Sam Hallas' Website
Sadly the Goonhilly Future World and Visitor Centre closed early in 2010. A sad blow for the local tourist industry as it had clocked up around 80,000 visitors a year. A BT spokesperson said at the time "BT is currently looking at the future of the assets at Goonhilly, including the Goonhilly Visitors' Centre and is discussing options with other organisations."
However in 2014 it came under the private management of Goonhilly Earth Station Ltd. "It continues to be recognised as a premier ground station of choice for the world’s major satellite operators, and has expanded its services to include lunar and deep space communications."
Learn more from their web site:
https://www.goonhilly.org/
I visited BT's Goonhilly satellite earth station in August 2007. The weather was more like November than August as you will see from the pictures.
All the images are clickable for a larger version. Use 'Back' to return here.
Later in the day the sun came out and I took this picture of Goonhilly's dishes in the distance from the road down to the Lizard Point. |
Outside the entrance to the visitor centre were coaches to take us on a tour round the site to see the many dishes. |
Displays were on two floors. This picture shows the staircase leading to the upper display area with models of satellites hanging down. |
At this console visitors could steer a dish on the roof to connect with one of several geostationary satellites and view the TV channels they were transmitting. |
The "Connected Earth" display showed the history of telecommunications with various artefacts in small windows. This part was about telephony. |
Some of the young visitors were obviously interested in old phones. |
Here's a display about telegraphy, starting with Morse code. |
Goonhilly was also a terminal for several undersea fibre optic and coaxial cbales. Some samples of such cables can be seen in the display case. |
A rather fanciful display about the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. |
The centre had an internet café with high speed connections much faster even than home broadband. However these two did't look terribly impressed. |
The café was pretty busy. Maybe it was a reflection of the poor weather outside. Appropriately enough it was called the Big Dish. Probably not a reflection on the size of portions. |
Collection: BT Goonhilly. Pictures © 2007, text © 2008 & 2011 Sam Hallas.