There's a United States Space Force base that is closer to the North Pole than it is to the Arctic Circle, and it is not a research station. It has a ten thousand foot runway, a missile warning radar, and a few hundred people who have to eat and sleep and stay sane through four months of total darkness.
Pituffik.
Pituffik. And Daniel has sent us a very long, very specific set of questions about it. He wants to know who actually lives there and how many, because apparently that number depends on who you ask. He wants the mix — Space Force, other U.S. military, Danish staff, Greenlandic staff, contractors. What a posting is actually like. What an ordinary day looks like.
And then the human stuff.
The human stuff in detail. Accommodation, food, recreation, communications, medical care, work schedules, social life. The polar night. The cold. The isolation. The fact that you cannot drive somewhere for the weekend. How restricted movement outside the base really is.
He also wants the airport.
He wants the airport, which is apparently a much bigger operation than anyone would guess. How often aircraft arrive, where from, who and what they carry, how dependent daily life is on those flights, and what happens when weather closes the airfield. Then the physical supply chain — food, fuel, mail, machinery, building materials, replacement parts. What comes by air, what comes on the seasonal sealift, how much has to be stockpiled, and what happens when something essential breaks.
And the central question.
The central question is very practical. What does it take to keep several hundred people, an airport, and a sophisticated Space Force installation functioning year round at seventy six degrees north?
Start with the place, because the number everyone gets wrong is the population, and you can't understand anything else until you've got that straight.
Give me the geography first.
Seventy six degrees, thirty one minutes north. About twelve hundred and ten kilometers above the Arctic Circle. Roughly fifteen hundred kilometers from the North Pole. It is the northernmost installation in the entire Department of Defense. It sits on Greenland's northwest coast, which means it is on the territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, operated under the 1951 Greenland Defense Agreement. That agreement was modified in 2004 to require the Greenlandic flag to fly there and a Greenlandic liaison officer to be posted.
So it's an American base on Danish soil with a Greenlandic flag requirement.
Correct. And the physical scale is bigger than people picture. Two hundred and sixty four square miles of base area. Several dozen buildings. Sixty five miles of unpaved roads. And the base is deliberately scattered — the missions operate up to a twelve mile drive apart along gravel roads. That was intentional, historically, to keep the main base camp a safe distance from the nuclear radar.
Which tells you something about what they thought the radar might attract.
It tells you everything about what they thought it might attract. Now the population. In the early nineteen sixties, at the Cold War peak, there were around ten thousand people at Thule. By January of nineteen sixty eight it was down to three thousand three hundred and seventy. Twenty ten, about six hundred. Twenty twenty two, about six hundred and fifty. And in twenty twenty five, roughly one hundred and fifty U.S. service members permanently stationed.
So which is it. Six fifty or a hundred and fifty.
Both are true, and they are counting different things. The hundred and fifty counts permanent U.S. military only. The six hundred to six fifty counts the whole community — what they call Team Pituffik — which includes contractors, Danish personnel, Greenlandic staff, and people who are rotating through. That distinction matters for the rest of this conversation, because the base does not run on the hundred and fifty. It runs on the whole several hundred.
And the cost.
Reportedly the most expensive overseas base the United States operates. Over a hundred million dollars a year. Roughly ten times the cost of the average Air Force base. And that is almost entirely a function of where it is and the fact that everything has to arrive by air or by ship.
Ten times. For a base with a few hundred people on it.
That's the number that tells you what kind of place this is. It's not expensive because of what's on it. It's expensive because of where it is.
So who's actually there. Break down the mix.
The host unit is the 821st Space Base Group, under Space Base Delta 1. Then you've got the 12th Space Warning Squadron, which runs the missile warning radar. And the 22nd Space Operations Squadron Detachment 7, which runs the satellite tracking station — callsign POGO.
POGO.
POGO. Then U.S. Air Force and other U.S. military in support roles. Then Danish personnel, including a Danish Liaison Officer from Joint Arctic Command. Then Greenlandic staff and a Greenlandic liaison officer. And then a very large share of civilian contractors.
How large.
Large enough that most of the 821st Support Squadron personnel are not doing hands-on maintenance. Their job is Contracting Officer Representatives — they oversee the base maintenance contract. They're the people making sure the contractor is doing what the contract says.
So the Space Force is managing contractors rather than turning wrenches.
In a lot of cases, yes. The tugboat crew is entirely contractor. A captain and a deckhand. That's the whole crew.
Two people run the boat that moves the icebergs.
We'll come back to that.
And the structural fact that shapes every posting.
It is a non-family duty station. No families live there. There is no school, there's no housing office in the family sense. The only children's laughter you hear is when Greenlandic locals visit, or when a family member makes a short trip in. This is not a community in the normal sense. It's a work camp with a mission.
Which changes what "ordinary day" even means. There's no school run. There's no spouse's coffee morning. The entire social world is the people you work with.
And that's why the morale infrastructure matters so much. Let me give you the physical plant first, because it's strange. Everything runs on generators powered by imported jet fuel. There are electrical outlets everywhere, and the reason is that every vehicle has to be plugged in and kept warm. If you don't keep them warm, they don't start, and if they don't start, you're not going anywhere.
And the ground underneath.
The ground underneath is the problem. The base is built on permafrost, and the permafrost is thawing. That's causing sinking foundations, cracks in the runway, and a slanted floor in the community center. Col. Stuart Pettis, who commanded from twenty fifteen to twenty sixteen, put it plainly: everything depends on a lasting permafrost. If you melt the permafrost, it never comes back. You have to keep that cold.
How do you keep that cold.
One of the ways is that the runway is painted white, to reflect sunlight and reduce thawing. During a repaving in twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen they used extruded polystyrene foam boards in eighteen percent of the runway instead of white paint. They're literally insulating the ground under the runway.
Painting a runway white at seventy six degrees north. That's a sentence you don't get to say about many places.
And the previous commander, Col. Brian Capps, was candid about it in twenty twenty two. He said the facilities they were seeing with sinking foundations was because they were experimenting. They built on permafrost in the fifties and sixties and the assumptions they made about that ground have not held.
So the base is fighting the ground it's standing on.
Permanently. Now — the human experience. Accommodation is dormitory style. Free massage chairs are scattered across the base. Almost every building has an arcade room and large TV screens, explicitly to relieve the tedium. Aging DVDs are a genuine solace in the evening.
Aging DVDs. That's the detail that makes it real.
The Top of the World Club is the base's only bar, and it has a bell out front. The community center is the morale lifeline — large round tables, soft red armchairs, and walls lined with wooden armoires full of wine bottles and antique wine glasses. Weekly bingo is hosted there. There's an annual ball that generates, and I'm quoting, days if not weeks of eager anticipation.
A ball. At the top of the world.
A ball. There are movie theaters, bowling alleys, fitness centers. The tugboat Rising Star is used for sightseeing tours of the surrounding bays and fjords in summer. There's a spot called The Secret Place overlooking the fjord where you can sit and listen to icebergs calving off the glacier.
That one I'll give them. That sounds worth the trip.
Chief Master Sergeant Christopher Clark is the one who describes it. There's also a small base museum, and a video series called On Thule Time, which includes one episode called Taking the Plunge. Polar plunge.
Of course there's a polar plunge.
Now — the polar night. From November to February the sun does not rise at all. An endless black. Every room is equipped with a sun lamp, and all personnel are issued Army-issued vitamin D pills.
Sun lamps and vitamin D. That's the medical answer to a four month night.
It's the practical answer, and it's not a small thing. And the last rotator flight out before the darkness sets in is a big deal. People fret about making it home. There's a real anxiety around that final flight, because once it goes, you're in the dark for months.
How restricted is movement outside the base.
Very. The base is over sixty miles from the nearest town, Qaanaaq. Travel to the base is limited and only for direct mission support. You cannot just visit. There is no driving somewhere for the weekend — the only way off is the weekly rotator flight. Access is controlled through the Foreign Clearance Guide and a Travel Coordination Requirement.
So the answer to "what do you do on a Saturday" is: whatever is on the base.
Whatever is on the base, or nothing. And the weather is its own category of problem. Storms are categorized by threat level, Alpha escalating to Charlie. During storms, visibility can be so bad that base members can barely see their fingers in front of them. People can be trapped at their work sites for days, sleeping in windowless rooms that fit no more than a bed.
Trapped at work for days.
The base also recorded the fastest sea level surface wind speed ever measured. Three hundred and thirty three kilometers an hour. Two hundred and seven miles an hour. On the eighth of March, nineteen seventy two, immediately before the instrument was destroyed.
Immediately before. So the number is a floor, not a ceiling.
The instrument died taking the reading.
What about medical care.
This is where it gets serious. Clark describes a vehicle rollover where they had to medically evacuate two members for follow-up care. It took them three days to get them out. Three days. And he joked that it was easier to evacuate troops from Afghanistan than it would be from Thule.
That's not really a joke.
No. It's a man making a point in a way people will listen to.
And the unvarnished human cost.
Shaina Simpkins was the base's only barber. After seven months she said, quote, I just want to go home. And at this point I don't even know when I'll be going home. I hate it.
Seven months.
And there's a man in the departure lounge who had not yet met his grandson. His line was: my wife will kill me if I don't make it back.
That's the whole thing in one sentence. The base isn't the hard part. The hard part is the life you're not in.
And against that you have to put Clark's other line, which is the reason the place functions at all. Where you find the worst conditions, you find the best morale. We have a common enemy of the snow, the cold, the elements.
A common enemy.
And the deputy commander, Lt. Col. Michael Warren, said life and operations on top of the world are only possible when the whole team — military, civilians and contractors — all tug together. That's not a slogan. That's an operational requirement. If the contractors don't show up, the base stops.
So the human experience is: a work camp, a bar with a bell, a ball everyone waits for, sun lamps, vitamin D, and a three day medevac. Now the airport, because that's the thing that makes all of it possible.
The runway is ten thousand feet, and it handles more than three thousand U.S. And international flights a year. For a place that remote, that is a busy operation.
Three thousand flights.
The lifeline for personnel is the rotator — a weekly charter flight out of Baltimore. In one account, the rotator was already a day late because of technical issues in New Jersey, which meant departing passengers were likely stuck until Tuesday.
So the weekly flight isn't a guarantee. It's a hope.
That's the correct way to think about it. Air Greenland provides commercial service to Qaanaaq and Savissivik, with charters to Copenhagen and Kangerlussuaq. You see C-130 Hercules transports on the flight line. And air traffic controllers and Contracting Officer Representatives from the 821st Support Squadron keep the flight line running year round.
And when the weather closes the airfield.
People are simply stranded. The base is locked in by ice nine months out of the year, but the airfield is open and operated year round. When it closes, nothing moves. The historical illustration of the stakes is the B-47 reconnaissance era in nineteen fifty six and fifty seven — if weather closed Thule, the aircraft had to divert to England, Alaska, or Labrador. That's what a closed airfield means at that latitude. Your alternate is another continent.
And the sea side.
The base has the northernmost deep water port in the world. Sea ice thins enough for supply ships only briefly each summer. The port is open only July to August. Some sources put the tugboat's operating season at May to September. The U.S. sends one heavy supply ship each summer in Operation Pacer Goose, which has run since nineteen fifty two. In twenty twenty two the cargo ship Ocean Gladiator delivered cargo as part of Pacer Goose. Fuel tankers come too — the Maersk Peary was photographed being pushed into position during a fuel resupply. And Schuyler Line Navigation Company, a U.S. flag ocean carrier, holds the government contract for sustainment and building supplies.
One ship a year.
One heavy supply ship a year, plus fuel tankers, inside a two month window. Everything else — mail, replacement parts, fresh food, people — comes by air, year round, at the mercy of Arctic weather.
Which means the base has to stockpile for winter.
It has to stockpile enough to survive the long, harsh winter. That's the central practical fact of Pituffik. The base runs on a two channel supply system where one channel is open two months a year and the other is at the mercy of the weather. And the consequence is that problems can take months to fix.
Give me an example.
A major radar renovation was indefinitely postponed because of the Ukraine war. Lt. Col. April Foley said the radar couldn't be down during the heightened state. That's the tradeoff in its purest form. You can't take the radar offline to fix it, because the moment you do, you've got a hole in the warning picture. So it stays up and it stays unfixed.
And the morale infrastructure is vulnerable too.
The community center faced possible permanent closure due to structural cracks. And Clark's worry was specific: when it's dark out, you don't really have a lot of other places for folks to go to get together.
So the thing that counteracts the polar night is itself cracking, because the ground underneath it is thawing.
That's the knock-on effect, and it's the one I'd flag hardest. The morale infrastructure is not decoration. It's a countermeasure. The bingo, the ball, the massage chairs, the arcade rooms — those exist because four months of darkness will break people otherwise. And the same thaw that's cracking the runway is cracking the building that holds the countermeasure.
The tugboat. You said we'd come back to it.
The Rising Star. It is the only tugboat in the Department of the Air Force. Seventy one feet, built in Morgan City, Louisiana, in service at Pituffik since nineteen ninety two. Two Detroit diesel two stroke V-16 engines, nine hundred horsepower each.
Nine hundred each. So eighteen hundred total on a seventy one foot boat.
On a seventy one foot boat. It escorts fuel tankers and cargo ships, aligns them with the pier, and moves icebergs out of the way as vessels enter North Star Bay. It pulls the fuel lines from the ship to the pier to connect to a pipeline. In September it's hauled onto shore to prevent ice damage.
Hauled onto shore.
Physically lifted out of the water and put on land, because if you leave it in, the ice will crush it. And in twenty twenty, the Rising Star rescued a sinking commercial boat and its crew of six about fifty kilometers south of the base, towing it back through two meter waves.
So the tugboat is also the search and rescue service.
The tugboat is also the search and rescue service. And the crew is a captain and a deckhand.
Two people.
Two people. The northernmost deep water port in the world, the most expensive overseas base the United States operates, and the thing that moves the icebergs out of the way is two guys on a seventy one foot boat.
There's a political layer here too, and it's recent.
March twenty eight, twenty twenty five. Vice President JD Vance, Usha Vance, and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz toured the base. The most senior U.S. government official ever to visit. And Vance was blunt about Denmark. He said, quote, you have not done a good job by the people of Greenland. You have underinvested in the people of Greenland, and you have underinvested in the security of this incredible, beautiful landmass.
And then the commander.
April eleventh, twenty twenty five. Base commander Col. Susannah Meyers was relieved of command for undermining Vance. Her email to all base personnel on March thirty first — including Danes, Greenlanders, and Canadians — said she did not presume to understand current politics, but that the concerns of the administration discussed by the Vice President were not reflective of Pituffik Space Base. And she committed that for as long as she was lucky enough to lead the base, all of their flags would fly proudly, together.
That's a commander choosing her base over her chain of command, in writing, to everyone.
The DoD Chief of Staff, Joe Kasper, said actions to undermine the chain of command or to subvert the President's agenda would not be tolerated. The current commander as of this year is Colonel Shawn Lee. And for context on the ground, a January twenty twenty five Verian poll found eighty five percent of Greenlanders do not want to leave Denmark to join the United States.
Eighty five percent. That's not a close question.
Not remotely. And that sits on top of a base whose actual daily function is unglamorous and fragile. The politics is loud. The work is a fuel line and a runway and a bingo night.
What's the long term threat.
Permafrost thaw, and it's not speculative. The first decade of the two thousands was the warmest in Greenland in at least a thousand years. And in December twenty twenty two the DoD awarded a three point nine five billion dollar maintenance contract to Inuksuk A/S — a company owned by Greenlandic, Danish, and U.S. enterprises — for energy and communications infrastructure, climate risk mitigation, and dormitory renovation.
Three point nine five billion. On a base with a few hundred people.
Which tells you the answer to the strategic question is yes, they intend to keep it. The money says so. But the money is also going toward climate risk mitigation, which tells you what they're worried about.
Hilbert: A hose.
Sorry?
Hilbert: The fuel line. That's the part nobody talks about. I did a season as a marine electrician's assistant on a U.S. flag sealift ship running northern resupply, and one summer we had a Greenlandic port on the run. I never set foot at Pituffik. I was on the ship. But I spent three weeks looking at that pier from the water, watching the tug work.
So you've been to Greenland.
Hilbert: I've been next to Greenland. I've been telling people I've been to Greenland for twenty years and it's not true. The captain wouldn't let me ashore.
Why not.
Hilbert: Didn't say. But what struck me wasn't the cargo. It was the fuel lines. You watch the crew pull those lines from the ship across to the pier, and you think: that hose is what stands between that base and a very cold, very dark, very short winter. Everybody talks about the runway and the radar and the Space Force mission. The actual single point of failure is a fuel line on a pier that's only ice free for a couple of months a year.
And if it fails.
Hilbert: Then it fails in August and you find out in January. The tug crew was two guys. I couldn't get over it. All of that, and it runs through two people on a seventy one foot boat.
So the thing that keeps the lights on is a hose and a captain and a deckhand.
Hilbert: That's the whole base, near enough. Anyway. I've got a trailer that needs moving before it gets dark.
The most common wrong belief about Pituffik is that it's a small Arctic outpost. It isn't. It's a functioning Space Force installation with a ten thousand foot runway handling more than three thousand flights a year, a missile warning radar, and a satellite tracking station under the callsign POGO.
And the second most common is that there's a single population number. There isn't. A hundred and fifty is the permanent U.S. military. Several hundred is the whole community. Both are true and they're counting different things. The base doesn't run on the hundred and fifty. It runs on the whole team.
Leave them with the question the episode has been circling. The population figure is ambiguous and probably always will be. The base is simultaneously shrinking from a Cold War peak of ten thousand and being reinvested in with a three point nine five billion dollar contract. The permafrost is thawing and the morale infrastructure is cracking with it. And whether the strategic value of Pituffik survives the physical and political thaw is not a question anyone has answered.
What it takes to keep several hundred people, an airport, and a sophisticated installation running at seventy six degrees north is, in the end, a fuel line, a white painted runway, a weekly flight out of Baltimore that might be late, and two people on a tugboat.
Thanks to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop. This has been My Weird Prompts. If you're enjoying the show, a review wherever you listen goes a long way.
We'll be back soon.
