Broad Reach Engineering in Golden develops hardware and software for space missions, but chief executive Chris McCormick calls it art.
McCormick started the company in 1997, and now Broad Reach has six employees in Colorado and more than 30 in Tempe, Ariz.
The company is growing and recently leased more space in Golden. Broad Reach had $12.5 million in revenues in 2007 and is now working on an $80 million project — its largest to date — for Cicero, a constellation of microsatellites delivering data on Earth’s atmosphere and ionosphere. Broad Reach is providing sensors for the project and other work.
One of the company’s key specialties is spacecraft avionics tailored to meet the mission, McCormick said.
“This is still an art business,” with a focus on the architecture of instrument design, he said.
The company has supplied small but important parts of a number of missions that have a high profile in Colorado’s aerospace industry, including MicroSat Systems’ TacSat-2 satellite launched in 2006, DigitalGlobe’s WorldView spy satellites and the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate satellite network.
Broad Reach is one of a number of smaller companies that keep Colorado’s aerospace economy running as the nation’s second-largest. According to the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp., more than 120 aerospace companies were located in Colorado in 2007, and half employed fewer than 10 people.
“All these companies have very good ideas, and they may be making many contributions, but it’s not very visible,” said Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources at Colorado School of Mines. Many people “may not even know that Broad Reach is doing aerospace in downtown Golden,” he said.
McCormick believes a company like Broad Reach is more nimble than others.
Larger aerospace companies are “just so bureaucratically constrained,” McCormick said.
But Broad Reach may go public or come under more pressure to sell, he said.
“It’s not worth anything until you sell, in a lot of ways,” he said.
Kelly Yamanouchi: 303-954-1488 or kyamanouchi@denverpost.com
