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Friday, April 22, 2011
KAFB Space Lab Has 200 Jobs
By Charles D. Brunt
Journal Staff Writer
Albuquerque's economy is about to get an $89 million boost from a U.S. Air Force laboratory where scientists and technicians will predict the weather in space and ensure the reliability of satellites.
On Thursday, Kirtland Air Force Base officials and a handful of dignitaries cut the ribbon on the new $59.5 million Battlespace Environment Laboratory, which brings with it nearly 200 jobs.
Base officials said the lab's annual budget will be close to $89 million.
The lab is the centerpiece of the Battlespace Environment Division — one of three divisions in the Air Force's Space Vehicle Directorate, which is one of eight directorates under the Air Force Research Laboratory headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
The division includes the Space Weather Center of Excellence and the Battlespace Surveillance Innovation Center, both of which are already at Kirtland.
The Innovation Center develops detection and imaging technologies that can provide the military with information about combatant forces in the field.
The Weather Center studies phenomena in space that can affect military systems and develops ways to predict, mitigate and reduce those effects. These range from radio signal interference in the ionosphere to radiation damage to spacecraft hardware.
Jack Quinn, program manager for the Space Weather Forecasting Lab, said space weather forecasting today is about where terrestrial weather forecasting was in the 1950s, but is progressing quickly with new technologies and computer modeling.
A term heard frequently during the ribbon-cutting ceremony and the tour was "space assets," which essentially means military satellites that provide a wide array of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance information to military leaders.
But that's only part of the puzzle, Col. Bill T. Cooley, director of the Space Vehicles Directorate, said.
"For all of those assets in space, we have to have ground systems that 'talk' to those space assets and crunch the data and look at the data," he said.
Other divisions within the directorate are involved in developing technologies used in satellites.
"It's one thing for scientists to observe a magnetic flare-up in the sun and determine that a 'coronal mass ejection' is spewing debris toward the Earth," he said. "It's quite another thing for analysts to understand that the result of that event could be an interruption of the Global Positioning System."
Analyzing the data, predicting its impact and developing models for future applications are among the duties of the division's scientists.
The Battle Environment Division is transferring to Kirtland from Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts as part of the recommendations of the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission.
Cooley said some employees have indicated they will relocate from Hanscom to Kirtland.
"Of the folks remaining at Hanscom, there's about 88 who said they would move," Cooley said as an estimated 250 invited guests toured the 145,000-square-foot building.
"The challenge we have is, there's no real downside for someone in June, let's say, when it's getting really close to actually having to pack up your house, to say, 'No, I've changed my mind.' "
The lab, which is still receiving truckloads of specialized equipment from Hanscom, should be fully equipped and staffed by August, he said.
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