Baikonur

I think that many people want to know, what about the rocket? The Mad Pleasant 26-metre antenna was first used to support a rocket launch back in February 1999.

And the mission that we supported was the launch of the Global Star satellites, telecommunication satellites, which the first of them was launched on a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur in Kazakhstan.

This mission has a particular significance to me for a number of reasons.

Essentially, we were asked to support this mission with about three months' notice, And my job at the time was to take an antenna which was used solely for astronomy and to update the antenna control system so that it could track a low Earth orbit satellite or these satellites soon after their launch.

Yep, that's absolutely right.

Yeah, keeping it at that inclination makes it accessible from Baikonur, basically, in Kazakhstan.

And so, yeah, that's absolutely correct.

But the upside is that we get a lot of good views over a lot of parts of the Earth from the space station, which can lead to some really nice photographs and views of everywhere on our planet.