By SCOTT HADLY
NEWS-PRESS SENIOR WRITER

LEN WOOD / NEWS-PRESS Raytheon has a new building at 425 Commerce Court in Lompoc. The county's fourth largest employer, defense contractor Raytheon provides jobs for almost 2,000 workers and generates about $500 million in revenue annually.

New kinds of rockets, new contractors and a new mission will mark the coming year for Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Phasing out some old workhorse rockets that sent payloads into space, this year the 15 scheduled launches include Boeing's bigger and cheaper rocket, the Delta 4 and newcomer Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX's, Falcon.

The number of planned launches in 2004 is five more than last year, said Paul Klock, chief of planning and programming for the 30th Space Wing at Vandenberg.

"We're starting to see a cultural change to go from contract to launch quicker and cheaper," Mr. Klock said. "We're constantly trying to improve the process."

The base remains the only installation in the continental United States that test-launches intercontinental ballistic missiles. Its location also makes it the only spot that can boost satellites into polar orbit.

The base is the largest employer in the North County, with more than 5,200 civilian and military jobs. About half of those positions are with private contractors, the biggest being Indyne, Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Probably most significant of all for Vandenberg this year is the planned missile defense program, Mr. Klock said.

If everything goes as planned, sometime in October, the United States will have in place at Vandenberg Air Force Base and at a base in Alaska the first pieces of a rudimentary "shield" meant to shoot down incoming enemy missiles.

It will be a threadbare version of the Ballistic Missile Defense System — first envisioned by President Ronald Reagan in 1983 — that has been pushed by the Bush administration since his inauguration.

Portions of the system have been tested at Vandenberg, with mixed success, since 1999. Each test costs $100 million.

Just to deploy this modest missile defense shield — which will include four interceptor missile silos at Vandenberg and six at Fort Greeley, Alaska — will cost the Department of Defense $1.5 billion over two years. This limited shield is intended to protect against an attack with long-range ballistic missiles from so-called "rogue" nations such as North Korea and Iraq.

Critics argue that the costly system is deeply flawed, and stands little chance of success.

But it will mean a new mission for the base and it will mean continuous testing of the system, which will eventually include other land, sea and air components.

According to published reports the Defense Department is spending $9 billion a year on various missile defense programs. Estimates for the final cost of the system range wildly from tens of billions to hundreds of billions of dollars.

Although the new Missile Defense Shield entails significantly new demands on the base, it is unlikely to mean more jobs at this point, Mr. Klock said.

Employment at the base remains fairly steady and year-to-year changes are very incremental because much of the work there entails long-term contracts and launches that take sometimes more than two years in planning and preparation.

SpaceX's Falcon launch is an attempt to shorten that time frame to about 18 months.

Scheduled to fly early this year, the company's rocket is designed to ferry smaller satellites into orbit for about $6 million a shot.

Boeing, which employees 230 people at the base, is continuing its more than $100 million renovating Space Launch Complex-6 at the base, where it will eventually launch its new bigger and more affordable Delta 4 rockets.

Evan McCollum, spokesman for Denver-based Lockheed Martin Space Systems, said that the company, which employs about 450 people at the base, is in preparation for a 2005 launch of its new Atlas 5 rocket, another larger rocket that costs less to launch and can carry moreof a payload.

"You'll see a continuing level of work," Mr. McCollum said. "I don't anticipate any big changes."

But once preparation for the new rocket is complete, a more robust launch schedule is expected, he said.

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