School Satellite Tracking Station

From the collection of

MACE is the strategic lead organisation for screen heritage for the East and West Midlands regions. An independent charity based at University of Lincoln, MACE preserves and makes accessible a collection of more than 100,000 historic moving images representative of the diverse cultures and histories of communities throughout the heart of England from the Lincolnshire coast to the Welsh border.

School Satellite Tracking Station

Media Archive for Central England
Kettering
1966-03-18
Sound
5m

In the late 1950s enthusiastic science teachers Geoffrey Perry and Derek Slater decided to set up a space tracking station at Kettering Grammar School. They built equipment that could not only track Soviet satellites but actually record the conversations made by the intrepid first Russian cosmonauts. The Americans, who used a different path to orbit Earth, were probably glad that the Kettering wizards could not track them with such ease.

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