United States Air Force Academy

Campus Environment

USAFA, which opened its doors in 1958, is the youngest of the service academies. It is located in Colorado Springs on 18,000 acres at the base of the Rocky Mountains. Colorado Springs has a growing downtown with restaurants and entertainment, but cadets fourth class (first-year students) are pretty much confined to campus, and are likely to spend more time in Jack's Valley, 2,000 wooded acres used for training.

Cadets are housed in two dormitories, Vandenberg Hall and Sijan Hall. Inspections of dorm rooms occur every Saturday, and woe to the cadet who is less than spotless. Taps means lights out. Cadets march to breakfast and lunch, which is served by waiters; the food is decent and plentiful. Dinner is served buffet style. Only juniors and seniors can have refrigerators. Upperclassmen are also allowed to have cars, and use them to take advantage of outdoor sports in the Rockies and for trips to Denver, about an hour away.

The academic facilities are cutting edge. In addition to a sophisticated computer lab with war gaming software, the aeronautics laboratory features two wind tunnels, operational turbo jet engines, and rocket test cells. Three astronautics laboratories provide facilities for small satellite design, fabrication and testing, rocket design, and orbital analysis software. There is an on-site planetarium for astronomy and navigation. Even the foreign language learning center is state-of-the-art.

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