the British Government agreed to its use as an NMD tracking facility. The decision was criticised, because the proposed NMD system was solely for US benefit. According to the BBC, The Independent reported that the British Government secretly agreed to the US request to station NMD missile interceptors at Fylingdales Moor in late 2004. This has subsequently been denied by the Ministry of Defence. The £449 million upgrade for RAF Fylingdales to become an NMD tracking facility was undertaken by Boeing, with Raytheon as the major subcontractor. Operation BMEWS While the radar station remains a British asset operated and commanded by the Royal Air Force, it also forms one of three stations in the United States BMEWS network (the United States also funds the cost of the radar units). The other two stations in the network are Thule Air Base, Greenland and Clear Space Force Station, Alaska. The data obtained by Fylingdales is shared fully and freely with the United States, where it feeds into the US-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs. The British Government advised in March 2018, that as of the beginning of that month, fewer than five United States military personnel and ten US contractors worked at the station. Space Delta 4 of the United States Space Force, maintains a liaison officer at Fylingdales to act as link to US missile warning operations and advises the RAF station commander on operational issues. The secondary role of detection and tracking of orbiting objects, also called Space Situational Awareness (SSA), as part of the United States Space Surveillance Network is carried out in conjunction with RAF High Wycombe. Systems The primary radars of RAF Fylingdales are active electronically scanned array (AESA) phased array radars, mounted on each face of a truncated tetrahedron, typically referred to as the "pyramid" or the SSPAR (Solid State Phased Array). This makes Fylingdales unique amongst its peers in that it covers a full 360 degrees. Each of the three arrays is across and contains around 2560 transmit/receive modules; mean power output is about , with a tracking range of . Protests by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament The functions of RAF Fylingdales have been subject to criticism from opposition groups, such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), leading to protests being held on occasion. These stem from concerns regarding the base's association with nuclear warfare