The OTC Satellite Earth Station Carnarvon, West Australia was established to meet the need for more reliable and higher quality communications for the Apollo program. NASA contracted Australia's Overseas Telecommunications Commission (OTC) "to provide an earth station near Carnarvon, Western Australia to link the NASA tracking station in that area to the control centre in the USA", also contracting COMSAT to launch three Intelsat-2 communications satellites.
The station was decommissioned in April 1987 but in 2022 the OTC antenna was acquired by Canadian ThothX Australia, who are recommissioning it and refurbishing it into a deep space radar to provide space situational awareness on resident space objects in geostationary orbit.
An article today at ABC on the restoration and refurbishment :-
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-...ions/102893882
