These giant white structures called radomes at Buckley Space Base in Colorado house huge satellite dishes.
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This story is part of CNBC’s quarterly Cities of Success series, which explores cities that have become business hubs with an entrepreneurial spirit that has attracted capital, companies and employees.
In the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, at an altitude a mile closer to space than sea level, lies an area that is home to a growing aerospace business complex.
It may not be obvious to someone driving in Denver and Boulder that there are hundreds of companies actively working on some of America’s most complex national security needs and building innovative products like the ones you might see in a science fiction movie.
But the local industry’s rise has been undeniable: Aerospace has grown 88 percent over the past two decades, more than any other emerging industry in the Denver and Boulder metro areas during that time, according to a CNBC analysis. Now, 191 aerospace businesses support 29,000 jobs in the region, the Colorado Space Coalition reports.
“When we were building Voyager and thinking about the best growth markets where we could access talent … Denver really rose to the top,” Dylan Taylor, president and CEO of Voyager Space, told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in an interview of at CNBC’s “Manifest Space” podcast. He founded the privately held multinational aerospace group in 2019 in Denver.
Voyager Space CEO Dylan Taylor traveled to space on a Blue Origin flight in 2021.
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“I think talent coupled with government alignment were really important issues, and then if you look at other elements of Denver, whether it’s access to capital, this is an emerging venture capital market, especially the Boulder corridor,” he added.
The area’s corporate roster ranges from the largest, oldest, leading contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman to the newest commercial space and defense technology start-ups such as Ursa Major and True Anomaly. United Launch Alliance, BAE Systems and RTX also have a presence in the region, as do private space soldiers other than Voyager, such as Sierra Space and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which has been aggressively expanding its local footprint in recent years.
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“I think aerospace has now become the linchpin of our entire economy,” said U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., who previously served as governor of Colorado and before that as mayor of Denver.
“It’s a collaborative aerospace community,” said Hickenlooper, who is cited by local business leaders as a key space advocate for the region and the state. “It’s not dog eat dog. It’s all dogs working together. It’s hunting like wolves.”
For Voyager, this was true. The company has made seven acquisitions so far — the first two of which were local startups. “We’re about 700 employees now and, you know, enough revenue, we’re looking to go public at some point,” Taylor said.
Its most high-profile project, Starlab, is an effort to replace the aging International Space Station. Voyager partnered with Airbus in a joint venture to build the commercial space station, with Mitsubishi recently announced as a strategic partner and equity owner. The space station is expected to launch into orbit on SpaceX’s powerful Starship rocket system, which is under development.
For Taylor, who has been to space after a trip on Blue Origin’s New Shepard, the Denver-Boulder space story extends beyond Voyager. He has spent years personally investing in the sector, as an early backer in more than 50 startups, including Orbit Fab.
Orbit Fab employees who build the company’s refueling ports for satellites.
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Backed by neighbors Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, Orbit Fab has moved into a roughly 60,000-square-foot manufacturing facility after relocating from California in 2021.
“We started the company in Silicon Valley. We moved to Colorado mainly because of the workforce. There’s a bigger aerospace workforce here,” said Daniel Faber, CEO and founder of Orbit Fab.
Since making that move, the company has grown from six to 60 employees and is focused on building space-based “gas stations” to refuel satellites. Historically, many satellites have been decommissioned not because their payloads or hardware no longer work, but because they have run out of power.
“If you ran out of fuel on a highway, AAA can come and deliver fuel to you. That’s actually the standard way we’re going to do it in space,” Faber said. The startup recently unveiled a refueling port — or gas cap — that is flight-certified and commercially available for $30,000 per unit.
Denver-area startup Orbit Fab is building refueling ports for satellites that will allow them to refuel in space.
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Like many companies in the region, Orbit Fab counts the US military, specifically the Space Force, among its biggest customers. One thing that makes the greater Denver-Boulder area so unique is its strong military presence, including three separate US Space Force bases, the US Space Operations Command and the US Air Force Academy in nearby Colorado Springs.
“I think location matters a lot,” said Col. Heidi Dexter, commander of Space Station Delta 2 at Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora, Colorado. “The partnership we have with all the local defense contractors and startups gives us the opportunity to lower the cost of space operations, as well as innovate very quickly to be vital to national defense.”
Colorado now has more private aerospace workers per capita than any other state, according to the Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation.
“What an executive wants to hear, a CEO of a fast-growing company, is that young people are going to be attracted,” Hickenlooper said. “Once you attract young people, eventually the entrepreneurs come, the businesses start.”