Kaena Point Satellite Tracking Station

The Kaena Point Satellite Tracking Station is a United States Air Force military installation in Kaena Point on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. It is a remote tracking station of the Air Force Satellite Control Network responsible for tracking satellites in orbit, many of which support the United States Department of Defense, receiving and processing data and in turn, enabling control of satellites by relaying commands from control centers. The station originally opened in 1959 to support CORONA, an early reconnaissance satellite program.

Detachment 4, 22d Space Operations Squadron, part of the 50th Space Wing, operates Hawaii Tracking Station on the site. It was constructed in 1959, one of three built that year. The facility is placed near the western-most point of the island of Oahu, atop a 1,500-foot (460 m) high ridge. The two radomes are locally known as the "golf balls", and are a popular landmark for fishing vessels in the surrounding waters.

Yokohama Bay state park is at the base of the ridge, with a hiking trail that goes to the point and around to the northern side of the ridge, to Mokuleia Beach. By permit only (see below), the station roadways provide access to state hiking and hunting trails, as well as a camping site about 10 miles (16 km) inland called Peacock Flats. Permits to enter through the station to hike, hunt, or camp on the surrounding State lands can be obtained from the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources in downtown Honolulu.

Famous quotes containing the words point, satellite, tracking and/or station:

    As one delves deeper and deeper into Etiquette, disquieting thoughts come. That old Is- It-Worth-It Blues starts up again softly, perhaps, but plainly. Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness. The letters and the conversations of the correct, as quoted by Mrs. Post, seem scarcely worth the striving for. The rules for finding topics of conversation fall damply on the spirit.
    Dorothy Parker (1893–1967)

    Books are the best things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it—an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.
    —H.L. (Henry Lewis)

    [T]here is no situation so deplorable ... as that of a gentlewoman in real poverty.... Birth, family, and education become misfortunes when we cannot attain some means of supporting ourselves in the station they throw us into. Our friends and former acquaintances look on it as a disgrace to own us.... If we were to attempt getting our living by any trade, people in that station would think we were endeavoring to take their bread out of their mouths.
    Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)