Can you remember the names and order of all the planets?
Ball Aerospace announced that task just got tougher. In a presentation at the May 18th meeting of the Colorado Photonics Industry Association (CPIA), the local aerospace company discussed their role in the search to find habitable planets.
Pictures taken from a satellite built by Ball, as part of the Kepler project, have confirmed 15 new planets and their composition. That is just the beginning. About 1,000 additional potential planets have been discovered and are being evaluated. Expectations are that 80% will be classified as planets.
A second segment of the CPIA program included a presentation on the performance of the Colorado economy and a review of the Governor’s Bottom-Up Economic Development plan. That discussion focused on the importance of Advanced Technology in Colorado and the growth of the photonics cluster.
The AT cluster is a subset of the Information; Manufacturing; and Professional, Scientific and Technical Services sectors. About 20% of the state’s private sector workers are employed by companies in these three sectors, yet they account for about 35% of the state’s private sector Real GDP.
By comparison, tourism accounts for about 5% of Real GDP and retail is 6%. Both sectors are important to the state in different ways.
The tourism sector is an important part of the economy for the state’s 64 counties. Major attractions include Rocky Mountain National Park, Mesa Verde, mountain sports, and shopping at Cherry Creek mall.
Retail is important to local governments. They derive between 50 to 75% of their total revenue from retail sales taxes. As well, the state and special districts rely on retail sales taxes as their primary source of revenue.
The economic review concluded with a look at an analysis of data that showed the growth of the photonics cluster between 2004 and 2010. Cluster growth for this six year period exceeded total state growth in all but one employment size category.
In short, the cluster benefitted from growth of renewable energy companies, but suffered from the decline of the state’s semiconductor industry. The analysis illustrates the importance of enabling technologies and how they play a key role in the success of companies in a wide array of industries.
©Copyright 2011 by CBER.