President's Message:
Pennywise and Pound Foolish

By Steve Bartlett

A recent L.A. Times article described efforts in Washington to move the operations of the Los Angeles Air Force Base (LA AFB) from California to a base in another state. The L.A. base, which serves as the central clearinghouse and brain trust for all military space projects, is on a list of closure candidates because of its singular mission.

Since its creation back in the mid-50’s, LA AFB has been responsible for developing every military space launcher, ballistic missile, and military satellite for this nation. Some of its current projects include the Delta IV and Atlas V launchers (which are being considered for lofting the manned Orbital Spaceplane vehicles), the ubiquitous Global Positioning System navigation satellite constellation, as well as numerous weather, communications, imaging, and intelligence satellites.

The base was established in Southern California to put it in close proximity with the collection of aerospace contractors located here, thereby allowing a better working relationship between supplier and customer. In the past few decades, the base has served as a center of excellence in the space arena, supporting both military and civilian space needs. Its site near LAX gives it easy access to space contractors Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, and numerous smaller space firms and hundreds of local support contractors, as well as the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the semi-private support firm, the Aerospace Corporation.

Senators from New Mexico, Colorado, and other regions are lobbying to move LA AFBs operations to their states because they realize that billions of taxpayer dollars that would come into their state economies from the influx of base personnel, support services, and the like. In addition, each of the major contractors would be forced to set up new facilities wherever the space operations center moved. From the states’ viewpoint, this is a simple question of dollars and cents.

But moving the space operations out of the Los Angeles area would make it much more difficult for Air Force space personnel to do their jobs with contractors. It would place additional obstacles between those doing the work and those who need it done. In the long run, our space support infrastructure would suffer and it would be much more difficult to provide the space services our personnel in the field need.

Since the major push to move the LA AFB operations out of state is coming from those states’ senators, I urge local space activists to contact our senators, Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and urge them to fight to keep the base where it is, in the Los Angeles area.

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