The walls inside 9100 E. Mineral Circle were orange and purple, the interior empty and bare – a remnant of the go-go dot-com era and its bust.
When United Launch Alliance transition facilities manager Clint Winterling first saw the building, he knew he had a challenge on his hands as he worked to set up the new corporate headquarters for the rocket joint venture there within months.
The building in Centennial was once occupied by Rhythms NetConnections Inc., a formerly highflying Internet-access provider that filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001 and shut down.
“They stripped the building of everything that wasn’t bolted down,” said Winterling. “We ended up doing a total refurbishment” – including new paint on the walls.
The office building has taken on a new life as the home of hundreds of ULA employees moving in this summer.
The ULA is a rocket joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing that started operations last December – people working on Lockheed Martin’s Atlas rocket program and Boeing’s Delta rocket program became ULA employees.
Much of the ULA’s operations, including engineering and product development, are at Lockheed Martin’s Waterton campus. But the company chose Centennial for its headquarters. The human-resources department moved into the building Wednesday.
The company’s lease in the new building started in February, and employees started moving into the building in June. The ULA spent more than $20 million on facilities.
The 160,000-square-foot building can now house nearly 600 employees, with space for another 1,200 ULA employees at Waterton. The company is moving about 370 people from Huntington Beach, Calif. – where Boeing’s Delta rocket operation was based.
“The folks that have moved started out with huge anxiety about moving to Colorado,” said Greg Schiller, ULA resource-management project lead. “People from L.A. are anxious about the weather.”
The ULA also hired about 400 new employees, mostly from the Denver area. About 180 of those just graduated from college. The company will ultimately have close to 1,900 employees – further expanding the rocket hub in the Denver area.
The economic impact of the ULA will amount to about $414 million a year, according to Tom Clark, executive vice president of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp.
But the move wasn’t easy for all the employees affected. To move former Boeing engineers into Waterton, for example, the company had to move former Lockheed Martin employees around, and some had to move multiple times.
Occasionally, employees showed up for work but had no computers yet.
The ULA has to maintain separate information-technology systems from Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
And through it all, the ULA had to continue with its schedule of rocket launches.
“We’re dealing with rocket scientists,” Winterling said. “We were able to overcome a lot.”
Staff writer Kelly Yamanouchi can be reached at 303-954-1488 or kyamanouchi@denverpost.com.
