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Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station - A Look Inside NORAD
Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station
A Look Inside NORAD U.S. Military
For all its technological majesty, the
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trillion-dollar North American air warning
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network, with connections spread around the
world, could best be personified by one Related Resources
innocuous cloth-bound log book resting on a • Air Force Job Descriptions
counter. • Air Force Resources
• Bases & Units
Labeled “FAA Log,” the handwritten • AFXC 1C5X1 - Air Warning
• AFXC 1C6X1 - Space Ops
record of out-of-the-ordinary happenings for • Air Force Assignments
aircraft monitored by the Federal Aviation
Administration — like the airline passenger who
decided to climb on the beverage cart and use it as a toilet — is integral.
The inch-thick record is a chilling reminder of the air warning mission,
which is now the most public portion of the Cheyenne Mountain
operations center’s charge. But there’s more to this mission and to this
team of aerospace sentinels than what goes on in the air-breathing world.
Housed on the grounds of Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station 7,000
feet above sea level near Colorado Springs, Colo., the operations center
gave mutually assured destruction and Matthew Broderick fame in
“WarGames.” It’s the epicenter for a worldwide network of satellites,
radars, sensors and 5,500 multinational, multiservice military and civilian
guardians watching over North American air and space.
Canadian and American national
defense officials realized they needed a
continental home alarm system to track
Soviet bombers in 1956. A year later,
Russia launched Sputnik I, and Defense
Department leaders added the ballistic
threat to the center’s mission. They
broke ground in 1961 and opened the
$142 million facility nestled in 2,000
feet of granite in 1966.
Staff Sgt. Brent Lanier, an emergency
action controller inside Cheyenne
Cheyenne Mountain is the worksite for
Mountain, watches North America’s
skies with the help of a piece of three major commands: the North
American Aerospace Defense
software called Flight Explorer (shown
Command, formed in 1958 with
in background), tracking thousands of
aircraft flights each day. Official Air
combined U.S. and Canadian forces; Air
Force Photo by Tech. Sgt. John E.
Lasky Force Space Command, created in
1982; and the U.S. Space Command,
created in 1985. Scattered throughout Colorado Springs and surrounding
towns, Cheyenne Mountain forms the Orion — the warrior — of the DOD’s
space force constellation.
For four decades, its mission went relatively unmodified. Then one
morning, hijackers used four passenger airliners as weapons of mass
destruction and changed the playing field.
“Before Sept. 11, our focus was outward,” said Col. Steve Allen, deputy
director for operations at Cheyenne Mountain and a 22-year veteran of
space operations. “Now there’s a whole new ballgame. If we don’t do our
job, the consequences are pretty severe.”
A new focus
Along with Russian bombers and drug runners coming from the outside
in, the air warning center’s flight-suit garbed military air weapons
controllers now watch North America’s “inner space.”
Stood up days after the Sept. 11 incidents, this outside-in watch has
controllers watching a computer monitor that, thanks to radar
and sensor data, draws a picture of the North
American continent, Alaska and Hawaii. Over the
top of the map crawl thousands of pixel-small
dots, representing some of the more than 12,000
aircraft that fly throughout the continent each
day.
Cheyenne Mountain Air
Controllers see at least one unidentified aircraft Force Station doesn’t look
daily, called a track. To assist them in identifying like much from above.
the track, controllers contact the Continental That’s because the combat
United States NORAD Region at Tyndall Air Force operations center — the
installation’s nerve center
Base, Fla., which gathers data from one of the — is hidden beneath more
three Air National Guard-run air defense sectors. than 2,000 feet of granite.
They also work closely with a newly installed Official Air Force Photo by
24-hour FAA representative who can reach out to Tech. Sgt. John E. Lasky
the administration’s 20 centers across the country.
The region and the FAA feed supplemental data back to the air warning
center. They analyze it and attempt to identify the aircraft. If the track
still cannot be identified, NORAD will scramble jets to chase it. All of this
happens in about five minutes.
While controllers identify most Advertisement
Inside Cheyenne Mountain While controllers identify most
tracks, not all aircraft are identified.
The path to Cheyenne Mountain Air Force In 2000, there were 115 remaining
Station is a thin winding road. At one unknown tracks and 179 in 2001.
point you travel so high, you swear you
can see Nebraska. A thick yellow line
On Sept. 11, there were more than
painted on the asphalt serves as the first
reminder that you’ve left Colorado Springs 50 people training inside the battle
and entered the installation. Then come management warning center during
the metal gates, barbed wire and security a NORAD exercise. Shortly after the
forces in sport utility vehicles to anchor second airliner smashed into World
that feeling.
Trade Center Tower No. 1, the
Entry inside is more like attending a exercise ceased. The mountain’s
professional sports event or going to a massive blast doors closed as a
theme park. After parking their cars and protective measure for the first time
following a thorough screening. including
baggage X-rays and metal detectors, in more than 20 years, and the
workers — most in green flight inner space watch began.
suits or BDUs — catch the blue bus in.
About 210 people work in the operations As an air warning center controller
center. team crew chief that morning, Tech.
The bus winds through a long granite
Sgt. John Sterling expected a day of
tunnel, carved in the early 1960s. It “the usual.” Nothing, he said,
pauses at, of all things, a stop light inside prepared him for the surreal events
the mountain. Then it finds its stop and that unfolded in front of him.
the passengers walk in.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,”
The space feels more like a submarine
than typical military office digs. The Sterling, a 15-year Air Force
hallways are narrow, white and without veteran, recalled. “For impact, on a
ornament. Work areas look more like scale of one to 10, it was an 11.”
business offices once you reach them,
some with cubicle farms and others with Sterling’s team and everyone who
technological consoles. In between some
of the walls and floors, you can peer into
remained behind from the exercise
the heart of the mountain, seeing the rock moved “at light speed.” In addition
and foundation. to his regular duties, Sterling
coordinated the first medical aerial
The main briefing room doubles as Gen.
Ralph “Ed” Eberhart’s office and includes a
evacuation flights into Washington,
pullout bed and other facilities in case he D.C., and New York City that
needs to stay the night. Eberhart serves morning.
as North American Aerospace Defense
Command and U.S. Space Command’s “Everything we did that day
commander in chief. He also leads Air mattered,” Sterling said.
Force Space Command.
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“WarGames” counterpart, save the hive of bees. In the command
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three space commands, asked Lanier Planning
It’s a small city, complete with a base to do something he’d never done
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“I’d sent out false DEFCON
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shut Sept. 11 for almost three hours, the Multifaceted watchers Christmas Airborne Ranger
byproduct of a possible threat to the
mountainside complex. While the United States’ inner space
mission blossomed, and its handlers
About 15 percent of the force here is were cast into the world spotlight,
Canadian, the remainder is U.S. military.
Cheyenne Mountain’s missile and
The operations center and everything space watch role continued. Since
inside runs on power generated from the the early 1990s, military space use
city of Colorado Springs. If all power goes has grown in importance. Eberhart
belly up, the complex can run on a series
of industrial-sized batteries for about 15
emphasized this and his commands’
minutes until six diesel-powered backup role in the United States’ war against
generators are brought up. terrorism in October 2001 during a
visit to Malmstrom Air Force Base.
“Whatever this nation does, wherever they do it, they’re not going to
leave home without us,” he said. “The capabilities we provide ... are very
important in the ongoing Operation Enduring Freedom.”
To that end, Cheyenne Mountain’s missile warning center now tracks
strategic and theater missiles as well as space launches, from the
multiple warhead-topped ICBM to the theater-based Scud missile. Big or
small, the center has less than five minutes to assess it. The missile
alert, called a “quick alert,” appears as a thick red circle on one of the
command center’s large warning screens. Defense support program
command center’s large warning screens. Defense support program
satellites and controllers at radar stations can then track its path,
projecting when and where it will land.
“It’s like watching a baseball being thrown. Eventually, you know where
it’s going to land,” Allen said.
But there’s more to the missile watch than spotting and tracking. Allen
said there are rigorous safeguards to ensure the system and its people
are working properly. That includes the use of two independent sources,
called “dual phenomenology,” to discover if a missile threat to North
America is real.
Space control is a tad tamer. Currently, the United States and Canada
are the only countries cataloging what’s up there. All told, more than
8,300 objects are orbiting Earth. Approximately 7 percent of those, about
580, are active, including a wealth of commercial television, wireless
telephone and automated teller machine data satellites. More than 27,000
objects have been cataloged since 1957, and controllers provide more
than 100,000 location updates each day.
Cheyenne Mountain’s controllers are also good pathfinders. Every time a
space shuttle goes into orbit, controllers create a “best flight path”
simulation, keeping the shuttle crew from bumping into orbiting objects.
North America’s new charge
Today, Canada and the United States can scramble any of more than 200
Canadian and U.S. intercept fighters and airborne early warning aircraft
standing watch from the southern edge of Alaska to the tip of Florida.
That number was 20 on Sept. 11. Their pilots wait on alert and fly
undisclosed combat air patrol missions over major cities across North
America [See “Homeland Patrol”].
Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, who leads the mostly Air National Guard-staffed
1st Air Force, the numbered air force in charge of those aircraft, said the
ability to quickly meet any threat is paramount.
“We work tirelessly to meet our nation’s requirements for rapid response
to any air sovereignty threat,” Arnold said. “This rapid-response capability
is a reflection of the teamwork and professionalism of our service
members. When we’re called upon, we’re ready to act — and act
fast.”
For Arnold and the entire aerospace security team, acting fast means a
continuance and improvement of the air, space and missile watch
missions, even if it means writing about disruptive passengers and weird
aircraft happenings in a cloth-bound federal diary. Allen, whose three
decades of service has taken him from the missile silo to the Cheyenne
Mountain command center, said Canadians and Americans expect and
deserve the best aerospace sentinels their nations can provide.
“For about 200 years, we thought we were safe,” Allen concluded. “You’d
like to think that after all America has been through and given to the
world, we’ve earned that.”
Above Article byStaff Sgt. Jason Tudor, Published in Airman's Magazine
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