Duke Jordan, a sales professional with Great Expectations Realty Commercial division in Charleston, said Etam Earth Station was sold to Deep Space Network LLC for about $1.5 million.
Jordan said his company listed the property for AT&T. The earth station was for sale since at least 2018, until Deep Space Network purchased it in December.
Jordan believes the most exciting thing about the sale is the Deep Space Network wants to bring ETAMS antennas back on line.
According to its website, The Deep Space Network — or DSN — is NASA’s international array of giant radio antennas that supports interplanetary spacecraft missions, plus a few that orbit Earth. The DSN also provides radar and radio astronomy observations that improve our understanding of the solar system and the larger universe.
The DSN is operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which also operates many of the agency’s interplanetary robotic space missions.
Etam Earth Station was built by Comsat around 1968 and formally began commercial operation on Christmas Eve of that year, according to a 1977 article by John Peterson in Satellite Pathways Magazine.
Among its achievements, Peterson wrote that Etam was:
- The first U.S. station to operate with the INTELSAT III satellites.
- The first to introduce (in 1973) the SPADE system, where a pool of frequencies is kept available for users as needed.
- The first to be equipped in the Atlantic region for high-speed digital data (50 kilobits per second, or 50,000 words per minute) service to Europe.
- And the first to work with the new INTELSAT IV-A satellites, which achieved a significant increase in communications capacity and flexibility by introducing frequency reuse through beam separation, the first commercial application of this concept in satellite communications.
On Nov. 14, 2018, the station obtained a kind of immortality when it moved into the world of computer gaming. It is featured in Bethesda Game Studios video game, Fallout 76, an action role-playing game that takes place in “Appalachia.”
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