In short:
The Carnarvon Space and Technology Museum has marked 60 years since NASA established a tracking station in the coastal town.
The station was key to NASA's Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab missions.
What's next?
Its former staff, known as "trackers", say they will continue to carry on the memory of their work and late colleagues.
A remote coastal community in north-west Australia has celebrated 60 years since NASA opened a tracking station on its outskirts, bringing together former staff to commemorate their pivotal role in putting a man on the Moon.
Celebrations were held over the weekend at the Carnarvon Space and Technology Museum, which houses some of the station's equipment and other exhibits in the shadow of a 29-metre-wide Overseas Telecommunications Commission (OTC) dish.
The landmark, rising high above the town's banana plantations, was commissioned five years after the tracking station opened in 1964.
Strategically placed across the planet from NASA's Cape Canaveral launch pad, the site was then the largest tracking station built outside the mainland US.
It served as a state-of-the-art communication link for the Gemini, Apollo and Skylab missions before NASA wound down operations in 1975.
John Harmsen, 84, one of the station's longest-serving digital technicians, joined some of his fellow "trackers" to speak at the event.
He told the ABC the reunion was "bittersweet".
"I look as young as when I worked here but I look at other people and go, 'My god, that person is so old,'" Mr Harmsen said.
"It was the highlight of our life."
A fateful holiday
The events that led Mr Harmsen and his wife Lynn to Carnarvon are typical of the casualness that belies many of the trackers' career beginnings.
A failed work transfer to the Pilbara outpost of Mundiwindi saw the young couple take a holiday to get over their disappointment.
Mr Harmsen called into the newly established tracking station on a whim to visit an old colleague.
"I left there an hour later with a job over double my salary, a brand new home in town, free transport to and from the site, with a guaranteed three-year contract," he said.
He was 24 years old at the time.
Three years later, he would be closely scanning scrolls of telemetry data in the station's main computer room as Neil Armstrong and his crew left orbit.
"We were actually manning consoles and part of the mission," he said.
To this day, he describes Apollo 11 as "a backstop in my whole life".
"It's really the centre of my little universe."
While her husband was flown to the Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland to retrain, Lynn Harmsen set about making a home with their firstborn child.
"All the ladies got together … we all congregated in one of the houses, and that way the kids could let go and enjoy themselves," she said.
Hundreds of men and women were employed by the Carnarvon tracking station.
It gave the quiet town of about 2,000 people a vibrant social life of mirror-ball dances and fishing trips between lengthy shifts at the station.
End of an era
TV repairman turned tracker Tito Teraci, 85, said while the success of Apollo 11 looms large, the "almost catastrophe" of Apollo 13 was particularly harrowing.
"Carnarvon was the one that, when they came back into Earth's orbit, we latched onto them, and we tracked them for nearly 12 hours," he said.
"We talked to them. We kept them going because they were freezing, the poor buggers."
When the final manned mission to the Moon came along, the trackers were "devastated".
"[Apollo 17] was a very significant moment for us," Mr Teraci said.
"We knew that was going to be the end of the actual trackers tracking. There was going to be no more lunar landers."
Mr Teraci met the last man to walk on the lunar surface, Eugene Cernan, years later.
"He was the one that came to me and tapped me on the shoulder and told me that, you know, if it hadn't been for Carnarvon, America would never have got to the Moon."
Recognising a mission accomplished
Carnarvon's 60th anniversary celebration included international recognition for the trackers, with NASA sending a message of thanks.
Loading...Acting Consul General of the US Consulate in Perth, Somer Bessire-Briers, said she was initially surprised to hear about the remote town's special place in the history of space exploration.
"It speaks to ingenuity of the people there in Carnarvon," she said.
For Mr Teraci, the milestone has taken on deeper meaning.
"We've lost so many trackers now … it's a countdown for me as well," he said.
"But while we can still do it, and while we can keep this party going, I'll be there."