Sci-fi City Where Mad Max Would Feel At Home

Eric Ellis, Boulder

01/07/1998

Boulder could be the setting for Mad Max - before the apocalypse.

A white and well-to-do suburb of Denver, the US's so-called Mile High City at the foot of the towering Rockies seems straight out of Science Fiction Central Casting.

To get to it from Denver requires careful navigation of ultra-modern freeways that take no prisoners and punish errant drivers.

Boulder is bathed in light of a film-maker's clarity, its rarified air has the quality of cut-glass. And scything through it across perfect steel-blue skies, symmetrical jetstreams. Radomes and satellite dishes punctuate the surrounding prairie. Actual people are rarely glimpsed and then mostly through the tinted windows of huge and immaculately maintained sports vehicles, or pulling into enormous houses with perfect gardens. They have the teeth to match their neat picket fences. Little wonder then that Boulder has become the media and communications centre of the New Economy, one straight out of the space age.

It's from here at Longmont, just north of Boulder, and Thornton, just south, that the world's first commercial spy satellites are operated.

With internet access and the authorisation of your credit card, it is possible to determine the site of an Iraqi Scud missile base, the location of a director's blockbuster, the state of a farmer's crop, the spread of an endangered species and even if your spouse is having an affair.

EarthWatch Inc and Space Imaging are part of a growing array of communications companies availing of Colorado's clear skies, central location and military connections to base operations.

The list extends to media companies. The area around Denver is home to its biggest cable-TV operation, TCI Communications, its second and third biggest satellite television operators PrimeStar and EchoStar, and it hosts the main uplink facility of the country's biggest satellite television provider, Hughes Corporation's DirecTV.

There is also a long list of satellite and communication-oriented defence contractors. Lockheed Martin Corp builds much of the Titan IV rocket, the US Government's launch vehicle for mostly classified payloads just outside Denver. It's a $US14 billion contract to build 40 Titans. TRW also has a big presence in Colorado, as does Ball Aerospace.

One of the reasons they are here is the US military. The State is dotted with military bases that form part of the fabled NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense command, which itself is famously housed inside Cheyenne Mountain, south of Denver.

There's Buckley, adjacent to Denver, which is the centre of the US's early warning intelligence efforts and Greeley, which hosts the Space Warning Squadron that monitors missile launches and nuclear detonations.

And there's Peterson Air Force Base near Colorado Springs, south of Denver, that is the nerve centre for the country's early warning Defense Support Program satellites.

Cheyenne Mountain of NORAD fame is nearby as is Falcon Air Force Base, home to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organisation and the Space Warfare Center -slogan: In Your Face from Space. Falcon also manages the controversial MILSTAR satellites, a $US10 billion-plus satellite system built to survive a nuclear war.

Companies like Earthwatch and Space Imaging help bring what were once exclusively the Pentagon's secrets to Everyman, and sometimes controversially.

EarthWatch launched its EarlyBird 1 satellite from a Russian cosmodrome in the last week of 1997, thus ending the military's monopoly on gathering high-resolution pictures from space.

Earthwatch will soon develop images with a 3-metre resolution (the best available so far is 10 m) to pretty much anyone who orders one, although the US Government will have some say over who buys what, lest North Korea be discovered ordering shots of Seoul through Iraqi intermediaries.

Earthwatch and Space Imaging are targeting the civilian market, believing their service to have application in urban planning, mining, mapping, agriculture; indeed any industry or field that requires landscape study.