Holiday Wishes

When I saw this picture on my my colleague Rob Donat’s blog I just knew I was going to republish it.  Rob is very good at making GPS tracking visually appealing … and he’s much better than I am at remembering to wish his loyal readers a Merry Christians and a Happy New Year.  Actually, I’m not late, just consider this an early Christmas wish for 2008.

As Bob pointed out in his article I am very grateful to those across the country who work through the night, every night, to keep us safe, fed, informed and even entertained.

In a control room where I used to be able to "hang out", but as a civilian can not any more, there are many thousands more vehicles being tracked … across the "Northern Tier" of the US on their way to and from missile silos, in Afghanistan, Iraq and a thousand other places around the globe, driven by mainly young men and women,far from home, family and even safety.  My heart goes out to them as well as my snappiest military salute to my former brothers and sisters at arms.

And there’s one other special group we ought to think of as the light of 2008 begins to color the sky in the east … a dedicated group of military, US Civil Service and defense contractor personnel who sit deep inside Building 400 on Schriever AFB on the empty Colorado Plains where it’s pretty darn cold tonight.  They are the men and women of the 2nd Space Operations Squadron who sit at consoles, 24/7/365 and "fly" those NAVSTAR "birds" that make this all happen.  You see GPS isn’t brought to you by Larry and Sergey, or Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoc, or any other of the rich and famous … it’s brought to you by sergeants and lieutenants and colonels and ‘workaday" engineers and technicians who don’t get rich and don’t get much recognitions … they just make it happen for the USA and the entire rest of the world’s population … hat’s off.