On Friday, 27 November 2020, with great weather on our side, NCS brought in a crane and our engineering team to decommission our long-serving EU-5B4 dish. Watch the complete demolition in just 60 seconds:
EU-B54’s retirement after 30 years makes room on the power supply building rooftop for a new dish going into service early 2021.
The removal process involved freeing the 13 meter (43 foot) dish from it’s anchors by severing the supports, and then ripping the dish from the roof entirely with a crane.
Originally erected to carry traffic from Cyprus through Elfordstown to North America via New York, EU0B54 has transmitted billions of gigabytes of communications data to satellites orbiting Earth. The dish will now be salvaged with parts recycled as scrap metal. A small amount of salvage will be preserved on commemorative plaques and added to the National Space Centre’s archives.