In 1976, outside Woodbury, GA, American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) constructed a pair of mammoth satellite dishes in a basin along the Flint River known as “The Cove.” The dishes, once formally named the Woodbury “Earth Station,” were part of a satellite telecommunications installation, and at 30 meters in diameter, they were as long as a Boeing 737. Buoyed by the success of its revolutionary “Long Lines” microwave relay network, AT&T looked to the future - and to space - to make long-distance phone calls affordable and commonplace in American households. And so the dishes in The Cove were constructed to connect Long Lines and other earthbound systems to the skies. From terrestrial earth stations like Woodbury, these massive dishes would beam phone calls to celestial COMSTAR satellites, literally putting “voices in space” as AT&T’s marketing department touted. This was groundbreaking technology for domestic communications, but Woodbury’s role in it would be short-lived.
According to a 1978 Congressional hearing, building the Woodbury Earth Station cost $9 million (nearly $41 million adjusted to 2020). Locating it in The Cove was ideal. AT&T and partner company General Telephone & Electronics (GTE) intentionally sited facilities “in valleys or depressions wherever possible to take advantage of the natural screening provided by the surrounding terrain.” Locations were carefully chosen to “prevent mutual interference between the terrestrial service and satellite services” in “locations that are sufficiently close to communication and population centers to be economically useful, yet avoid interference from the competing signals which are particularly congested in and around such centers.” In Georgia, this meant that Woodbury was close enough to Atlanta, yet far enough away, and The Cove presented a natural choice.
On its own, The Cove presents a surprising confluence of astronomy. Its topography is believed to be the result of an ancient asteroid impact, its 40 km-wide crater disguised by eons of erosion. This depression is further obscured by the geologic uplift of Pine Mountain. The Fernbank Department of Space Science offers geological details that go far over my head in a 2016 paper, but apparently there is quite a bit of supporting evidence. It’s somehow fitting that such a recognizable symbol of the future past - massive satellite dishes - would rise from the disguised remains of a planetary catastrophe.
By the 1980s the Woodbury installation’s advanced technology was already obsolete. And so the station sat, disabled and deteriorating, until 1992 when it was acquired by the Georgia Institute of Technology. The university spent $300,000 to buy and fix the place up - cleaning, painting, installing fences, upgrading the antenna, and repairing the dishes’ mechanisms so that they could rotate again. Much of the labor was done by university students and staff as part of course curriculum, and once the work was complete, the antennae were used for radio astronomy - even observing the impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on the surface of Jupiter. Several years later, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) invested in additional upgrades to support its interstellar research. These days, the now-renamed Woodbury Research Facility has been a film backdrop, and like so much of Middle Georgia, hosted zombies and survivors in The Walking Dead at one point.
Unlike Woodbury, some earth stations missed their extra leases on life. AT&T revels in their destruction these days, chocking up PR and social media points with the carnage. The Bartlett Gateway Earth Station in Talkeetna, AK met its end in a corporate video on the company blog. The viewer is asked: “What do you do when a giant satellite dish has outlived its usefulness? First, you take stock of its accomplishments over the years,” before crassly being informed that “then, you blow it up.” For me, the video is painful to watch. Satellite dishes were icons, symbols of the future from my childhood, subjects of elementary school science lessons, stars of the film Contact and second fiddle only to Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey. And Bartlett’s demise offers no spectacle - the dish was cut off with a small, focused explosion at the neck, and it fell slightly back with an anticlimactic thud. In its demolition, the dish didn’t even clear its base, and it had to be blowtorched away bit by bit until it slowly rolled off the pedestal backwards, collapsing under its own weight. Instead of going out with a bang, sparks and fire and smoke, it was an underwhelming wreck. Given what these earth stations accomplished, it strikes me as a terrible waste.
But in Woodbury, from outside the fence, things are less conclusive. Last time I visited, I couldn’t tell if the earth station was still in use by Georgia Tech or SETI anymore. On my several passes through the area, flocks of birds were comfortably roosting on its dishes. Woodbury Earth Station looked peaceful. And so it sits, quietly in solitude, tucked in the pleasant surroundings of The Cove, surviving, and maybe waiting for something more.