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:
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“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)
“Say first, of God above, or Man below,
What can we reason, but from what we know?
Of Man what see we, but his station here,
From which to reason, or to which refer?
Thro’ worlds unnumber’d tho’ the God be known,
‘Tis ours to trace him only in our own.
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—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)