meet Armstrong in 2011, a year before he died.

“It was a wonderful moment, we spent an hour and a half talking,” he says.

John recalls the station’s “intense” atmosphere back in the Apollo days, where cigarettes and a stiff drink were often the order after a long day for most of the workers.

“When there were missions we were doing 10 or 12 days straight with at least 12-hour shifts, so sometimes we’d sleep there overnight – there was a lot at stake,” he says.

Despite the many photos, transcripts and certificates he has on hand, John says he’s never short of sceptics: “I still have people thinking it was all just a hoax, but I don’t bother with them, they’ve already made up their mind so there’s no point,” he shrugs.

“They can all speculate, and they probably will for some time to come, but only we know what really happened in there.”

“Apollo – Canberra’s finest hour” will be held at Questacon, from 9.30am on July 20 and from 10am on 21. More information at tinyurl.com/apollofest1&2