You saw it in The Terminator. You saw it in Independence Day. If you’re a gamer, you’ve probably engaged in a firefight inside it on Call of Duty or Fallout. Now you can see it without the special effects and or computer graphics, all for the glorious price of ‘free.’

We’re talking about the U.S. Air Force atomic bunker, Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station.

The base became operational during the height of the Cold War 50 years ago. Built deep inside a 9,500 foot high rocky mountain, the installation is designed to withstand intercontinental nuclear strikes and coordinate defense measures. The station sits on about 1,300 natural springs, its only entrance is located 2,000 feet from the peak of the mountain, and it is 7,000 feet above sea level.

This Air Force atomic bunker was built to last and endure. It will celebrate its 50th year of operation in April 2016.

Today, the Cheyenne Mountain station focuses on gathering information from military satellites and relaying that data to various U.S. commands around the world. Cheyenne Mountain AFS Deputy Director Steven Rose told Airman that the station was like “brain stem” of the U.S. military.

“Those sensors are your nerves out there sensing that information,” Rose said, “but the nerves all come back to one spot in the human body, together in the brain stem, entangled in a coherent piece. We are the brain stem that’s pulling it all together, correlating it, making sense of it, and passing it up to the brain — whether it’s the commander at NORAD, NORTHCOM or STRATCOM — for someone to make a decision on what that means. That is the most critical part of the nervous system and the most vulnerable. Cheyenne Mountain provides that shield around that single place where all of that correlation and data comes into.”

[Airman]