Thule Air Base – The US Military’s Most Remote Outpost
This radar station is so remote that it sees no sunlight for four months of the year. It is also so powerful it could spot a tennis ball in flight 3,000 miles away.
This is America’s controversial missile defence system in northern Greenland, where the Cold War never ended.
The Thule Air Base – the US military’s most remote and northern outpost – is home to one of the most important and advanced pieces of American military hardware in the world, a Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) radar.
It’s the size of a ten-storey building and glaringly hi-tech, the radar stands perched like a silent sentinel scanning the skies for anything coming over the top of the world.
Access to the inside of the radar is through a thick steel door that is protected from the inside by armed guards.
Beyond them is a dark warren of corridors and rooms with high ceilings and exposed pipes running everywhere – it looks like a James Bond film set, complete with golf buggies to ferry people around.
Since the radar has to be manned constantly there has to be room for staff to survive here for days without any contact with the outside world.
There are a couple of dormitories, a small canteen and even a volleyball court in the middle of the squat building that sits underneath the radar.
Inside the small, windowless control room three Air Force operators in uniform sit in front of bulky, white computer terminals. Although the radar itself is supremely hi-tech, the current interface that these operators use dates back to 1986.
The operators’ primary mission is to look for intercontinental ballistic missile launches. Obviously, these are a pretty rare occurrence, but there is the odd scheduled Russian test launch to monitor.
To keep themselves busy, the radar operators spend most of their time performing a secondary role of looking out for space debris that could crash into satellites or the orbiting space station.
In addition to the BMEWS radar, Thule Air Base is home to the 821st Air Base Group and is also host to Detachment 3 of the 22d Space Operations Squadron, part of the 50th Space Wing’s global satellite control network.
The modern airfield boasts a 3,000 m (10,000 ft) runway and 2,600 U.S. and international flights per year.
Posted on April 15, 2009 | Filed Under Life
Leave a Reply
