“What has America done for this island?” asked Nathan Francis, a deputy minister of the government of Turks and Caicos, in 1983. “Has she added one wing to our hospital? Has she put one classroom [in] our schools? Has she educated one boy or girl to higher learning?” Francis asked these questions as the United States prepared to close a military station it had operated within the territory’s Grand Turk island for 30 years. Throughout this time, the United States had poured millions of dollars, hundreds of engineers and technicians, and state-of-the-art scientific equipment into the archipelago. But what good had the American presence done for those who called Turks and Caicos home? According to Francis, it had done little.
Between 1950 and 1952, the United States and United Kingdom negotiated an agreement for the US Armed Forces to construct and operate a missile tracking station on Grand Turk, in the southeast of the Turks and Caicos archipelago. This was among the earliest agreements of its kind, but it would not be the last.
From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, the United States established a constellation of missile tracking stations, collectively called the Atlantic Missile Range, that spanned more than 10,000 miles from Cape Canaveral to the Cape of Good Hope and beyond. The stations monitored, communicated with, and collected data from missile test flights launched from Florida to several impact points throughout the Atlantic Ocean. Strategically vital missiles to the US military posture throughout the Cold War, including the SM-65 Atlas, UGM-27 Polaris, HGM-25A Titan I, and the LGM-30 Minuteman I, became operable through the testing and verification processes of the Atlantic Missile Range. These missiles secured the United States’ nuclear deterrent capability and, by extension, so did these tracking stations.
The Grand Turk station was seventh in the Atlantic Missile Range network. It gained the additional roles of satellite tracking in 1957 and spaceflight tracking in the early 1960s, wherein the station facilitated ground communications to space vehicles and monitored their trajectories in orbit. In serving these roles, the station became a strategically vital nexus point within the United States’ expanding web of overseas tracking stations. Over its 30 years of operation, the Grand Turk station helped inaugurate US aerospatial dominance by aiding in missile, satellite, and crewed spaceflight programs.
When US–UK negotiations began in 1950, Turks and Caicos was among the poorest outposts of the British Empire. The islands were ruled by a small clique of white oligarchs who owned the territory’s salt mines, a principal source of wealth generation worked by the island’s Black majority. While negotiating the minutiae of the station agreement, diplomats in the United States and United Kingdom tactfully avoided authorizing the site’s construction through the Jamaican parliament, whose jurisdiction at the time extended to Turks and Caicos. Both parties understood that the multiracial, prolabor, and American-skeptic legislature may not readily accede to US overtures of military basing. One state department representative described the Jamaican parliament as “numerous and unwieldy and [having] more than a slight Commie tinge.” Instead, negotiators finalized the agreement through the devoutly anticommunist Legislative Board of Turks and Caicos, a political body beholden to the archipelago’s white oligarchy.
The agreement gave the US military broad administrative authority over the island of Grand Turk. It redirected local resources toward the station and exempted US military and contracting personnel from local taxation, judicial oversight, or social integration with the residents of Grand Turk. The station’s administrators were free to adjudicate justice, import goods, and organize social life as they saw fit. In effect, the station served as an autonomous political zone of the United States.
Moreover, the agreement provided the US military considerable power over the island’s inhabitants. It stipulated that the Americans would hold broad criminal jurisdiction over local inhabitants in security-related matters. The agreement also granted US armed forces extensive control over the island’s infrastructure, specifying that the US military “shall have the right to employ and use all utilities, services and facilities, harbors, roads, highways, bridges, viaducts, canals and similar channels of transportation” owned by the local or royal governments. It required the Legislative Board to enshrine the property rights of the tracking station into law and harmonize local security measures with those of the United States
Such authority did not come with mutual responsibilities to the island’s residents. In fact, the treaty stipulated that the US military must collude with the island’s government to fix wages, keeping local labor for both the salt mines and the station’s maintenance cheap, so as not to cut into the mine owners’ profit margins.
Furthermore, at its inception, the station did not contribute to public revenue, which serviced the day-to-day needs of Turk Islanders. Government revenue was generated primarily through customs duties instead of income tax, freeing the archipelago’s landholders from dispensing with their concentrated wealth. Given this taxation scheme, exempting the US military from customs duties meant that, despite the infusion of funds and equipment, the people of Grand Turk found little benefit from the increased economic activity on their island. Eventually, the US began paying rent on the station’s land plot, but this boost to the public coffers only deepened the fiscal pain when the station closed.
Turks and Caicos thus became an early and particularly stark example of a new kind of US military expansionism that operated with lean administrative overhead and global mobility. Sites like Grand Turk station regularly flipped between active and decommissioned, given ever-changing US operational needs. These stations had narrow missions, functioning as data collection and communication relay points. And the stations’ agreements were designed to be nonreciprocal—maximizing value to US military occupants and minimizing resource investment within local communities. In other words, the economic austerity and political partition at Grand Turk station was not a bug but a feature of the tracking station network.
Yet the archipelago’s contribution to the space age, vis-à-vis the Grand Turk station, remains a proud point of institutional memory in Turks and Caicos. The station’s renown reached its apogee on February 20, 1962, when astronaut John Glenn orbited the Earth and splashed down in the waters just east of Turks and Caicos. He was quickly fished out and shuttled off to the Grand Turk station for physiological evaluation and technical debriefing. Vice President Lyndon Johnson and five other astronauts arrived to greet Glenn, reportedly with great fanfare from the Grand Turk populace.
The Turks and Caicos National Museum has dedicated a significant portion of its online exhibitions to the island’s involvement with missile and space activity. A full-size replica of the Friendship 7, Glenn’s space capsule, stands outside of JAGS McCartney International Airport in Grand Turk, and a John Glenn Splashdown Memorial stands near the island’s cruise ship port, an attraction for visiting tourists.
And while the memory of peaceful space exploration may be celebrated by some residents and vacationers, the political and economic underpinnings of the Grand Turk tracking station deserve close historical scrutiny. Glenn’s successful orbit and safe return to Earth near Turks and Caicos highlights both the global flows of US technological investment related to space activity that began throughout the 1950s and 1960s as well as the sharp barriers delineating who could access these resources and on what terms. Despite the precipitous rise in American military and civil spending on space capabilities throughout this era, many of the communities hosting US tracking stations saw little material benefit. In fact, the legal and physical infrastructure making feats like Glenn’s orbit possible was designed to segregate inflowing US funds from hosting communities. As Francis noted 20 years later, the hospitals had not been expanded and the schools had not been upgraded.
At a glance, the American system may have seemed to mimic features of the British imperial system—consolidating power within a well-compensated managerial class over an expendable and localized laboring class. But many of the core components of the American system were quite new. The American servicemembers and technicians did not move to Grand Turk permanently but cycled in and out through occupational tours, limiting intercommunal socialization. Likewise, the Americans did not seek to harness and extract value out of the island’s labor force, but rather to employ as few Turk Islanders as necessary. This “light footprint” approach allowed the US military to activate, deactivate, and reactivate tracking stations worldwide given changing geostrategic needs.
From a historical vantage point, then, the Grand Turk station embodied a moment of geopolitical transition. Locally, it was a fusion of British and American rule in the mid-20th century—combining European-style territorial colonialism based upon resource extraction and labor exploitation with the imperatives the US national security state seeking to supplant labor with capital-intensive, technologically sophisticated weaponry. For decades thereafter, this template would spread globally, aiding in the creation of both a highly mobile American military basing system and the new domain of outer space to exact US security advantages worldwide.
The inhabitants of Grand Turk island witnessed this new form of US expansionism develop within their archipelago over three decades. Their reactions were manifold. They likely resented, celebrated, ignored, accommodated, resisted, and marveled at the unfolding of a scramble for outer space. They saw how aerospatial military systems, truly global in their scale, exacted occupation of foreign territory, of their territory. And perhaps some wondered: As the United States races toward the stars, how might it be transforming the Earth?