Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour says that the state’s Air National Guard wing at Key Field near Meridian, Miss., has a new lease on life. The 186th Air Refueling Wing is slated to lose its KC-135 aerial refueling aircraft under BRAC 2005, but now it appears the Air Force has decided to let the unit work with Boeing on a KC-135 safety modification project. Barbour says the work, which will start next month and run through January 2010, comes in addition to Air Force plans to create a 150-person warfighting headquarters and a 250-person RED HORSE engineering unit at Key Field. These new efforts, however, have not dissuaded the state’s elected officials from continuing to search for a new flying mission.
The White House announced its United States Space Priorities Framework in a document released concurrently with Vice President Kamala Harris' first National Space Council meeting. Listed among five U.S. priorities is to “defend its national security interests from the growing scope and scale of space and counterspace threats.”