Closure of NASA's Cebreros station 30 Nov 1981

This telegram was written by José Urech, Cebreros director at the time of the station's closure.

In the early 2000s, ESA decided to build its own deep space stations to support the growing number of distant missions like Mars Express, Venus Express and Rosetta. The first, DSA 1, was built at New Norcia, Australia, and the second had to be sited somewhere on Earth 120° away.

Like Maspalomas, the Cebreros site is owned by INTA and formerly hosted a NASA station, DSS-62, which was primarily used in the 1960s and 70s for tracking, data acquisition and commanding for Apollo and interplanetary missions such as Viking. The station was closed in 1987, and NASA consolidated all their European DSN activities at Robledo, Madrid.

More information at NASA's DSN history site.