Lockheed Martin's Jim Crocker: jobs come second to vision.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: AEROSPACE

Aerospace industry veteran Jim Crocker points out that Colorado ranks third nationally in the number of people employed in aerospace, behind only California and Florida with about 54,000 aerospace workers. And Colorado is No. 1 from a per capita standpoint.

But Crocker, the keynote speaker Dec. 1 at the seventh annual Colorado Space Roundup held at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, said that as important as jobs are to a robust aerospace industry, focusing solely on employee numbers tends to overshadow something he believes is more important.

"If we don't have a vision for where we're going in aerospace, not just in Colorado but in the nation, it just degenerates into a story about jobs," said Crocker, vice president and general manager/sensing and exploration systems for Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co.

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The daylong program, presented by the Colorado Space Business Roundtable and Colorado Space Coalition, was a networking event that also provided an update on the Colorado space industry.

Panels during the day included an industry update from Colorado's top aerospace contractors, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Sierra Nevada Corp. and United Launch Alliance.

Crocker talked about how past aerospace leadership was sparked by a vision, particularly that led by President John F. Kennedy, and it bolstered United States' prestige and power in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Now he says, "We as a nation desperately need a grand, overarching vision of space exploration, on the military side as well as on the civil side. There are 60 nations that actually have spacecraft in orbit around the Earth," he said, pointing out that Iran became the 60th in 2009 and that North Korea, South Korea and Brazil plan to become the next.

"If you listened to some of the debates going on in Congress, we don't have an overarching...