June 3, 2026

If you've ever fancied living somewhere remote and barren, then perhaps 1960s Ascension Island might fit your bill? Crafted from the spew of some forty-odd volcanoes, this pile of ash in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean has barely any human inhabitants; a graveyard for those abandoned there suffering from yellow fever and a few wild donkeys left behind by the Royal Navy generations ago. All of this isolation is perfect for NASA, though, who have … read the rest.

If you've ever fancied living somewhere remote and barren, then perhaps 1960s Ascension Island might fit your bill? Crafted from the spew of some forty-odd volcanoes, this pile of ash in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean has barely any human inhabitants; a graveyard for those abandoned there suffering from yellow fever and a few wild donkeys left behind by the Royal Navy generations ago. All of this isolation is perfect for NASA, though, who have teamed up with C&W to build a satellite tracking station here to work on assisting the forthcoming Apollo mission to the moon. What we watch for the next half hour follows the meticulous construction of this complex piece of electrical and mechanical engineering amidst a landscape that is probably only marginally less hospitable than the lunar one the astronauts will soon be visiting. The film is augmented by some simple graphics that illustrate the transmission flows of the data this site will generate and also demonstrates just how crucial that will be to the process of re-entry for the people in their returning module. We get a little bit of a Cook's Tour of the island thrown in too and though the film is all a pretty dry enterprise, it's astonishing to see what we can build from nothing in the middle of the ocean.

show less