In the days before the July 1969 space mission that marked humanity's first steps on the Moon, NASA was working with a group of Australian technicians who had agreed to engineer a space-to-Earth interface to carry the video and telemetry signals from the Lunar Lander "Eagle" on the Moon and relay them to the rest of the global audience, estimated then at some 600 million people. The dish antenna used had to be large, as the signals expected from the spacecraft were very weak and easily lost; NASA had to use the Parkes radio telescope, situated in the middle of an Australian sheep farm. There were some background concerns at NASA about using the Parkes antenna, mainly technical, as the signals had to go via point-to-point microwave links to get re-transmitted globally.