Colorado’s aerospace industry is a major economic engine in the state, fueled by top research universities and several federal laboratories that have a presence here.
Not only do the Colorado School of Mines, Colorado State University and the University of Colorado Boulder work closely with NASA and some of the top defense contractors in the area, but technology developed in the state also has figured into several of the space industry’s most-recent missions, including NASA’s Artemis program, which will send Americans back to the moon.
According to the Colorado Office of Economic Development & International Trade, the aerospace industry contributed $8.3 billion to the Colorado economy in 2022, with 1,100 aerospace companies and more than 29,000 employees working in the industry, and those numbers continue to grow.
Many of the small aerospace companies that have popped up in Colorado over the past few years got their start in a university research program or federal lab, and even if the aerospace industry didn’t come to Colorado specifically because of the universities and their research, many of the largest aerospace companies in the world that call the state home, including BAE Systems Inc. Space & Mission Systems (formerly Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.), Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin have benefited from them.
Aerospace research coming out of the state’s universities and labs encompasses many disciplines, from science and engineering to medicine and computer science.
Colorado School of Mines
Colorado School of Mines is in a special category when it comes to aerospace because it is a STEM-focused university and very engaged in the industry. The school has partnerships with the Department of Defense and the U.S. Air Force. Because the Air Force Academy does not offer graduate programs, many of its students will do their graduate work at Mines.
“We are ranked the No. 1 public university in Colorado largely because of the balance between research and academics that goes on at Mines,” said Walter Copan, vice president for research and technology transfer at CSM. “Because we are a medium-size university, it forces all faculty to be highly interdisciplinary. We do not have larger programs or large silos. We are really highly interactive, and we did $110 million in research in the most recent fiscal year; 20% of that is supported by the private sector.”
Copan added that there are 260 NASA-funded projects at Mines, ranging in size and scope up to $10 million. Mines researchers also are working on several industry-sponsored aerospace research projects with partners including Lockheed Martin, CisLunar Industries and United Launch Alliance.
Mines is home to the first space resources program in the world, exploring how humanity can survive and thrive beyond earth. The program looks at the moon, asteroid belt, Mars, and other parts of the solar system and beyond for energy, materials and resources that would be necessary for further exploration of the universe, Copan said.
“Think about earth to moon and moon colonization projects, programs on construction in space so you can have the materials you need and robotic systems to construct in space rather than multiple launches. To have the ability to build things right onsite or right in orbit,” he said.
Mines’ Nuclear Science and Engineering program conducts research on nuclear propulsion and power systems.
“A lot of long-term space missions rely on nuclear and integrated solar to be a key part of their energy system. Mines has close partnerships with federal labs, including the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the Department of Energy. For space systems and the aerospace sector, a lot is about managing energy, managing power,” he said.
Mines has a nuclear reactor that it uses for teaching purposes. The university also has the only Mineral and Energy Economics program in the U.S. that looks at the economics of space operations, energy, and industrial economics, providing information to the public sector and industry.
The university’s mechanical engineering program conducts work in the aerospace sector on propulsion systems, energy storage and batteries. Mines is working with Boom Supersonic, a trade name for Boom Technology Inc., to explore how to design advanced systems for supersonic transport.
Additive manufacturing and 3D printing are also an important part of Mines’ manufacturing research programs, “not only the use of additive manufacturing here at earth gravity but additive manufacturing in space applications, zero gravity, lunar gravity applications,” Copan said. The materials science program is designing materials for extreme environments that deal with cosmic rays and other sources of background radiation.
Colorado State University
Although Colorado State University doesn’t have a designated aerospace program, it has one of the top atmospheric-science departments in the country and is a pioneer in developing satellite technology for weather applications, said Dr. Allen Robinson, dean of the Walter Scott Jr. College of Engineering and a professor of mechanical engineering and atmospheric science at CSU.
In May 2024, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration renewed its long-term partnership with CSU by awarding it a $308 million grant over five years to support research and forecasting of the earth’s weather and climate systems. The money supports the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, or CIRA, a collaboration between NOAA and CSU. NOAA’s GOES satellites provide real-time imagery of the Earth’s weather, which is used by weather forecasters and meteorologists to warn the public about severe weather outbreaks, including hurricanes. CIRA also has partnerships with NASA, the National Park Service, the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation.
In 2021, CSU Distinguished Professor Sue van den Heever was named to lead a NASA Earth Venture Mission. The $177 million INCUS or Investigation of Convective Updrafts mission, which will launch in 2027, will study the behavior of tropical storms to improve weather and climate models.
The university also developed TEMPEST-D, a small satellite called a 6U CubeSat, which was deployed from the International Space Station into low-Earth orbit in July 2018, to provide precise images of global weather. TEMPEST-D is about the size of a small suitcase and is equipped with a miniature microwave radiometer that can see through clouds to reveal the interior of storms where ice crystals and raindrops form.
It also has made a name for itself in more traditional aerospace work, such as ion-propulsion technology for deep space. The university has a hypersonic wind tunnel that has garnered much interest in the defense industry, which felt they were falling behind in hypersonic technology compared to the country’s adversaries, Robinson said.
CSU has also partnered with the University of Colorado School of Engineering in the quantum-computing arena.
“We try to figure out what our strategic advantages are, what we can contribute the most to and not step on each other’s toes as well,” he said.
Robinson said that CSU’s drone center is doing interesting research with drones and wildfire plumes that relates to remote sensing.
“We train an enormous amount of pilots to be drone pilots. Ours is the biggest trainer outside of the military,” he said.
Much of this research, while not specifically targeted at the aerospace industry, is complementary to aerospace research as a whole, such as remote sensing, satellites, and radar technology.
University of Colorado Boulder
CU-Boulder considers itself an aerospace campus, with more than 20 different departments, institutes, programs, centers, and other academic pieces on the academic and research side that deal with aerospace, said Chris Muldrow, director of The Ann & H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences department within the College of Engineering & Applied Science.
The Smead department has 1,800 students in engineering sciences this year.
“Part of our mission as a department is to train the next-generation workforce,” Muldrow said. “We are training them to become experts in the aerospace field, which is also tied into that research piece as well.”
Of the 1,200 undergraduates in Smead, 40% already participate in research. They can do that for credit or pay.
The department’s annual research expenditure fluctuates from $30 million to $50 million. The department conducted $130 million in research in the last four years, Muldrow noted.
One core research focus at Smead is bioastronautics, which conducts research on how to keep humans alive in space and how they can work and live in space environments. One of the program’s graduate students will be part of Polaris Dawn, a commercial Dragon mission that will attempt to fly the Falcon 9 craft to the highest Earth orbit ever flown, orbiting through portions of the Van Allen radiation belt. Its crew will conduct research on the effects of spaceflight and space radiation on human health. While there, the crew will attempt the first-ever commercial extravehicular activity with SpaceX-designed spacesuits.
Another unique program at CU is a collaboration between the University of Colorado Schools of Medicine and Aerospace Engineering to train future innovators, clinicians and researchers in space medicine. The dual degree program allows medical students on the Anschutz campus to earn their M.D. and a Master of Science in aerospace medicine by taking a series of combined medicine and engineering classes, research projects and continuing medical education that aim to meet the future needs of human health and performance in spaceflight.
The College of Engineering & Applied Science includes mechanical and electrical engineering and computer science. Research in those departments includes the radio frequency spectrum and how to communicate with satellites.
The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, or LASP, predates the formal creation of NASA and is CU Boulder’s highest-budget research institute. For more than 75 years, the institute has been at the forefront of solar, planetary, and space physics research, climate and space-weather monitoring, and the search for habitable worlds. Since 2013, it has received more than $1 billion in research revenue.
LASP is the world’s only academic research institute to send instruments to all eight planets, Pluto and beyond. It employs more than 250 university undergraduate and graduate students in all of its departments.
CIRES, the Cooperative Institute in Research and Environmental Sciences, is a partnership between CU-Boulder and NOAA that employs 1,000 people working together to improve environmental remote sensing for science, trying to determine where the water is and where it is going by looking at floods, droughts, and environmental sciences.
JILA is another research institution on campus that is a collaboration between CU-Boulder’s physics department and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The institute works on atomic clocks.
CU-Boulder participates in the CUbit Quantum Initiative that works with quantum sensing and measurement. For aerospace purposes, it looks at future quantum applications for positioning, navigation, and timing or PNT that will enable jam proof and spoof proof GPS. The university has researchers working in that PNT mission on Lockheed Martin’s GPS III/IIIF global positioning system satellites that are being built for the U.S. Space Force.
