Drive around Aurora, Colorado, and you’ll see typical suburban sights: cookie-cutter communities, apartments that call themselves luxury, strip malls with breweries next to nail salons, and open-space parks where dogs and their owners gather. But then, overhead, a sag-bellied aircraft swings low; next you notice that — atop that hill over there — a bunch of white domes arc from the ground. You see them long before you reach the gates of Buckley Air Force Base, inside of which they live.
These objects are technically called radomes. But back when the military and intelligence communities first started building them — in places like Edzell Airfield, Scotland, and Menwith Hill, England — people came up with a better name: God’s golf balls.
If golf balls are bright geodesic objects that advance toward a goal, and if God is a whatever who knows a lot and controls things, then, sure, that’s an accurate moniker. Because in Aurora, God’s golf balls play a pivotal national-security role. Some belong to one of the nation’s most secretive agencies, the National Reconnaissance Office, and they drag down and distribute intelligence information largely from spy satellites looking for bogeys.
The reconnoiterers run Buckley’s Aerospace Data Facility, one of the country’s biggest data-collection and distribution centers. It’s the largest tenant on the base, said Sharlene Fairbanks-Kyte, chief of the facility’s Office of Strategic Communications, and it employs around 4,000 people.
The golf balls’ all-seeing existence is one reason Buckley sits on the short list of military bases that might host an organization called U.S. Space Command, reinstituted by the Trump administration in August. Space Command, for the time being, operates out of Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. It is one of 11 “unified combatant commands” — military forces made up of multiple branches — and is responsible for overseeing war and peace in space.
Buckley, nestled near parks and a Sam’s Club in one of the Denver metro area’s most diverse cities, would like to become this mysterious and futuristic organization’s forever home. This would be, as chamber of commerce president Kevin Hougen told the Aurora Sentinel, the “largest economic development project Aurora has ever seen today and into the future.” But whether Buckley will be the chosen one, and how residents will feel about that, remains unknown.
Odds are good Space Command will end up somewhere in Colorado. In addition to Buckley, Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, Peterson, and Schriever Air Force Base — all in Colorado Springs — are possibilities for Space Command HQ. Just two options sit outside Colorado: Redstone Arsenal in Alabama and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The winner will get an influx of cash and jobs, in addition to military prestige.
Aurora’s Economic Development Council likes to point out that Buckley has lots of space of the terrestrial variety — “buffer zones,” as the Sentinel put it, “that have been painstakingly sculpted” to make room for just such an expansion. In addition to the golf balls, Buckley is home to some of the Air Force’s space operations, along with a number of other intelligence units. And then there are the utilitarian logistics: “Buckley has enough power, water, and square footage for a headquarters building,” said Colonel Devin Pepper, commander of the base’s 460th Space Wing.
Buckley is already the largest employer in Aurora. “For the past several years, Buckley Air Force Base has averaged just under a billion dollars annually to the city of Aurora and larger Denver metro area,” said Pepper. If U.S. Space Command came here, it would bring 1,100 more jobs with it. “The combination of personnel working directly for the command and the indirect jobs that will be created may propel Buckley’s annual fiscal impact well past the $1 billion threshold,” he added.
The area’s private aerospace sector would likely boom, too. “Business likes to co-locate” with the places that give them contracts, said Jay Lindell, the Colorado Office of Economic Development’s aerospace and defense industry champion (yes, that’s his real title).
The possibility of Space Command settlement has the support of Jason Crow, Aurora’s representative in Congress, who wrote an April letter, signed by 11 other local leaders, outlining the case for his city’s base. Part of his missive focused on the omniscient Aerospace Data Facility, the existence of which was only declassified in 2008. “These professionals work around the clock, 365 days a year, to keep our country safe from evolving threats domestically and abroad,” wrote Crow.
But even if Aurora doesn’t win, Colorado would be happy to have Space Command anywhere in the state, a fact Governor Jared Polis and the entire congressional delegation penned into an August letter. “As the epicenter of national security space, Colorado is the prime location to house national efforts to ensure continued U.S. technological superiority, global leadership, and capabilities in space,” it read, adding that “the Colorado community has demonstrated continued support.”
Pepper said this widespread support in Aurora is partly because people in the town are the base. “We’re part of that community, and we absolutely feel supported and welcome,” he said. “What most of our neighbors forget is that our kids go to the same schools as theirs, we shop in the same grocery stores and dine at the same restaurants. We’re so integrated with the people of this community that we’re almost indistinguishable.”
Historically, the relationship been more complicated. In an extensive 1996 article, communications and networking analyst Loring Wirbel details times when locals (albeit a small minority) very publicly opposed the military space programs that dot this Rocky Mountain region. There was the time, in 1991, when activists released a bison onto Falcon Air Force Base (now called Schriever). Colorado Springs hosted the 1993 national meeting of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, at which attendees started to organize demonstrations that year outside of Buckley. Later, in 1995, “six protesters tried to walk into the cordoned-off Aerospace Data Facility area,” Wirbel reported. “Two protesters were tackled to the ground, water cannons were trained on the group, and a photographer from the Rocky Mountain News had his film confiscated.” Westword detailed a small-scale demonstration in 2000.
Buckley did run a “mock protest” exercise in 2015, but things by and large have been calmer of late. Wirbel’s group, Citizens for Peace in Space, hasn’t been as active these days. “Occasionally we help support Plowshares protesters [opposed to nuclear weapons] who plan civil disobedience at space facilities, and we usually hold vigils during Keep Space for Peace Week in October,” he said. “But I’m not sure if anyone is talking about actions after the formal declaration of the Command.”
While people may have concerns about creating a place to command space, economics often wins out in these situations. “Most people see Buckley as a benign cash cow,” Wirbel said. He remembered a time in the mid 1990s when the radomes were expanded to serve the kind of missions that whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed years later.
“The ACLU joined with us in protests at that time, warning Denver residents their civil liberties were under threat,” Wirbel said. “And there was a big collective shrug of the shoulders. ‘Hey, those big golf balls are kinda cute, and besides — jobs, jobs, jobs!’ Sounds kind of cynical, I’m sure, but that seems to be reality.”
No matter the public reaction, military expansion toward your backyard involves hazards. The information these units gather and distribute facilitates both peace and war. Bases yield economic development, but also ethical dilemmas. That’s not so different from what happens when any imperfect industry moves into town. Oil and gas can be a boon to struggling regions, but they also change the landscape and abet climate change, a tension Colorado is familiar with. And, sure, it’s great that Amazon delivered prime jobs to Seattle, but that influx also helped spur an affordable housing crisis.
Of course, no one knows for sure what issues might arise at an Auroran Space Command, if it materializes. Not even God’s golf balls.
