Its underground reservoirs hold 6 million gallons of water workers sometimes traverse them in rowboats. Its generators can produce enough electricity to power a medium-size city. The complex was built to be self-sustaining for one month. The hallways of its inner sanctum are painted slate gray, the ceilings are low and there are combination locks on every door. Much of the work performed at the center is top-secret. It detects the firing of a long-range missile, anywhere in the world, before that missile has left the launch pad. It provides early warning of missile attacks. The Operations Center tracks every man-made object that enters North American air-space or that orbits the earth. The place feels like the set of an early James Bond movie, with men in jumpsuits driving little electric vans from one brightly lighted cavern to another.įifteen hundred people work inside the mountain every day, maintaining the facility and collecting information from a worldwide network of radars, spy satellites, ground-based sensors, airplanes and blimps. A heavily armed quick-response team guards against intruders. Pressurized air within the complex prevents contamination by radioactive fallout or biological weapons. Now officially called the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, the facility is entered through massive steel blast doors that are three feet thick and weigh twenty tons each. The four-and-a-half-acre underground complex was designed to survive a direct hit by a ten-kiloton atomic bomb. Fifteen buildings, most of them three stories high, were erected amid a maze of tunnels and passageways extending for miles. The mountain was hollowed out, and about 700,000 tons of rock were removed. Cheyenne Mountain was chosen as the site for a top-secret underground combat-operations center. In the mid-1950s, high-level officials at the Pentagon worried that America’s air defenses were vulnerable to sabotage and attack. One of the nation’s most important military installations is located deep within it, housing operational units of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the United States Space Command and the Air Force Space Command. And yet Cheyenne Mountain is hardly pristine. From a distance, the mountain looks beautiful and serene, dotted with rocky outcroppings, scrub oak and ponderosa pine. Cheyenne Mountain sits on the eastern slope of Colorado’s front range, rising steeply from the prairie and overlooking the city of Colorado Springs.

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