The 45th Space Wing: Its Heritage, History & Honors 1950-1998

Commanders' Selected Comments

...When I came down here in 1953, our number one problem was building the range and developing its instrumentation. We had to build an organiza-tion that could operate all this stuff. It wasn't very long before we decided to get Pan Am and RCA to help us. One day, we sat down over at my house and wrote a couple of contracts one for Pan Am, and one for RCA. Andy Conrad, Dick Mitchell and a couple of procurement types sat down in my house one evening and decided what kind of a contract we ought to write. Pan Am would do the housekeeping, and RCA would do the technical work, even to the point of installing and operating range systems downrange...(The contract) was pretty small at first, so that wasn't difficult: most of the expense was for manpower, and we could monitor that easily. Later on, the contract became competitive. The main thing was to get it going...Andy Conrad was head of RCA Services and Dick Mitchell was head of Pan Am's service company. They were both honest, well-meaning people who were interested in doing the job. We had confidence in them, and they had trust in us.

Major General Harry J. Sands, Jr.
30 April 1990

...The commercialization of this country's space effort is going to become increasingly important to the Eastern Space & Missile Center as well as the nation in the years to come. This is all tied in with the expansion of the government's Expendable Launch Vehicle (ELV) programs...the Air Force fought hard for the TITAN IV over the strenuous objections of NASA and pushed that ELV program through the Defense Department and Congress...The work we did prior to the (Shuttle Challenger) mishap put us two years ahead of where we would have been without a commitment to the ELV program. It's a challenge for the Center to: 1) develop a capability to launch four or five TITAN IVs per year, 2) continue our support of the Space Shuttle, 3) continue to launch the TITAN 34D, 4) develop the facilities for the DELTA II and 5) develop payload processing facilities to handle the influx of payloads for all these systems...

Colonel John W. Mansur
1 October 1987

...I think one of the most critical decisions we had to make in 1988 was to support a viable competition for the range contract. The range contract had been awarded to the same, very strong team of contractors for the previous 35 years. It was almost an "institution." We took the range contract and broke it into two parts that decision was made by General Aloysius G. Casey, the Space Division Commander...We stepped up to removing an incumbent contractor when his proposal was not the best one available...I think the new range contract competition set the course for contract competitions in the future. It was the single most important action we accomplished last year.

Colonel Lawrence L. Gooch
12 October 1988

...When we switched over to cost-plus-award-fee contracts (in 1988), it behooved us to start managing the tasks of those contracts...Now, here's the problem: our people were never trained to manage tasks, and it has only been over the past few months that they have started thinking about tracking task performance in relation to their targeted costs...I'm trying to educate my people not to give (the contractor) so many tasks that they will frustrate his attempts to stay within his manyear ceiling. The government, in this case, was not doing well by the contractor. It had given him a statement of work that asked for much more than we were willing to pay for.

Colonel John R. Wormington
10 October 1990

...The reorganization (of ESMC into the 45th Space Wing) made significant changes in the jobs that people were doing and the focus of those jobs. Was there a better way for them to do their jobs? Yes, I think so, just through the reorganization. We were identifying things that had become dinosaurs. We had lots of old processes that were dying of their own weight. So, we expedited their demise...For example, we took all the maintenance functions out of the Eastern Test Range (organization) and put those functions in the 45th Maintenance Squadron. We left operations and operational requirements in the 45th Range Squadron...We have revamped the way we do operations. The (new) concept is tracking things day-to-day...So, in terms of the organization itself, I am extremely pleased. If you were to ask any of the group commanders, they would tell you that they like it a lot, too. They like being commanders versus staff guys, and they like the functions they are in charge of. The structure is clear and definitive.

Brig General Jimmey R. Morrell
4 May 1992

...(The Wing has) done an awful lot of good things to be proud of. (Between Thanksgiving and the middle of December 1993) the Wing supported five launches in four weeks...All were successful, and all were on time. The last time this country did that was in 1976. I was just incredibly proud of the way the commercial space launch industry was able to move forward...We proved we can sustain a launch rate here as high as the commercial launch industry or the government could ever ask us to sustain.

Brig General Robert S. Dickman
11 February 1994

...I came here with a desire to see how the Wing could face up to the challenge of working for the warfighter. I want our people to understand and believe that control of the battlefield begins here, at Cape Canaveral and Patrick Air Force Base. When we launch a rocket and place a satellite on orbit, whether it be a Global Positioning System satellite, a communications satellite or an intelligence spacecraft, the information that the warfighter needs to control the battlefield starts right here...if I can get people from every Group to say, "we launch rockets as our mission," we will make giant strides.

Brig General Robert C. Hinson
1 April 1996

...The constraint on resources drove us to the Joint Base Operations and Support Contract [awarded to Space Gateway Support on 21 August 1998]....when we realized how limited our resources would be after the turn of the century, we were forced to come up with this new initiative as the best solution. This single contract will address operations and support issues for Patrick Air Force Base, Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center. We have been checked by the Air Force Inspection Agency, contracting people in the Pentagon, Air Force Space Command and NASA Headquarters, and they are all pleased with this initiative. I think we will see a very successful, efficient organization. We hope to realize some efficiencies that will enable us to recapitalize our launch infrastructure at the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral.

Brig General F. Randall Starbuck

23 March 1998

Prepared by Mark C. Cleary, Chief Historian
45 Space Wing Office of History
1201 Edward H. White II St., Patrick AFB, FL 32925