From launching the next-generation space vehicle Orion to laying miles and miles of petroleum pipelines and fiber-optic cables, Colorado companies and their executives connected a lot of dots in 2014.
Colorado continued its dominance in aerospace and science, with Lockheed Martin, United Launch Alliance and several other players in the state getting .
Sierra Nevada Corp.’s Louisville-based Space Systems division lost a $6.8 billion “space taxi” contract with NASA, but its chief, Mark Sirangelo, vowed to find private companies and other space agencies willing to use Dream Chaser spacecraft.
On terra firma, the drilling boom in the Denver-Julesburg Basin accelerated, giving Weld County bragging rights to the fastest rate of job growth out of the country’s 339 largest counties.
To help all the product emerging from miles below the surface get to market, DCP Midstream, under CEO Wouter van Kempen, invested $1 billion in plants and pipelines in Colorado the past four years, with plans to spend another $1.5 billion by 2016.
In Boulder, Zayo Group won a big payout for laying a different kind of conduit — fiber optic. The company, founded in 2007 by CEO Dan Caruso, went public in October, raising more than $400 million and minting more than 100 millionaires.
Caruso came from Broomfield-based Level 3 Communications, which in June .
Among the real estate deals of note in 2014, Vail Resorts purchased the in September. Loveland developer after three decades of stop-and-start redevelopment efforts. And down in Lone Tree, in October.
Colorado’s newest industry, recreational cannabis, also took root in 2014, giving growers, dispensary operators and service providers in the state a head start on the national trend toward legalization.
Chris Myklebust, the state’s financial services commissioner, was moving as the year ended to
