The silence of the desert, it's eerily quiet.

There's literally nothing going on apart from bugs flying.

We're in Argentinian Patagonia, the largest desert region of the Americas.

It's perhaps not the place where you might expect to find a Chinese-run ground station.

These stations are strategically located across the world

to provide continuous coverage of space and that allows for seamless communication

as satellites move across the sky. This one, as with all Chinese ground

stations, is run by the CLTC or China Satellite Launch and Tracking Control

General, a sub-entity of the People's

Liberation Army. So that says that doesn't work. Okay so that doesn't help. We've been trying for months to gain access to this

facility but to no avail. The CLTC haven't given any comment or an

interview for this documentary.

Frustratingly, there's an agreement in place for a visitor center, but it's not somewhere

you can just walk into, which kind of defeats the object of a visitor centre and further adds to the intrigue.

So it looks like a kind of, it's a Patagonian style building,

the kind of a little turret fake bell tower I don't know I kind of have this

image of something quite kind of space age you think of a space station and then on the other side is the massive satellite.

The ground station sits on a two square kilometer plot and the jewel in the crown of this

place is a huge 35 meter tall antenna. This is the first Chinese space research

structure built outside of China. It's an inverted pyramid on a pyramid, so it's a kind of hourglass shape if you like, which is wider at the top obviously a big satellite.

And the satellite, although it moves, it can move, it is absolutely facing straight up.

So it's checking out exactly what's going on in space at the moment.

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