Cheyenne Mountain Shutting Down

WilliamSChips writes "The United States military has announced that they are shutting down the facility at Cheyenne Mountain, home to the high-tech NORAD which tracks every object in the sky. NORAD's operations will be moved to the nearby Peterson Air Force base. The mountain facility is being placed on standby in case they need it again." From the article: "The Cheyenne Mountain center, at the eastern foot of the Rockies near the base of Pikes Peak, was constructed underground in the mid-1960s. Fearing nuclear attacks at the time, the United States built sites such as the Cheyenne Mountain complex. The Navy prepared a floating White House aboard the communications cruiser USS Northampton, in case the president needed to be evacuated from U.S. soil. Another protective bunker was created near White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., for members of Congress."

Comments

Re:Santa

[jdbartlett]

Never ye fear:

"Cheyenne Mountain is not going away," Keating told reporters Friday. "There will be a small number of people that will remain at Cheyenne Mountain to maintain the facility in the event we need to stand up for either a real world threat or for exercises. Day-to-day NORAD-North Com operations will occur from Peterson Air Force Base."

Re:Doesn't surprise me at all...

[Jerry Coffin]

They probably have another "secret" base to do this work from.

You seem to be talking about Schriever Air Force Base. Interestingly, this is also pretty close by. According to TFA, one of the reasons for the move is the commute between Peterson and Cheyenne Mountain. From Peterson to Cheyenne Mountain is a fairly ugly drive directly through Colorado Springs (the end of that route isn't quite right, but Mapquest doesn't seem to know exactly where the entrance to NORAD is. By contrast, from Peterson to Schriever is almost entirely through open country with minimal traffic.

You can probably find some good satellite photos on Google.

You hardly need satellite photos. I'd guess some people living near the Broadmoor can probably see traffic in and out of the mountain with nothing more than binoculars or maybe a small telescope at most. OTOH, there's not really much to see -- almost everything is underground, and about all you can see from the outside is the entrance to a tunnel into the mountain. About all you'd see from a satellite photo would be a road that disappears into the side of a mountain with a LOT of antennas on top (though a lot of them belong to the local radio stations, TV stations, Sprint Broadband, etc.)

Re:It's obvious why they're *really* doing this

[Mr. Freeman]

Stargate SG-1 s a science fiction show aired on the sci-fi channel. It's in it's 8th season now I believe. The stargate is supposedly this big ring looking thing that allows people to open a wormhole to another stargate, there are a lot of stargates places all over the galaxy.

It turns out that there are also stargates all over the universe but that requires a lot of power and a weird ass way to dial to the other stargate. They find a way to do that and they create stargate Atlantis which is it's own show now.