Spaceship Colorado: Colorado Employs more aerospace workers than all but one state, but its success in the industry rests largely on the flow of money from NASA and the military.

• Author: Neff, Todd
• Position: Company overview

It was a scene as otherworldly as it was distinctly Coloradan. Through a plate-glass window in a new $65 million annex on the Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. campus in Boulder, visitors observed workers assembling a spacecraft--or, rather, parts of a spacecraft, as it was in three separate pieces.

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Technicians padded about in "bunny suits," covered from head to toe in white clean-room outfits vaguely reminiscent of women's fashion under the Taliban. Dust that can fry electronics in a vacuum is such a concern among spacecraft mechanics, even their faces remained hidden behind surgical masks.

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The spacecraft was WorldView-2, a remote-sensing orbiter scheduled to fortify Longmont-based DigitalGlobe's fleet sometime in 2009. DigitalGlobe, a Ball Aerospace offshoot, says the spacecraft will resolve ground features as fine as 0.46 meters across while whipping around its polar orbit at about 17,000 mph.

Engineers Kirsten Sterrett and Michael Horner sat in a control room in front of plate-glass windows offering a World-View-2 view and, more directly, four flat-screen monitors in the control room. They were in the middle of a software upload. To their right stood racks with labels like "Solar Array Simulator" and "Power Control Console."

Both engineers are graduates of the University of Colorado's aerospace engineering program, she with a master's degree, he with a Ph.D. Thus, Colorado-educated engineers worked on a Colorado spacecraft for a Colorado customer.

"I love the complexity of the system," Horner said, looking out at gold-sheathed cabling, stark black boxes and other indescribable features of a spacecraft under construction.

Although referring to a single project at a single company, Horner could have been describing one of hundreds of efforts spanning the civilian and military, involving rockets, the spacecraft and instruments they carry, and the ground systems capturing and manipulating all that data about the Earth and heavens beyond.

The Colorado space business is huge--the nation's second largest in terms of employment, behind only California. It is also complex--an economic and engineering food web of companies acting as contractors, subcontractors and competitors at the same time. They are all being forced to evolve amid profound changes in the space-business environment.

The industry that launched in 1955 when the Glenn L. Martin Co. began working on Titan intercontinental ballistic missiles in Jefferson County now employs roughly 55,000 people in this state, according to the Colorado Space Coalition. As of 2007, about 26,000 of them were with private aerospace companies --120 companies dedicated to the space business and at least 180 that dabble in it.

That's more employees than space mainstays Florida, Texas and New Jersey and behind only California, which, with a whopping 250,000 space workers accounts for 20 percent of the global space business, according to the California Space Authority.

The U.S. military employs an additional 29,000 workers in space jobs at Buckley Air Force Base, Peterson Air Force Base, Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station (which includes NORAD and the U.S. Northern Command among other entities), the U.S. Air Force Academy and Schriever Air Force Base. Colorado has, in short, a huge military space presence. It is an engine for thousands of jobs, primarily in developing ground systems and related software, at such companies as Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and ITT Systems.

COLORADO'S AEROSPACE GIANT

Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Martin's current incarnation, remains Colorado's biggest space player with about 10,000 employees. Lockheed Martin's Colorado operations encompass classified military efforts and such interplanetary NASA spacecraft as the Mars Phoenix Lander currently digging into the soil of the Martian arctic plains.

The company is also building the spacecraft for NASA's $700 million Juno mission to Jupiter as well as the $375 million CRAIL moon-gravity mapper, which in fact is a pair of spacecraft scheduled to begin orbiting Luna in 2011. Then there's the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, mission to Mars.

The $485 million NASA Mars Scout program aims to understand the evolution of water on the Red Planet. It is being led by the...