Ball Aerospace Archives - Colorado-based Business and Economic Research

At their annual meeting on October 15, the Colorado Photonics Industry Association (CPIA) named Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation as the 2013 Colorado Photonics Company of the Year. The company was selected from more than 200 companies in the aerospace, renewable energy, defense, life sciences, telecommunications, and electronics industries involved in photonics, or light-based, technologies. Ball is the only company to repeat as winner of this prestigious award, having previously won in 2002.

Ball is one of many companies that make outstanding contributions to the Colorado photonics cluster. These companies bring international attention to Colorado as a place to conduct business.

Reasons for recognizing Ball span several years and include the following:

The Deep Impact project: Ball designed and manufactured the optical spectrometer that observed the collision between the comet Temple I and the man-made interceptor.
Kepler: Ball designed the telescope that has detected several hundred earth-like planets from other solar systems.
Ball designed every currently operational instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope.
Ball completed delivery of the next generation Operational Land Imager (9 band earth observing spectrometer).
Ball designed the optical System for the DoD Space Based Surveillance System that went operational in 2012.
Ball designed the Ozone Mapping Profiler Instrument that went operational in 2011 on the Suomi Weather Satellite.
Ball designed and built the camera system on the latest Mars Rover.
Ball is near completion of the 10-segment Primary Mirror Assembly for the James Webb Space Telescope, a telescope that will allow researchers to literally see back to the beginning of time (although not until the year 2018).

Ball Aerospace was started in Boulder County in 1956, about a year before the start of the great space race.

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.

Tag: Ball Aerospace

CPIA Announces Photonics Company of the Year – Ball Aerospace

Colorado Photonics Cluster Outperforms Job Growth for State