The palatial office campus at the western end of Garden of the Gods Road is now a hub for space-focused defense contractors that are tackling tough problems, such as the future of space warfare and better tracking the tens of thousands of objects in space. 

Five years ago, the nearly 746,000-square-foot building housed just a handful of tenants, including Verizon, PGI and Vectrus, which is now V2X. 

The campus was also at the center of a controversial proposal to add hundreds of apartments to the property, an idea neighbors fought hard because they argued it would add traffic to the area and slow an evacuation from a potential wildfire such as the Waldo Canyon fire of 2012. The Colorado Springs City Council sided with the neighbors, and in 2022 a judge upheld the decision.

With that fight fading into memory, the campus, first built by Rolm Corp. in 1983 as an information age manufacturing plant, has launched into the space age. 

The office building, currently valued at almost $70 million, boasts about 15 tenants, counting Parsons, a large defense contractor that is renovating space to move into the building. 

Scott Gregory, a senior program manager with Odyssey Systems, says he has found tenants are united by a single mission: Supporting warfighters wherever they are. But this is not uncommon in the Colorado Springs’ defense industry, he said. Odyssey works in acquisitions, an area the military is working to reform. 

“One of the things that we like about this space is it gives the feeling to the team here that their company appreciates the work, the passion and the blood, sweat and tears they’re putting into the mission,” Gregory said. “It’s like driving into a postcard… It’s an inspirational place to work.”  

In addition to the views, tenants say they love the cafeteria, meeting spaces, large auditorium, bike rentals and gym. 

Perhaps one of the most important features of the building is the Innovation Hub that Virginia Tech Applied Research Corporation opened in recent years to bring together government, academia and industry professionals. It hosts 40 events a month in its unclassified space that features 20 conference rooms and 300 desks, according to its website. 

The innovation hub has more than 20 government partners, many focused on accelerating the development of Space Force technology. The lengthy list of features the Space Force Front Door, a group dedicated to encouraging commercial collaboration with the military branch, the 33rd Range Squadron, dedicated to helping the Space Force with cyber training and the Space Domain Awareness Tools, Applications and Processing Lab, focused on accelerating the delivery of space battle management software. 

LMI’s Mark Eddings, senior vice president of LMI’s space market, said the company was drawn by the Space Force presence at the campus.

“Space Systems Command, out of Los Angeles, was encouraging companies to get together and aggregate in that space,” he said, noting that played a role in his company deciding to join the ecosystem there. LMI announced its new office at 2424 Garden of the Gods in January. 

Companies in the building have bagged impressive contracts and projects in recent years, with Parsons developing the software and system integration that will allow the Department of Commerce to take over space traffic control from the Space Force and LMI working to model a war in space and the needed building blocks for Golden Dome, a new missile defense system. 

KBR is building a tool meant to improve mission training for Space Force guardians so they are as well-equipped as possible when operating satellites in normal and potentially hostile environments. 

Parsons consolidating 

Parsons plans to move employees scattered across five locations in Colorado Springs to the campus. The company currently operates offices on Tejon Street, in three small areas across Catalyst Campus and a building along Tech Center Drive near the ProRodeo Hall of Fame. Some of the locations were legacies left over after Parsons purchased Polaris Alpha in 2018 and Braxton Technology in 2020, said Ed Baron, the lead for the space engineering solutions directorate. 

“We’re scattered all over. And for us, getting people in close proximity is going to help increase the collaboration and ability to spark new innovation,” Baron said. 

The company started renovations in the building two months ago and employees may start moving in by the end of 2026. The company is currently renovating two full floors and it has the option to expand into a third floor, he said.  

As part of the renovation, the company is building a new operations center where employees will continue flying satellites as a government service. The new center will allow the company to expand a bit and support more activity, Baron said. 

The space domain awareness team for Parsons is working on the Traffic Coordination System for Space or TraCSS program by developing software that will improve the detection, tracking and management of space objects for NOAA’s Office of Space Commerce.

Space domain awareness is tricky. Imagine spinning 30,000 weights on the end of a rubber band at different rates and that chaos is similar to what’s going on in orbit, an expert previously told The Gazette. 

In addition to teams working on space domain awareness and spacecraft ground control systems, the company also has a team that supports the Missile Defense Agency at Schriever Space Force Base, he said. The company employs 355 people around Colorado Springs, a company spokeswoman said. 

While the company saw a bit of a slowdown during the government shutdown, as a whole the company is seeing a lot of growth potential this year, Baron said. 

“This summer was probably our busiest period of proposal writing since I’ve been with the company,” he said. 

LMI makes plans

LMI is focused on helping the military to understand how a war in space would be fought and what building blocks are needed for Golden Dome, said Eddings, with LMI. President Donald Trump has called for Golden Dome, the new missile defense system, which is expected to bring a significant amount of work to Colorado Springs. 

Eddings said some of the questions LMI is trying to answer include: 

If a war broke out in space, could the country still fight and win a ground conflict? 

Could all of the commercial aspects of space, such as GPS, continue during a space war? 

The company developed its Rapid Analysis Prototyping Toolkit for Resiliency or RAPTR, a modeling and simulation platform, to help answer those big questions, Eddings said. It is work that’s extended across multiple contracts. For example, in 2023, the company won a $98 million, five-year contract to support the Space Security and Defense Program and the Space Warfighting Analysis Center. 

LMI’s work to model a war in space started about eight years ago with the overarching question: “What does a war in space look like?” Eddings said. 

The work to model the complex conflicts in space gave the company the right tools to model what it would take to build Golden Dome, and defend against a barrage of missiles or attacks from unmanned aerial vehicles, Eddings said. 

Threats today are much more complex. 

“Now people can fly a small unmanned aerial vehicle across our border, or from inside our border, or a submarine could be off the coast, and those timelines are much more compressed. The threats are harder,” he said. 

The country needs additional radars, satellites and sensors to build Golden Dome, Eddings said. 

“We need new building blocks. We need to connect these new building blocks,” he said. “We need to figure out how it’s all going to work together. And that’s what LMI does,” he said. 

The company also tackles the supply chain Golden Dome would need in an ongoing conflict, he said. 

LMI has about 80 to 100 employees who work in the Garden of the Gods office over the course of a week and Eddings expects that number will double in the next couple of years. 

Advanced training

Right now, KBR, a Houston-based company, is working on its $98.7 million Integration Accelerator, a tool that will address critical shortcomings in Space Force training identified by Gen. Chance Saltzman, the chief of space operations.

Advanced, threat-based training is “critically important,” Saltzman said in March. He continued, saying the Space Force is still acquiring modern simulators and training capabilities.

KBR’s product will be one of the Space Force’s tools, said Brian Young, a senior vice president in the company’s space defense business. KBR expects to build its digital accelerator in the city and it will create a digital engineering ecosystem and provide modeling and simulation facilities for guardians.

The accelerator “is a testing and training facility that advanced Space Force missions are going to need,” he said. It may, in the future, allow testing and training to happen on orbit, Young said, though for now it is modeling and simulation based. 

“With this technology, KBR is enabling the U.S. Space Force to mature its training and testing infrastructure more rapidly and effectively,” he added.

The process of securing space for KBR in 2424 Garden of the Gods began in 2018, Young said, with several attempts failing due to fierce competition.

One of KBR’s military customers “had gone all in building out” its space in the building, Young said. This, in many ways, proved to be a catalyst for filling vacancies.

The company’s presence at 2424 started small. Young recalled only six employees working in a “tiny little closet” near a service elevator the first time he went to the campus. By the time he returned a year later, there were 14 and the tiny little closet was overflowing, people were working in hallways and in the cafeteria.

“Everything was at Peterson and east,” he said.  “We started to realize there’s a big, big investment and kind of pulling the center of gravity west of town.”

KBR has just over 17,000 square feet of space at 2424, and it can be built out should contract requirements change over time. It employs about 650 people in Colorado Springs, 50 to 75 of them work out of the 2424 building, Young said. 

Intuitive bags piece of $928M contract

Intuitive Research and Technology Corp. moved to the campus in August 2023 and announced earlier this year that it is a subcontractor on a  $928 million Hyper-Innovative Operational Prototype Engineering 2.0 contract, or HOPE 2.0,  led by the Science Applications International Corporation. The sweeping contract is meant to provide the Air Force with “full-spectrum support for research, development, testing and engineering — enabling rapid integration of advanced capabilities across mission areas,” according to a news release.  

The contract was slowed a bit by the government shutdown, said Steve Dietzius, director of the company’s Mountain West Operations, but he expected his company would add systems engineering and cyber expertise to the work.  

“Intuitive is really excited about getting much more involved in this space community, that’s why we expanded out to Colorado Springs,” he said. The company has office space in 2424 Garden of the Gods and another office building along the same road. Intuitive employs about eight employees in town and hopes to have 15 by the summer.  

The prototype will be used by the Space Test Course hosted at Edwards Air Force Base in California, where guardians learn how to test space-flight equipment.  

Dietzius and others noted that the building is bustling, and with the addition of Parsons and others not much unclaimed space remains. But just like in other palaces, there is ample room set aside for guests to visit.  

“It’s a really, really neat ecosystem that has developed there over the last several years,” said Young, with KBR. “It’s amazing … It is bursting at the seams.”

The Gazette’s Alexander Edwards contributed to this story.