Why are we closed?

10 December 2021

It has been a difficult few years for everyone, living through bushfires, pandemics, and lockdowns.

In the summer of 2020-21, we were forced to close due to dangerous bushfires in the area, dense smoke conditions, and road closures which isolated the station for many weeks.

When the pandemic hit in March, NASA decided, out of a sense of precaution, that each of the stations in the Deep Space Network (Madrid, Goldstone and Canberra) should all lockdown to ensure the safety of personnel and continuity of space communication services. This also included all of their visitor centres.

As the year went on, our Covid Safety plans allowed our visitor centre and café to re-open over the December 2020 - January 2021 school holiday period, and then again for the 2021 April Easter break. We were also able to continue to provide education programs for booked school groups. Beyond this however, lockdowns and border closures meant that our doors had to remain closed the public.

While other businesses have slowly been able to open up again, a variety of factors have contributed to our visitor centre not being able to reopen to the public. Among them, our Café and staffing.

With the extended shutdown, we no longer had an operator for our new Deep Space Café. Sadly, we were unable to run it ourselves or afford the associated costs. Also, as many businesses across the country have experienced, hospitality staff are almost impossible to find.

Our other problem is staff availability. For the past 35 years, the visitor centre has never had more than two people to run it. The visitor centre is not funded by NASA, and does not have a budget large enough to support extra staffing positions.

Our team of two perform many other duties for the tracking station, as well as covering all the jobs needed to run a public visitor centre and deliver education programs. With the extra requirements to ensure Covid safety and entry checks, we realised that we couldn’t cover everything needed to ensure a safe and enjoyable experience for our visitors.

Will the Visitor Centre and Café Open Again?

Absolutely yes!

As soon as we can get a new Café operator and everyone is satisfied that we can reopen safely for both the public and our team, the doors will be open again.

In the meantime, we haven’t been idle.

There have been some much-needed building repairs undertaken, we’ve been getting in some new audio-visual displays, and updating some of our longstanding space exhibits.

We have also continued to take bookings for school groups, with 2022 nearly completely full, and already taking requests for 2023-24.

Of course, we have also been doing a lot of TV, radio and social media to talk about all the great missions that the tracking station has been supporting, including the Mars rovers, the Voyager probes, and many others. We’re also getting ready for spacecraft like the James Webb Space Telescope and NASA’s Artemis missions to the Moon.

There’s lots of great space exploration happening that we continue to share.

We really want to thank everyone for your support, as well as your understanding in what has been a difficult period.

If you have any questions about space exploration or the tracking station, send them in via email or social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram).

We really miss you all and hope to catch up soon.

CDSCC Visitor Centre Management