UK billionaire invests £24m in Cornwall’s Goonhilly Earth Station

The funding - the largest ever single investment in the facility - will see Hargreaves, who is the founder of financial services company Hargreaves Lansdown, take a controlling share in the site.

Once the largest satellite earth station in the world, Goonhilly is famous for its role in the first transatlantic TV transmission which was made using Telstar, the world's first telecommunications satellite. It also beamed the lunar landings to millions of viewers in 1969.

Current owner Goonhilly Earth Station Ltd, acquired the facility from BT in 2014 and has since invested £5 million in rejuvenating the site which now provides spacecraft tracking and monitoring services to many of the world’s largest satellite operators.

The latest investment follows the announcement of an £8.4 million contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) which will see its 32m diameter GHY-6 antenna upgraded to provide deep-space tracking of future missions to the moon and mars, as well as satellite communication services.