Why There's a CIA Base in the Center of Australia

Australia is a fascinating continent as the driest continent in the world apart from Antarctica it's no surprise that Australia's home to the second largest desert of the inhabited Earth's continents remaining only behind the Sahara of Northern Africa in scale and scope The Great Australian desert spans more than a third of the continent and is larger in size than the entirety of Kazakhstan and it's partially because of this desert that Australia itself despite being the sixth largest country in the world in terms of land is only the 53rd largest in terms of people with a modest population of less than 26 million Citizens We're around the same size as North Korea but within this vast inhospitable and empty desert at the precise geographic center of the Australian continent exists a surprising and relatively unknown secret of enormous enormous geopolitical importance one of the largest overseas military bases of the United States of America operated by the Central Intelligence Agency the National Security Administration and the national reconnaissance office with a full 800 combined Personnel The Base is located nearby to the small Australian town of Alice Springs population just 26 000 or so people but besides for that there is no larger town that exists anywhere nearby to this base within a zone of about 700 000 square kilometers roughly equivalent in area to the U.S state of Texas so to say that this American intelligence base with hundreds of American Intelligence Officers operating within the dead center of Australia is a remote location would be an incredible understatement from the small Australian town of Alice Springs if you take a short drive just 10 minutes or so to the Southwest you'll quickly run into various threatening signs like this one warning you to turn your car around and proceed no further or else face some vague consequences just beyond these signs is of course the top secret joint intelligence base of pine Gap run by both the American and Australian governments and unless you've watched the Netflix series about this base going under the same name you've probably never even heard of this place or knew that such an important American operation existed in the middle of the Australian Outback and going under the more official code name of project rainfall it has a very long and mysterious history here going back decades into the past you see as the global cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union intensified during the 1960s both Nations began sending up satellites in a space with the launching of the earliest intelligence gathering satellites there was a recognition that real-time command and control over these platforms were necessary and a data collection to monitor geopolitical adversaries from afar was required an american-based operate these American intelligence and spy satellites operating over the planet's Eastern Hemisphere could have theoretically been constructed anywhere but the precise geographic center of the Australian continent was chosen for a number of strategically important factors first the sheer isolation of such a base deep within the Continental interior of Australia more than 900 kilometers away from the nearest coastline ensured that any potential spy ships from foreign Nations passing around would be incapable of intercepting any of the signals coming down to the base from the satellites second the base would be located deep within Australia a country who was very friendly and Allied towards the United States and far away from any major Australian population centers around the coasts and third and perhaps most importantly the location where the station would be built required the base of the floor and surrounding Hills to not exceed six degrees at the precise coordinates of pine gap's location in the center of Australia at latitude 23.8 degrees south and longitude 133.74 degrees east the ability would be gained to allow for high connectivity with satellites stationed as far as 60 degrees east and as far east as 153 degrees west a effectively covering the entirety of China North Korea the Indian subcontinent and a significant portion of the then Soviet Union in short it was a very logically chosen location to construct a satellite intelligence base act and as a result by late 1966 the American and Australian government signed a treaty calling for the creation of a U.S satellite surveillance base in Australia which eventually became the modern Pine Gap where operations began in 1970 with a relocation of hundreds of American families to the center of the Outback but there was another larger intelligence Alliance at work here that led to the creation of the base as well known as the five eyes this is an intelligence Alliance of the five major English-speaking democracies around the world of the United States United Kingdom Canada Australia and New Zealand created during the fires of the second world war and expanded during the Cold War this Alliance structure enables all member states as intelligence agencies to easily cooperate with each other and share all of their worldwide data as the Cold War continued to rage and new threats to the United States emerged like the People's Republic of China Vietnam and later on Iraq and Afghanistan Pine Gap continued to play a pivotal role in providing intelligence while dramatically growing in size to the point where today it boasts nearly 40 separate antennas across the site and has operated at least nine geosynchronous satellites owned by various U.S spy agencies over the past 45 years now what makes these kinds of satellites uniquely well suited to the mission of intelligence gathering is that within a geosynchronous orbit they travel in the same direction as the Earth's rotation and therefore retain the exact same orbital period as that of the Earth's rotation which effectively just means that they view the exact same portion of the Earth's surface at all times as if they're sort of fixed in position on the map this is in stark contrast to satellites that operate in lower Earth orbits which circle around the planet often multiple times a day and move at a relative Pace much faster one of the unique advantages of a geosynchronous orbit for a spy satellite is that within this range it can see an enormous amount of the Earth's surface all at once in fact if you were to go and do all the math and run the calculations for this it turns out to be just a tad bit less than half of the Earth's entire surface this of course makes it incredibly easy for the spy satellite above to gather a vast amount of information from a very large area beneath it and so today there are three of these types of geosynchronous spy satellites known to be operated from Pine Gap all at the same line of latitude Orion 5 above the Western Indian Ocean Orion 7 at the Western tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra and Orion 3 just west of the Indonesian island of suluisi each of these three geosynchronous satellites sit in an altitude of about 36 000 kilometers above the Earth's surface at these precise coordinates and they each collect an incredibly wide range of electronic signals from the Earth's surface beneath them like radio communications radar emissions microwave Transmissions missile Telemetry satellite and cell phone transmissions and even more these three satellites effectively Grant American intelligence agencies and therefore the intelligence of all the five eyes member states an incredible degree of satellite coverage across every single area of modern U.S critical strategic concern from Western Africa across the Middle East Ukraine Russia Iran Afghanistan China and North Korea more than half of the Earth's surface outside of the polar regions once data from these regions is received by the satellites their information is relayed via a signal back to the Pine Gap base in the center of Australia and then disseminated from there towards the various intelligence agencies of the five eyes member states like the American CIA and British MI6 and while controversial at times the American intelligence capabilities that are granted by satellite sites around the world like Pine Gap are unmatched by any other intelligence agency in the world and while most of what these satellites do is top secret and highly classified we all know that launching those satellites maintaining them up there and Gathering all that data from the surface below is an incredibly difficult feat to accomplish and if you're anything like me then you're probably curious how satellites like these actually work and more to the point how anything actually works understanding the difficult to understand is the very essence of stem Fields but for a lot of us myself included stem subjects like engineering and math and make this seemingly impossible possible have never come as easy to understand but luckily we can all get our own little dose of scientific learning every day 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Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 3,793,646

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know

Id: 0FUVwC-B1k4

Length: 11min 30sec (690 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 19 2022