May 2015 – Aug 2015

NASA operates a deep space communication complex in Australia’s capital territory in Tidbinbilla, Canberra. NASA uses this complex to communicate with satellites and missions during the rotation of the earth in which they cannot adequately communicate directly from their space station in Goldstone, California. The Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex currently supports over 30 missions and ensures that the critical science obtained by robotic spacecraft in extreme environments at incredible distances makes it back home to Earth. High profile missions include the Voyagers, the Mars Rovers, and Hubble Microscope.

The project required the provisioning of a new 300 km diverse terrestrial backhaul from the Canberra complex to the Sydney cable landing station and a redundant, diverse and protected back-up subsea cable circuit from Sydney to Los Angeles. In the USA, AT&T would then connect to the circuit to bring it back to Goldstone space station.

As the project leader, I initiated, planned, executed, controlled and monitored the project, working directly with NASA, their US telecom partners AT&T and managing a team of 12 from Telstra’s US & Australian service delivery team. I worked with a network architect to design the terrestrial backhaul which traversed 50 different exchanges and required a new last-mile diverse circuit from a Tidbinbilla exchange into the complex. The project was time-sensitive as there had been some outages with their existing circuit and complications/end of life of the Mars Rover mission. I coordinated all technical efforts between the customer, network technicians, smart hands, vendors and all deployment activities. Under standard lead time, the circuit was tested and handed over to a satisfied customer.