The state’s congressional delegation soon supplied the FAA with a unanimous support letter.īut it took around seven years longer than the governor estimated. If all went well, that transformation could happen by the end of 2012, Hickenlooper said. John Hickenlooper announced that the state had begun the application process with the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, which propels would-be spaceports into the future. And the small steps toward that goal go back years: Back in 2011, then-Gov. But the idea that they should ascend all the way to space? “It’s challenging in a community like this because people don’t think about launches from Colorado,” Ruppel says. Planes should take off from plains and ascend over mountain ranges. It speeds down the runway and noses up against the horizon-spanning background of the Rocky Mountains. And hard to picture.Ī plane takes off behind Ruppel’s head.
He imagines the spaceport, too, will someday do military work, maybe launching small satellites.īut that future - as well as the more civil sci-fi one - is years out. “Eighty percent of the industry in Colorado is associated with the Department of Defense,” estimates Ruppel, sitting in his office above the runway. But here and elsewhere, space is a giant part of the Defense-Department-Industrial complex. People don’t talk much about how important space is to the military, or how important the military is to the space industry. These stay deeper in the shadows, sometimes because they’re classified, but also partly because they’re less rah-rah press-releasable.
But away from the bright lights - and making up the majority of the $15.4 billion impact the space industry has on the state - lurk projects a little harder to talk about: defense initiatives, intelligence satellites, national security space missions. When these companies make big news, it’s often because of their feel-good projects: making test capsules for astronauts, sending cute robots to Mars, launching weather satellites, making space shuttles that looks like orcas, designing systems for NASA’s pretty-picture telescopes. Many work for the big guns, like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Sierra Nevada, and Northrop Grumman, but most of the state’s 500-ish aerospace employers are small companies. In the private sector, 26,620 Coloradans worked directly in the aerospace sector, as did 28,810 military personnel. Beaty/Denverite)Ĭolorado is a semi-sensible place to put a spaceport: It has the second-largest aerospace economy in the U.S., and the largest per capita. Although no one has yet changed the sign, or gone to space, it is from here that the state hopes to launch rocket-planes, sending people and objects beyond Earth’s atmosphere.ĭenver International Airport seen from the Front Range Airport in Watkins, Colorado, March 1, 2019. And the airport’s Wild-West sense has only increased since last August, when it became the Colorado Air and Space Port.
That frontier ambiance is especially acute here, on what was once an actual frontier. “There’s kind of almost a frontier feel to general aviation,” says facility director Dave Ruppel. It’s a small facility, a 14-mile drive southeast of Denver International Airport, and no fences stop you from walking right onto the runway. Then, finally, you’ll come to a sign that still says “Front Range Airport.” If you’re driving east on Highway 36 through Watkins, Colorado, go past the gas station that stocks a range of winter coats, take a couple doglegs and continue by the weathered white barn with a big BEEF advertisement on its side, and keep going beyond the parcels of prairie for sale.
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