Buckley Space Force Base: The Installation at Aurora's Eastern Edge
Buckley is one of the defining institutions of Aurora, a Space Force base whose missions look to orbit while its people live, learn, and volunteer in the city around it.
Drive east in Aurora and the city eventually meets a fence line that marks one of its most important institutions. Buckley Space Force Base, on Aurora's eastern side, is home to space-focused military missions, including missile warning and space surveillance work carried out by Space Force units and partners from other services and agencies. Its radomes are among the most recognizable silhouettes on the eastern plains skyline.
That mission can make Buckley sound remote from daily Aurora life, and the reality is the opposite. Service members, civilian employees, and contractors live in Aurora neighborhoods, send children to Aurora Public Schools and Cherry Creek district schools, receive care at the Anschutz Medical Campus, and retire in the community they served from. The base is an employer and a neighbor as much as a mission.
The Space Force itself is the newest U.S. military service, established in 2019, and Buckley's renaming as a Space Force base reflects the shift of space missions into that service. Aurora consequently holds a place in a national story much larger than itself: the warning and tracking systems that watch the skies are operated, in part, from the edge of a Colorado suburb on the plains.
November brings Veterans Day observances to a city with a deep military population, and in Aurora those observances include active Space Force guardians, veterans of every service, and military families in the middle of moves, deployments, and school years. Local organizations that support those families do work that is practical rather than ceremonial, and the need is year-round.
Residents who have never thought much about the base can start with a simple appreciation of scale. Aurora is a large, diverse civilian city and a space mission city at the same time. The jets and radomes at its eastern edge and the neighborhoods at its center are not two Auroras. They are the same place, seen from different gates.
