Colorado crucial to aerospace industry’s reach for the stars

BOULDER — The Air Force presence may be responsible for bringing much of the aerospace industry to Colorado, but not the most important piece when it comes to private-sector employment.

“It was really more of a fluke,” said Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. spokeswoman Roz Brown. “Our company was founded a year before NASA” when Ed Ball came to the Boulder area looking for a new glass technology to augment the company’s canning jars.

The glass-technology acquisition didn’t work out for Ball, but it did lead to an association with scientists and engineers working for the University of Colorado’s Upper Air Laboratory, who were becoming successful enough producing instruments and other devices for studying the sun and the ionosphere that the university encouraged them to make a decision between working in the public or private sector – something that probably would not occur today.

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Ball Aerospace will celebrate its 60th anniversary next spring with approximately 2,700 local employees – 15,000 worldwide – and a host of accomplishments in satellite and instrumentation production that have included the Kepler planet-hunting telescope, the close-up cameras that took the pictures of Pluto for the New Horizon mission this summer, and most famously the mirrors for follow-on telescope for Hubble.

Broomfield-based Ball Corp. (NYSE: BLL), the original company, still does food packaging but also contributes to the aerospace industry in a smaller fashion, and employs 1,865 people in Colorado and 14,500 worldwide.

Ball itself is a primary reason that Colorado ranks No. 2 in the nation, behind Florida, for private-sector aerospace employment, according to the Colorado Office of Economic Development. Figures vary according to sources, but the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp. estimated in January that Colorado had about 163,000 total aerospace workers in 2014, with 25,110 direct private-sector employees and an additional 109,680 in space-related work, as well as about 28,000 military personnel.

The state’s primary military commands include the Air Force Space Command, the Army Space Command, North American Aerospace Defense Command in Cheyenne Mountain and USNORTHCOMM , as well as the Air Force Academy and Buckley Air Force Base.

But the density of aerospace contractors based in Colorado, including Ball, Boeing, ITT Exelis, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Sierra Nevada Corp. and United Launch Alliance, also are providing a critical mass for the industry. Many of these are based in Northern Colorado, including Sierra Nevada Corp.’s Dream Chaser space transportation system, which is based in Louisville.

An educated workforce is an important element for Northrop Grumman’s Boulder presence, said operations manager Harvey Burkett, since software support for programs such as infrared early warning systems is the name of the game here. Surprisingly, the 300 Northrop employees here often share both space and work with one of Northrop’s main competitors, Lockheed Martin.

“We’re competitors or teammates, depending on the program,” Burkett said. “We both live in fear of Google,” which has promised to hire about 1,000 software engineers in its new Boulder campus.

Many other of the estimated 400 aerospace firms located here have become firmly cemented in Colorado, such as Longmont’s ABSL Space Products, the leading provider of lithium-ion batteries for space flights. The company, then held by a British firm, first established a one-man sales office here in 2005 as a means to get into the U.S. market, but gradually centered all of its space battery design, manufacturing, testing, program management and sales efforts for the Americas in Longmont.

ABSL, with about 50 local employees, has provided batteries for more than 120 space missions and recently was purchased by the American firm EnerSys, a leading provider of stored energy solutions for industrial applications. However, there seems little chance of it moving from Colorado, since company information noted that Colorado was chosen over sites in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., because of the density of existing and potential clients located here.

Most company officials contacted pointed to that density – along with an educated employee base, support by state institutions and access to great university programs – as a strong reason to stay in Colorado. Certainly CU’s space programs and engineering resources compete with the best universities in the nation, but often overlooked are training program for technicians, such as those being provided by Metro State University.

ABSL is not alone in this market. Solid Power, a spinoff company from CU research, has established a 7,000 square-foot facility in Louisville’s Colorado Technology Center. While solid-state batteries, which have no volatile or flammable liquid components, are largely being vetted for aerospace uses today, they could become strong competition by providing energy-dense solutions.

Certainly Colorado has its share of emerging technologies, but corporate officials also pointed to the strong base of local subcontractors, such as software and hardware engineering firms, as well as precision machine shops, as state strengths. Ball Aerospace even has a Small Business Office to facilitate subcontractors working with its program, which maintains a “Highly Successful” overall rating by the Defense Contract Management Agency.

Not all businesses are spinoffs from large government contracts and space missions. Some businesses, such as Ball, are created by people who just happen to be in Colorado when they decide to create a new business niche.

That’s certainly the case with Paravion Technology Inc. and its sister company, Century Helicopters Inc., which are based in Fort Collins and Loveland, said general manager Michael Hansen. In 1970, his father, Larry Hansen, started a helicopter-based aerial spraying business, but quickly saw the need for a helicopter maintenance shop.

“Century supports helicopter maintenance and modifications for about 15 states from North Dakota to Arizona,” Hansen said. Century clients include civilian operations, but also a number of fleets from police agencies and hospitals, with about 15 full-time employees.

Paravion, which employs about 21 people, grew from some of the direct needs of those clients, largely creating products that support the installation of surveillance equipment, from cameras for natural resource and wildfire monitoring, ground-surveillance radar and video cameras.

“The nature of our business is a lot of civilian work, which is governed by the FAA,” Hansen said. But the staff of Paravion and Century serve as support for either business when the need arises.

“Most of our staff can help out in either business when we have a real need,” he said.