Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station, Cornwall

Goonhilly’s first dish, Antenna One, (“Arthur”) was built in 1962 to link with Telstar. It was the first open parabolic design and is a monster 25.9 metres in diameter and weighs 1,118 tonnes. Other dishes followed, till there were around 60 dishes of various sizes. In 2006, however, BT announced that it would close its site by 2008, centralising its operations elsewhere. The biggest dishes are redundant, as with today’s powerful electronics, much smaller one will suffice.

Until Easter 2010 the site had a visitor centre inside which the Connected Earth gallery told the history of satellite communications. There were many other interactive exhibits, a cafe, a shop and one of Britain’s fastest cybercafés (a one gigabit pipe and a theoretical maximum speed per iMac of 100 Mbit). There were also tours around the main BT site and into the heart of Arthur.

I visited the visitor centre while it was open in 2007, and found it quite interesting. I looked at the exhibits, climbed to the viewing gallery, and looked at my website via the cybercafe. The high point was a bus tour around the site, which allowed visitors to get a closer look at some of the monster dishes. What was a let-down was that some of the dishes were online and receiving signals, and we weren’t allowed to see any of it. It was like your friend asks you round to see his new satellite and Freeview, and he shows you his elliptical dish and spiky aerial. You’d be under-impressed, wouldn’t you?

On 11 Jan 2011 it was announced that parts of the site are changing hands, and there are also plans to upgrade the former visitor centre into “an outreach centre promoting space and space science for visitors, including local residents and schools”.
As with privately owned great houses, this may have been a case of “visit it while you have the chance”, but you can hope.