SOUTHEASTERN COLORADO —What do virtual-reality goggles, custom motorcycle parts, sunflower oil and aerospace have in common? The answer, according to the Colorado Space Business Roundtable, is: “Who knows, but let’s find out!”
The roundtable, or CSBR, is a consortium of industry, government and academics involved in the state’s space business.
The group traveled to several small towns across southeastern Colorado for four days this month, spreading the gospel of the aerospace business to entrepreneurs, farmers, mayors, machinists, academics and students.
Along the way, they made astounding discoveries.
A business in Trinidad developed a virtual-reality technology used to inspire kids to learn by showing them magical worlds.
Down the street, a city native started a welding shop that has grown into a custom engineering and fabrication operation.
In La Junta, community college students conduct space situational awareness and debris tracking — a.k.a. looking for ♥space junk — as part of a worldwide network of planetary defense with the Air Force.
“I had no idea this was here in La Junta, but this is why we do these things. All this is out there somewhere,” said Joe Rice, CSBR board member and director of government relations with Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Littleton. “You have to establish the relationship somewhere and get out there on the ground.”
Sharing the aerospace bounty
The group first hit the road to tour rural communities in 2013, aiming to share the aerospace bounty beyond the Denver-Boulder-Colorado Springs corridor.
The trips have three goals:
• Connect small businesses with major Front Range contractors such as Lockheed Martin, United Launch Alliance, Boeing and Sierra Nevada.
• Spread the importance of STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — education.
• Share the story about Colorado’s involvement in the national and international aerospace industry.
Colorado has more than 400 aerospace companies and suppliers, ranks No. 1 in the nation for per-capita aerospace employment, and has more than 162,000 space-related jobs with a $3.2 billion total payroll, according to the Colorado Space Coalition.
There’s also the $27 billion in economic impact and $7 billion in payroll that the defense industry — which includes Air Force Space Command and the world’s Global Positioning System command, both in Colorado — brings to the state, according to a study released in May by the Colorado Department of Military and Veterans Affairs.
The more people who know that, the better they can inform their elected officials and influence decisions that affect both their community and the state economy.
“People have to be given information before they can do something with it,” Rice said.
STEM resources were shared on the CSBR tour by the University of Colorado at Boulder, the Space Foundation and the Colorado Education Initiative. Rocket scientist Amber Gell talked about NASA’s Orion program. Economic development was the focus of Jay Lindell, the aerospace champion at the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade. Staffers from the offices of Sen. Michael Bennet, Sen. Cory Gardner and Rep. Ken Buck also joined in.
“Real shot in the arm”
These types of road trips also are a “real shot in the arm” for rural communities, said Mikela Tarlow, CEO of the educational startup Action Lab.
Tarlow works with the Alamosa community developing a new “maker” space, which this summer hosted its first camps for kids as young as 8 to learn everything from robotics to fabrication.
“The kind of entrepreneurship and solutions that kids in rural areas can come up with are so different than city kids,” Tarlow said. “Urban kids maybe go to more a theoretical place, and with rural kids, their ideas are a little more grounded: What do you have to build? What does it look like? They’re more hands-on.”
Tony Paradisa, owner of Topar in Trinidad, has that same kind of ingenuity. Paradisa has no formal engineering training, but he is definitely an engineer.
Topar started as a small welding shop and has grown into a custom fabrication and machine shop. That’s because Paradisa finds inspiration everywhere — most recently while getting a digitally mapped custom-made tooth crown.
By applying the theory behind the medical process to his craft, he re-engineered fabrication of a custom part, saving himself two pounds of aluminum per part and reducing the cost by 50 percent.
Paradisa said he is excited about exploring a new realm: additive manufacturing, the industrial version of 3-D printing.
“Intellect does not have a ZIP code. It can occur anywhere,” said Michael Wisdom, executive director of the San Luis Valley Development Resources Group, a nonprofit that brings opportunity to the south-central Colorado region. “It’s farm-boy logic, it’s MacGyver, it’s everything that we would do on Saturday morning when we would go to the garage and fix something that broke.”
Looking for a partner
The needs of the aerospace industry can often be filled from anywhere in the state, Rice said, pointing to an open contract from a major aerospace contractor that’s looking for a partner to launder clean-room suits.
He talked about AMPT, a small company that CSBR learned of on a road trip last year. AMPT tests space propulsion systems at the Durango airport.
It’s a lucrative business: Lockheed Martin has purchased goods or services from 50 Colorado companies to the tune of $25 million for the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite R-Series, or GOES-R, satellite project alone, according to a company spokesman.
But it can take years for a company to join the supply chain due to special certification requirements and the government contract process, which is planned years in advance. Existing technological infrastructure helps.
CSBR tries not to overpromise or set unrealistic expectations, Rice said, but that shouldn’t stop interested businesses.
“No one decides to build a satellite tomorrow or any other kind of spacecraft, … so programs that we already have on the books generally already have the supply chain set up,” Rice told a group at the Cow Palace Hotel in Lamar. “But there are a lot of places in the state that want to diversify their economy. So if nobody starts on it now, then several years down the road, obviously they won’t be in the aerospace industry.”
This leads us to Colorado Mills, a sunflower oil production facility in Lamar and a stop on Day 3. No one was quite sure what to expect or what sunflower oil has to do with aerospace.
Colorado Mills general manager Rick Robbins hosted the tour, which included 23 students — half the enrollees — from rural Eads High School. The students learned there is much more to sunflower oil production than meets the eye.
Lead lab technician Crystal Tellez explained that she runs complex daily tests on the oil in a small lab, determining phosphorous levels, refractive indices, fatty-acid composition, moisture and more.
“I told them if they like chemistry, they’d like this work big time,” she said.
The CSBR team learned about the high smoke point of the oil, which makes it ideal for a nonfoaming hydraulic lubricant.
“This is all information-gathering, to see what people can do,” Rice said. “Some of this we have to noodle over. Then I can get an idea in my head and go back and look at it.”
Laura Keeney: 303-954-1337, lkeeney@denverpost.com or
