Jamesburg Earth Station Can Be Yours for $3 Million - NYTimes.com
►http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/us/jamesburg-earth-station-can-be-yours-for-3-million.html?_r=2&ref=global-hom
In its glory days, this sprawling bunkerlike redoubt on Comsat Road played an essential role in national life. Built in 1968 by the Communications Satellite Corporation, the Jamesburg Earth Station and nearly a dozen others like it helped bring the first televised images of Neil Armstrong on the moon and President Richard M. Nixon in Beijing into America’s living rooms.
He had planned to make the earth station his weekend home, and he tweaked the dish’s position from a right angle to a position parallel to the ground so that it looks like it is levitating by the structure.
He hoped to transform the operations center into a living room and master bedroom separated by a circular fire pit, and hired R. Wayne Johnson, a local architect and engineer, to reimagine the place as a home. [..] But Mr. Bullis abandoned his plans for the station and decided to sell when his youngest son, Adam, died of leukemia at age 23.
Paul Saffo, who forecasts technology trends in Silicon Valley, said that he hoped the buyer would appreciate the earth station’s history and that it would be perfect for an amateur astronomer. “It’s in the danger zone,” he said. “Someone is going to have to be really crazy and really rich to buy it.”