Maspalomas Station is an INTA-operated, ESTRACK radio antenna ground station for communication with spacecraft located at the southern area of Gran Canaria island, on the INTA campus. It is situated on the Montaña Blanca hill and is visible from the coastal resort of Meloneras, close to Maspalomas. It was originally established in the 1960s to support NASA's nascent human spaceflight program. History From the 1950s the momentum was growing in the Space Race to develop spaceflight. A need arose for an international network of tracking stations around the globe to communicate with satellites and crewed space capsules and to control their flight trajectory. On 18 March 1960, the Spanish and US Governments signed an agreement to establish a NASA satellite ground station on Gran Canaria, the first in Spain. The location was chosen because Maspalomas is on the same latitude as Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, with the two locations separated only by the Atlantic Ocean. The original Maspalomas Station was built by NASA close to the Maspalomas Lighthouse in 1960. It was initially set to provide support for NASA's first human spaceflight mission, the Mercury Program, one of 14 such stations in the Manned Space Flight Network (MSFN) distributed around the globe. It came into operation on 13 September 1961 to support the Mercury-Atlas 4 test flight, and continued to take part in Mercury missions, including John Glenn’s Mercury-Atlas 6 Earth orbit. Subsequently, Maspalomas participated in the ground control network for NASA's crewed flight programme Project Gemini (1965-1966). The expansion of tourism in the southern part of Grand Canaria threatened the radio quiet zone around Maspalomas station. NASA agreed with INTA and the Spanish Government to move operations to a new, more remote site several kilometres away from the original site. The new ground station retained the name of Maspalomas. Maspalomas Station continued to provide support for international space missions, including the launch of early communications satellites by Intelsat, who named their third satellite, Intelsat II F-3, Canary Bird after the Canary Islands. Apollo program Maspalomas Station supported a number of prominent NASA missions, including the Apollo program, the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project and the Skylab space station. For the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first humans on Moon in July 1969, Maspalomas Station acted as one of the receiving station for transmissions from the Apollo crew and relayed them to Houston using an analog link via London. On