21,000 Square Feet of Cold War Memories for Sale, Satellite Dish Included

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. They also pulled in signals from satellites in geostationary orbit that made international telephone calls fast and easily accessible for most Americans.

“It’s the ultimate man cave,” said Jeffrey W. Bullis, a Silicon Valley electronics mogul, who bought the property in 2004 for $2 million from AT&T and is now selling it, complete with the hand-carved Tiki gods from Vanuatu that he placed at the entrance as a homey touch.

Fiber optics made the station’s technology obsolete. Mr. Bullis, 56, who develops security systems for nuclear plants and other sites, had hoped to develop an Internet business there. When that did not prove to be feasible, he said, he proceeded with Plan B: Turning the Jamesburg Earth Station into a house.

“This is Love,” he said during a tour, indicating one of the would-be bedrooms that he christened on the building’s perimeter. “This is Peace. This is Happiness.”

A time-stood-still feeling pervades the place, despite its once-futuristic aura.

In one room, there are 14 file cabinets of blueprints, seemingly untouched for decades; in another, the dusty air filtration system emits a low wheeze.

The cinder block walls are lined with vintage cold war images: the hydrogen bomb test at Bikini atoll and a nighttime shot of an Intelsat II satellite launching in a cometlike streak of light.