Sky’s No Limit for Jeffco’s Aerospace Firms
Published Dec 22, 2009
Orion, Juno, WISE, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph – monikers befitting grand missions.
Their destination is space; their origins Jefferson County.
Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. and Ball Aerospace Corp. help anchor a strong statewide aerospace economy that is second only to California’s.
Each has been a community fixture for decades and been an integral part of the U.S. space program.
Lockheed Martin is the county’s largest private-sector employer and its Waterton Canyon complex will play a key role in the production and testing of up to a dozen next-generation military navigational satellites for the Air Force, a $3.6 billion project. In 2009, the company also won a $1 billion contract for the next-generation Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite R-Series, known as GOES-R, for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
“It will give us very much more capable weather prediction,” says Gary Napier, spokesman for Lockheed Martin.
But enough about the Earth. Lockheed Martin is designing and building Orion, the crew exploration vehicle that will take the place of the Space Shuttle, perhaps as early as 2014, a project that is worth $8.2 billion.
Lockheed Martin is also building MAVEN, a Mars mission set for 2013; GRAIL, twin spacecraft that will orbit the moon, and Juno, a Jupiter mission – both scheduled for 2011.
“These are robotic missions that will explore the universe where man probably will never go,” Napier says.
At Ball Aerospace, projects target even farther reaches of space. Ball is a prime contractor for NASA’s Kepler mission, a $500 million satellite launched in March 2009.
“Its mission is to discover planets orbiting around other stars, and if they are there, detect Earth-size planets,” says Dennis Ebbets, business development manager for astrophysics.
A wide-field telescope looks along the spiral arm of the Milky Way, taking measurements every 15 minutes from the same vantage point of more than 100,000 stars.
WISE, for wide-field infrared survey explorer, was set to launch in late 2009. It will scan the entire sky, capturing images for building a new catalogue of what’s out there to help target future big telescopes, Ebbets says.
Ball Aerospace also builds several instruments for the Hubble Space Telescope.
Astronauts installed its Wide Field Camera 3 in May 2009. The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph went into place two days later.
The next big thing is the James Webb, a supertelescope set to launch in 2014, that will take hours to record what the Hubble needs weeks to do. The WISE data will give the Webb targets, and Ball is building the optics and lightweight mirror array at the heart of it, Ebbets says.
“That is our biggest astrophysics program and our highest visibility one,” he says.
Story by Pamela Coyle
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