A FIVE STAR post.

What a find, thanks CS3.

The conspiracy theorists and PUF's are not gonna
like you for throwing a reality bomb in here.

/\/ight\/\/ing

What's so special about it? What's the REality bomb of it?
It's a electronic snooping base for the US and Australia..to do snooping on other countries. Fromt hat base they are able to use satellite to communicate with submarines that can launch missiles with Nukes on them. They can recieve many telephone conversaions from the middle East, Asia, etc and from very long distances...

It's a great base.
And i'm sure they would test all kinds of craft out there too..Maybe ;P
Hell...There's the whole of the Australian Outback to fly thier crafts around.

Although lightly populated, the middle of australia, especially around there is full of tourists with cameras, i doubt they test anything out there... would you ?

[Edited on 8-1-2004 by PeAtI]

This has been discussed before at lenght.

Pine Gap is a communications dowlink and relay station for US spy and communications satellites. As payment for letting the US use this land (which provides excellent coverage of the SW pacific - an area were the US has no other real presence), the Australians are entitled to have access to the "product" which these satellite produce.

If you think about it, the Australians are getting an excellent deal for very short money.

it seems like australia gets a good deal, but obviously the U.S first decides what to share with australia. It also seems to perpetuate a dependant relationship- what if the U.S decided not to share, what state would that leave australian intelligence in. Sharing data seems okay, but the whole idea of americans using australia to gather info, then choosing what to hand over seems to keep australia in a subordinate position...just where they want us i'm guessing.

The U.S. is not dependent on Australia to gather the data. The satellites do that quite efficiently by themselves. Its just a matter of convenience.
The NRO can get the data as the satellite come over the horizon near Pearl Harbor, but sometimes its just faster to get the downlink at Australia.

Also, the Australian site allows the US to have a comm "footprint" in the SW Pacific and Indian ocean areas.