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Aerospace Opens Office in Huntsville
Aerospace Establishes Offices to Support MDA in Huntsville, Alabama
One recommendation of the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure report was that the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) needed to decentralize from the nation's capital to minimize the Department of Defense's footprint in that region. As a result, at least 2248 MDA government and contractor positions have been moved to Huntsville, Alabama.
Participants of a ribbon-cutting ceremony including (left to right) Huntsville Mayor Loretta Spencer, Aerospace President and CEO Wanda Austin, Brig. Gen. Gary Connor, and Chamber of Commerce Chair Evans Quinlivan. |
The Aerospace Corporation has supported U.S. missile defense efforts since its very first days (see historical article in this issue). This support continued and intensified with the inception of Brilliant Pebbles in 1986, when the concept of using space-based kinetic energy sources for ballistic missile defense was being embraced. This issue of Crosslink attests to the deep level of current involvement in fielding the integrated Ballistic Missile Defense System: approximately 55 members of the Aerospace technical staff directly support MDA. So, when MDA moved to Huntsville, it was natural for Aerospace to follow suit.
In February, Aerospace cut the ribbon on its newest offices in Huntsville. "We are excited about opening an office in Huntsville, which has such a rich history in space innovation and technology advances," said Wanda Austin, Aerospace president and CEO, during the opening reception.
Don Walker, senior vice president, Systems Planning and Engineering, said, "The MDA's move to Huntsville offers Aerospace a great opportunity to demonstrate our commitment to the vital mission of defending our nation and its allies against a missile attack."
Huntsville is the longtime home of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) and the U.S. Army's Space and Missile Defense Agency, located at the Redstone Arsenal. Aerospace supports several projects at MSFC.
Celebrating a new customer collocation. (Left to right:) Aerospace employees Iris Jordan, Graham Arnold, Harlan Bittner, and Don Walker join Loretta Spencer, Wanda Austin, Brig. Gen. Gary Connor, Arthur "Sandy" Kirkindall (mayor of Madison, Alabama), Evans Quinlivan, and Mike Fortanbary. |
Aerospace is recruiting engineers and scientists to fill positions in Huntsville. Opportunities are also open through the Aerospace Rotation Program, which is designed for employees to rotate into open jobs, usually for one year, before returning to their existing or equivalent positions.
MDA will now have three centers: Ft. Belvoir, Virginia, home of headquarters and central command for direction, guidance, and policy initiatives; Colorado Springs, for central operations, support to the warfighter, and test execution; and Huntsville, for development, testing, integration, and fielding.
Southern Hospitality: A Closer Look at Huntsville
According to a 2007 Council for Community and Economic Research report, Huntsville stands at 78.9 on a housing cost-of-living scale, with 100 being the national average. By comparison, the Los Angeles-Long Beach area comes in at 251.2. This means that on average, if housing costs ideally run at approximately 28 percent of a person's income, Huntsville requires far less of that income, while Los Angeles garners far more. Huntsville also claims the highest per capita income in the southeast, followed by Atlanta.
Huntsville is steeped in the advent of U.S. space programs beginning in the mid-1950s, when U.S. Senator John Sparkman brought a band of German rocket scientists to the Redstone Arsenal to develop rockets for the U.S. Army. Within a decade, the now-famous team led by Wernher von Braun had developed the rocket that orbited America's first satellite. Eventually, the team also put the first American in space and transported the first astronauts to the moon. Huntsville now claims the title "America's Space Capital."
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The opening reception of Aerospace offices in Huntsville, Alabama. |
Wanda Austin (left) speaks with Harlan Bittner, general manager of the Missile Defense Division, and Larry Lamb, The MITRE Corporation. |
The city boasts the second largest research and technology development park in the country, with 225 companies employing 23,000 people. The Huntsville Chamber of Commerce reports "nearly every major U.S. aerospace corporation is represented with 90+ companies employing more than 11,000 people in the local aerospace industry."
Located in northern Alabama, Huntsville is 122 miles from Nashville, Tennessee, and 221 miles from Atlanta. The average high temperature is 71 degrees Fahrenheit and the average low is 49.6. Total rainfall averages 4.77 inches, and snow 0.4 inches.
A Giant of Missile Defense
In opening its new facilities in Huntsville, Aerospace took the opportunity to pay tribute to a legendary figure in ballistic missile defense, naming the conference room in honor of John O'Sullivan, who worked at Aerospace from 1989 until his death in 2006.
O'Sullivan was a major contributor to the progress of missile defense, from its formative years under the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) to its current incarnation under the Missile Defense Agency (MDA). He began his Aerospace career providing technical expertise to SDIO's Phase One Engineering Team (POET). As director of the POET from October 1997, O'Sullivan was responsible for managing the collaborative efforts of Federally Funded Research and Development Center's (FFRDCs), National Laboratories, and University Affiliated Research Centers (UARCs) that provided the MDA with multidisciplinary technical expertise on ballistic missile defense issues. In that capacity, he helped communicate the evolving technological configuration and underlying national policy regarding missile defense. When MDA was established in 2002, Aerospace formed a Missile Defense Division to support the agency, with O'Sullivan as the general manager. In these functions, he showed his extraordinary insights and encyclopedic ability to assimilate and organize vast amounts of information.
O'Sullivan received the MDA Pioneer Technology Award posthumously in March 2007 for his work on the Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) program. He led the study that first identified the need for an upper-tier missile defense capability to support the Patriot system in defending U.S. forces. He later established the framework for developing THAAD and directed POET support for the THAAD program office. He led the effort to identify and assess existing technologies that would provide THAAD with the capability to intercept missiles both inside and outside Earth's atmosphere. He also served as the chief technical advisor during contractor selection and was instrumental in THAAD's transition from R&D to testing.
O'Sullivan earned an M.S. in mathematical physics from the National University of Ireland and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Notre Dame. He was awarded postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and at Bonn University in Bonn, Germany; he also served as a faculty member in the mathematics department at Pennsylvania State University. He was a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the American Mathematical Society and was the author of several research articles in applied mathematics.
