Amid USAF pollution woes Ellsworth could have role in new 'space force'

Ellsworth Air Force Base near Rapid City was an alternative emergency landing site for the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Space Transportation System.

Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said in a visit to Capitol Hill in June 2017 that she opposed the creation of a “Space Corps,” a service some lawmakers had proposed to oversee military operations in space. Wilson favoring U.S. military investment in space isn’t a surprise. The service has warned about national-security issues there for years, and released a report in January that laid out a landscape where anti-satellite weapons increasingly are becoming a threat to national security. [Heather Wilson’s commitment to Trump’s Space Force was questioned. Now she leads the effort to build it.]

A former US Representative from New Mexico's 1st District with nefarious ties to Sandia Labs and Gazprom, Republican Wilson was defeated in the 2012 US Senate race by Democrat Martin Heinrich then in 2013 became president of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City.

She recently addressed a conference of the Western Governors Association in Rapid.

A big challenge, she said, is modernizing the force’s aging fighter jets, bombers, helicopters and space assets while simultaneously modernizing its soldiers, too. [Wilson lays out modernization plans for Air Force]

But she neglected to mention (publicly anyway) the report that some 126 bases in the US have water supplies contaminated with potentially harmful levels of perfluorinated compounds.

Ellsworth is on the list and Denny Daugaard hosted the gala. Mountain Home AFB in Idaho is on the list and Gov. Butch Otter was in Rapid. Peterson AFB, Colorado is on the list and Gov. Hickenlooper was there. Hill AFB in Utah is on the list and Gov. Herbert was there. FE Warren in Wyoming is on the list and Gov. Mead heard Wilson's talk. Despite being homes to Superfund sites, Malmstrom in Montana and Minot in North Dakota aren't on the list but Govs. Bullock and Burgum were in Rapid. All these bases participated in the now-suspended Combat Raider exercises in the Powder River Training Complex over parts of four states.

Burgum has committed troops to the Trump Organization at the southern border as has South Dakota's newest Republican governor while Democrat Bullock has refused and Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has pulled most New Mexico National Guard troops.

Splashed across the front page of the Las Cruces Sun News is a spread of an area dairy operator who has been dumping milk and has to destroy his herd because toxins known as PFAS have been spewing from nearby Cannon Air Force Base: home of the plane that dropped a Massive Ordnance Air Blast or 'Mother of all Bombs' on Afghanistan.

The chemicals also leach into groundwater from wastewater plants, industrial sites and landfills. As a result, drinking water supplies for more than 6 million Americans are contaminated with higher-than-recommended levels of PFAS (or above 70 parts per trillion, the non-enforceable limit set by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2016). [Groundwater contamination devastates New Mexico dairy — and threatens public health]

But how i do go on.

Donald Trump may be a career criminal, a crisis actor and this space force dealio is hardly his idea but it does make one wonder what intel he's seen that would make Heather Wilson want to accelerate it after she opposed it. The 45th Space Wing has been around since my dad's days in the USAF. Los Alamos and Sandia both do mountains of work for the Department of Defense.

I actually emailed Senator Hillary Clinton after the 9/11 events that an Astral Trade Center built around a space elevator constructed on the property once occupied by a center of world trade in New York City might have made a fitting memorial. Build a space port at Ellsworth instead of practice-bombing parts of four states and creating radicalized survivors by actually bombing them.

If Trump doesn't destroy the planet there will come a time when it will be routine to launch waste too hot for humans to handle into the sun and space cowboys will be living in western South Dakota like there are at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

2018 report shows off-the-charts contamination in Holloman AFB water | The NM Political Report https://t.co/Jsrdujno6O

— interested party (@larry_kurtz) February 2, 2019

Many have asked for a list of military sites with drinking water contamination. This is the list. Source is this DoD report. https://t.co/cSDnfMhbXC pic.twitter.com/Smb9DB8wAN

— julieturkewitz (@julieturkewitz) February 22, 2019

Hello, Earth 🌎. Footage from the boom of SpaceShipTwo pic.twitter.com/i6jdsjrRRB

— Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) February 22, 2019