Within just 55 hours, the Katrina evacuation hub at Lackland AFB, Tex., processed 9,788 evacuees, flown in aboard 89 aircraft. Lackland’s Wilford Hall Medical Center not only helped evaluate the evacuees, but also sent seven critical-care air transport teams to rotate in and out of the Gulf Region and a 60-person contingency aeromedical staging facility team to New Orleans, where it expects to stay for at least 30 days. AFRC’s 433rd Airlift Wing, at Lackland, has flown its C-5 airlifters on 20 medevac missions. More than 250 basic training graduates at Lackland turned down their well-earned “town pass” to help set up shelters.
Special-ops aviators, a physicist from the intelligence community, and an enlisted Marine with decades of deployments: U.S. Space Command’s military and civilian leaders who spoke May 7 were as likely to come from strictly space backgrounds as not. These are some of the day’s insights from inside the command, which…