New Boston Air Force Station, New Hampshire

This unique air force station started as a practice bombing range in World War II, then became a satellite tracking facility in 1959. It was further developed as a communications facility associated with Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts in the 1970s. It is now operated as space surveillance and control facility associated with Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado, the Air Force’s main satellite control base (which operates the GPS system and other intelligence assets). The New Boston Air Force Station is one of the most critical military satellite control facilities in the nation, and is part of a national and international network, with facilities at Ascension Island; Cape Canaveral; Thule, Greenland; and Oakhanger, in the UK. Together these facilities have complete coverage of the skies and space above the earth, and the few hundred satellites they monitor and control. New Boston also is involved in monitoring solar activity and associate “space weather,” which effects satellite operations. The base covers more than 2,800 acres, most of which is wooded buffer, and has six large radomes.