The space race has started again.
After decades of relative oblivion since man landed on the moon in 1969, things are looking up. In recent years, billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson have almost single-handedly commercialized space in their personal race to put hundreds of thousands of satellites and possibly humans into orbit over the next few years.
The willingness to spend small fortunes to gain access to the vast untapped space economy has attracted the attention of other private companies, nation states and cybercriminals. This is Astra Space Inc's high-risk, high-reward market. "excited," said CEO Chris Kemp.
"Satellite launches have become a commodity," said Scott Annable, CEO of Colorado Springs-based Delta Solutions & Strategies, which recently won a $187 million contract to support U.S. Space Command missions. federal government with enemies. "Satellites are experiencing a renaissance, they have been around for 70 years."
During such busy times, Colorado Springs is uniquely positioned as the de facto Ground Zero and arena for the aerospace defense industry.
Colorado Springs, or "The Springs" as the locals call it, is a fast-growing hub. Half of Colorado's 500 starting defense comes in the spring. It's where Cray was born and MCI flourished, and the region is one of the promising tech hubs highlighted in AOL co-founder Steve Case's bestseller Rise of the Rest: How Entrepreneurs in Amazing Places Are Creating the New American Dream.
About half (44%) of local GDP is accounted for by the defense economy, five turboprop regional military bases, Fort Carson, Cheyenne Mountain Complex, and Peterson Air Force Base, as well as nearly 250 defense, aerospace, and space facilities. and regional cyber security companies.
"Colorado Springs is the world headquarters for space exploration," said Frank Backes, senior vice president of information security firm Kratos Defense & Security Solutions Inc. The GPS system appeared in Colorado Springs. Since the 1950s, with the decision to build a Space Force facility and defense bunker in neighboring El Paso County in the Cheyenne Range.
The region is home to 34 federal research laboratories and consortia: the largest concentration outside of Washington, D.C., is the burgeoning Catalyst Campus, a converted 1917 railroad depot that plans to grow to eight 200,000-square-foot buildings. A million square feet in two decades. A 1,600-square-foot complex adjacent to the airport, Peak Innovation Park is supported by three Amazon.com Inc. buildings, including the largest in the state and neighboring states: a five-story, 4 million-square-foot village. . Thousands of robots move goods around the world using QR codes.
"The city is growing both east and north," Patrick Bowman, real estate expert at Peak Innovation Park, told MarketWatch. "It's like Sim City."
According to CB Insights, startups in the Denver-Boulder area raised more venture capital last year (about $5.5 billion) than startups in Austin.
space is space
But it's space technology (sorry) that has put this region of more than 750,000 people on a rocket trajectory in recent years. After Neil Armstrong walked on the moon on July 20, 1969, the space program continued until the Space Shuttle program in the early 1980s, but the Challenger disaster in early 1986 set everything back… An ambitious South African business called Boeing Co man . And he has not yet decided to go to Lockheed Martin Corporation.
Musk's decision to launch SpaceX and use the fortunes of PayPal and Tesla to disrupt the status quo of established tycoons echoes PayPal Holdings Inc's earlier groundbreaking plan. in the banking sector and slightly rerated Tesla Inc. General Motors Co. Ford Motor Co. and elsewhere.
"Billionaire visionaries like Musk and Bezos have had a major impact on the basic economics of space use by building 'high-capacity, low-latency satellites,'" says Backes, a communications software engineer at the Strategic Defense Initiative. President Reagan, a plan similar to Star Wars Defense
Most of the new companies growing in the region have direct connections and lucrative contracts with the Ministry of Defense. BlueStack, a specialist in secure data management, has signed a $330 million deal with a potential $1 trillion over five years, BlueStack CEO Seth Harvey told MarketWatch.
BlueStack has completed the Catalyst Campus, an impressive campus with a labyrinthine structure that emphasizes "unplanned collisions" between entrepreneurs, Barrett said.
"It's a small growth and a reasonable expansion," said Jim Lovewell, chief development officer for the Economic Development Corporation and the Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce, reaffirming the ambition of a mid-sized city that can grow well. Rocket trajectory through the space economy.