Commercial Aviation Services, part of Commercial Airplanes, work in the state of Colorado on a number of programs. United Launch Alliance, the joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin that uses Atlas and Delta rockets to provide launch services for government customers, also is based in the state. Overall, Boeing spent more than $198 million with 225 suppliers and vendors in Colorado last year. A significant portion of the defense programs the company supports in Colorado are classified and purposely don’t draw attention. That’s the case for many of the Boeing teams in Colorado Springs, a city that hosts two U.S. Air Force bases, the U.S. Army’s Fort Carson and the Air Force’s Cheyenne Mountain Complex, which monitors much of North America’s airspace for potential threats. From their offices around the city and at various bases, hundreds of Boeing employees mainly support the Army’s Ground-based Missile Defense (GMD) program for homeland defense 32 Boeing Front iers and the Air Force–controlled Global Positioning System, or GPS, which Boeing helped develop. “Most of our day-to-day activity is monitoring the GPS constellation. We look at the telemetry and the data and then analyze that to keep the older satellites running and get the new ones going,” said Boeing’s Ray Galik, manager of the Navigation and Integrated Mission Operations Support Center for GPS in Colorado Springs. “Our overall task is knowledge transfer—learning all the details so we can support the customer.” Being “close to the customer” isn’t a metaphorical phrase in Colorado Springs. Part of Galik’s team works within the complex of buildings at Schriever Air Force Base, constantly checking for any problems with the system used by the U.S. military as well as an estimated 3 billion people every day. The U.S. Air Force’s 100th Missile Defense Brigade also is based at Schriever, where an estimated 2,000 military and Boeing personnel perform Missile Defense Agency– related work. The agency’s facilities include the Joint GMD Training and Exercise Center, which Boeing has run for more than 10 years, training more than 4,500 warfighters. Robert Greger, the center’s Warfighter Training manager, said the U.S. Army– accredited “institution of excellence” works hard to train members of the U.S. armed forces in everything from the missile defense system’s basics up to realistic exercises. “There’s something special about bringing in a new soldier and saying ‘here’s your tools,” and six months later seeing them doing their job well,” Greger said. Besides providing day-to-day monitoring and training on important military programs, Boeing Defense, Space & Security runs engineering centers in Colorado Springs and Denver. “We provide engineering support for many programs across a large number of Boeing sites,” said Jim Barduniotis, program manager for the Colorado Design Center. Colorado Springs
Frontiers October 2015 Issue
To see the actual publication please follow the link above