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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."
Let's put it up for auction! This would be a really cool geek house. It would be even better than living in an old missile silo!
I hope they're taking the Santa tracking equipment with them!
Na, its being outsourced. Apparently Afghanistan has some cheap and currently vacant mountain complexes and staff with low salary expectations.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Will WOPR have the same phone number if it's moved too?
Maybe now we can take time out to port Linux to the WOPR. How about a nice game of GnuChess?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
It looks like Ill have to find a new place to play bridge, poker, checkers, tic-tac-toe, chess, and global thermonuclear war.
They're clearing it out so when Skynet goes online, John Connor will have somewhere to go and lead the rest of us to victory.
My fearless leader.....Dick Cheney....keeps telling me how we are in imminent danger of some rogue state, North Korea, Iraq, Iran or terrorist group, lobbing a nuke at us. On the one hand we have the whole "mushroom cloud" syndrome, and now the Pentagon tells me our penultimate bunker isn't really needed any more to defend our command and control center from a "mushroom cloud". Cheyenne Mountain actually wasn't worth much during the cold war when our main adversary had multi megaton nukes. It actually might stand up to the kiloton class nukes rogue states and terrorist groups are most likely to get. So we move command and control to a place where it will be relatively easy to destroy and decapitate one of the most critical command and control centers we have. And we do it AFTER we spend $700 million in a failed attempt to upgrade the one we are closing down. You really have to wonder if the people in charge really are completely incompetent to manage their own affairs let alone those of a superpower.
@de_machina
I am sure some narcistic, evil doctor would be very interested in acquiring a cave of his own (raises pink) muhahaha !
Or, on a more serious note, we could just make a nice secure colocation facility there, beats Sealand or something like Virtu (and there are more like that)...
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In a recent documentary, one of the producers of Stargate said that, in the real Cheyenne mountain, there's a door with a sign that says "Stargate Command", but that it's actually just a broom closet.
I really wanted to change my sig to something witty, but all I could come up with is this.
Same reason the US military is in the UK. NORAD is like NATO. It s a multi-national organization. The US and Canada joined together to defend North American from attack from the USSR and China.
I have run into flight crews from the UK, Australia, and Norway at US bases. There are many military personal from other countries including countries in Europe in the US all the time. UK subs pick up their Trident Missiles from a joint US UK stockpile at base in the US. They are then fitted with UK made warheads.
You didn't really believe all that propaganda that military cooperation between the US in other countries was totally one sided did you?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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 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.)
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Samantha Carter: Was I naked?(in McKay's hallucination)
Rodney McKay: Partially.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
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.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
"Present threats - including those that you describe - do not have that capability."
Actually Russia still has that capability, its somewhat smaller than it was but its still there. One wonders why people pretend its not still there when it is. Russia is making such a killing on their oil and gas reserves I imagine its unlikely they will bother with a nuclear war, but hey a coup and a wacko get the keys, or relations continue to sour, anything could happen.
Relations with Russia are in fact not very good. The U.S. has been treating Russia like dirt since the U.S.S.R collapsed. Gary Kasparov, chess grand master and now Democracy advocates, makes the interesting observation that Putin may be cheering on the chaos in the Middle East because everything that inflates oil and gas prices is a windfall for Russia.
All in all you have to wonder about the wisdom of replacing America's penultimate bunker and command and control facility with an extremely vulnerable office building that could easily be attacked with conventional weapons, a truck bomb or chemical or biological weapons. Cheyenne Mountain was, if nothing else, good for PR and intimidation value.
One question would be where the ABM system is controlled from. If its NORAD, and your worried the ABM system might work, then you take out NORAD first and then open the door for the ICBM's from North Korea.
All in all it just seems like a silly move to make especially after you've just sunk $700 million in to Cheyenne Mountain.
@de_machina
Yep. No doubt about it; it's closing down alright *wink*
It's now out of action - nothing going on in there anymore *smirk*
Things sure will be different now that Cheyenne Mountain is ceasing all operations *nudge*
Wow, even their broom closets are cool !!
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
There were two ships, the Northhampton and the Wright. One was always at sea while the other was in port. I was on the USS Wright for a couple of years and it was a pretty cool place to be if you had to be somewhere in the Navy. During our 2-week cruise we would sail to some vacation resort (St. Thomas, St. Croix, Nova Scotia, Bermuda, etc) and tie up for a week. That was our "cruise". See, it carried so many top brass that us peons had it pretty good too - THEY didn't want to paddle around for 2 weeks at a time, so we always put in at some really nice port along the eastern seaboard. Captain was even nice enough to let us bring our motorcycles along. Like at San Juan, we had to report in at 8AM for a roll call, then we got on our bikes and toured the island until the next morning. The ship though, was something else. It was a converted aircraft carrier with a humongous antenna farm on the flight deck. The entire rear section of the ship was a powerful VLF transmitter, with vacuum tubes taller than I am. Each stage of the transmitter was in its own compartment (like the "Pi Network Room" sign on the door). They had this helicopter with twin interlocking blades (no tail rotor) that hauled a cable to 10,000 feet for the VLF antenna - the most powerful VLF transmitter in the world at that time (talking about ERP). All the pilot did was take off and land, as it was flown from the ship most of the time it was airborne. Most of the ship was off limits to everyone I knew, and all I did was calibrate & repair electronic test equipment. Ever see the bow of a carrier underwater? Like they say, it's an adventure. :)
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
Um, I actually thought the question about "what is the Stargate?" was sarcasm.
Looking at the responses, I'm actually supprised that wasn't the case.
I'll throw in my sarcastic explanation of Stargate anyways:
Stargate is where the writers thought, "Hey lets grab the aging McGuyver, give him machine guns and have him fight Aliens throughout the Galaxy. We can team him up with a buxom science babe (doing a military version of the sexy librarian thing), a Stoic warrior guy like Worf (but with fewer head ridges) and a Indiana Jones type academic guy (but more know-it-all). The whole thing can be done with an ancient Egyptian theme with cool pyramids and crystals and stuff. We can make it all work by using a lesser known gaming system like Tri-Tac's Fringeworthy Roleplaying game. We can do a film, maybe even a series or two, with lots of explosions and special effects stuff, it'll be really cool".
Its not users who are broken, it's systems not taking account their likely behaviour and fixing it technically.
It seems the Goa'uld are big on apostrophes
Those people who stick an apostrophe on every word that ends with "s" are probably Goa'uld sympathizers. Better kill them just be sure.
The Cheyenne Mountain complex was never secret. They didn't use security through obscurity, they used security by freaking mountain shield.
The US and Canada joined together to defend North American from attack from the USSR and China.
On 9/11 all air traffic in the U.S. and Canada was grounded simultaneously. The next day the Prime Minister of Canada was asked by a reporter how soon flights in Canada would resume. He answered simply, "I don't know. The air space belongs to Norad."
Under joint North American defense treaties, Canadian military officers participated in the second Gulf War even though the same Prime Minister had explicitly refused to join the coalition. At the time, the U.S. ambassador to Canada observed that more Canadians participated in the war than 90% of the countries that formally supported it.
There was even a treaty signed recently that allows U.S. and Canadian forces to cross into each other's countries without any formal invitation under certain emergency conditions.
It appears that behind the public posturing about sovereignty and national identity, the defense of North America takes priority over everything. Some people will find that fact comforting and others find it alarming.
An actual piece of equipment was issued the asset tag WOPR-{numbers}....
It's a transformer located in a alcove in a back corridor.
I've seen it and some wag reprinted the asset tag with 24point type.
I was stationed in NORAD in the mid '80s, so it may no longer exist.
I think you mean Global ThermoGNU/clear War.
Ummm... excuse me, they're called "Gateships". You know, a "ship" that goes through the "gate".
(I can't believe I just burned karma on an obscure Rodney McKay reference...)
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."