In two weeks, NASA could send its first crewed mission to the moon in 53 years.

Rolling back out to the pad at Cape Kennedy, the 322-foot Artemis II rocket is a bit shorter than the Saturn V ship that carried three astronauts around the moon in 1968. The new mission, which will loop the moon without slowing into orbit, is a bit less ambitious than Apollo 8’s mission back then.

But a great deal rides on it here in Colorado, which has the second largest privately employed aerospace workforce in the country and the first-highest per capita.

Some 55,000 Colorado jobs with major contractors will ride along when the rocket lifts off — not to count some 240,000 more jobs in support roles.

That outsize presence could grow larger still, as Artemis expands toward an actual moon landing in as few as two years — a prime message to some 500 enthusiasts who gathered Monday for Colorado Aerospace Day at the Colorado State Capitol and the Denver Art Museum.

Series of problems

Colorado’s United Launch Alliance and Lockheed Martin Space Systems aren’t the prime contractors on the SLS rocket’s giant core (built by Boeing). However, they and Virginia-based Northrup Grumman are responsible for the business end of the assemblage — the crewed Orion spacecraft, and the upper stage booster that will push Artemis out of low-earth orbit on its way to the moon.

Those roles could actually expand, as NASA navigates a series of problems that have plagued the program coming into April’s planned launch.

The rocket, which reportedly cost $23 billion to develop and runs around $2 billion to $4 billion per launch, is six years behind schedule. The towering SLS had to be rolled back to its vehicle assembly building last month to search out helium leaks that had plagued its first launch date.

Meanwhile, as a new, possible launch date was set for April 1, NASA concurrently announced that the rocket to follow next, Artemis III, will not go the moon. Rather, it will fly a low-earth-orbit test of a lunar landing, linking up with two crewed landers being designed by Texas-based SpaceX and by Washington-based Blue Origin.

That’s more similar to how NASA originally managed the Apollo missions in the late 1960s, when three crewed missions were flown to test the complex systems before attempting to make a landing. An actual landing, NASA has announced, wouldn’t be attempted for two more years.

But that could mean more, not less, business for Colorado, according to Paul Benfield, Lockheed Martin’s Orion Artemis II spacecraft manager in Morrison, who spoke to Monday’s audience.

“We know the Artemis II mission and all that’s gone into that,” Benfield told the crowd Monday.

Lockheed Martin, he noted, has responsibility for the Orion vehicle’s service module, with some of the propulsion system for going to the moon and back, and for providing consumables and solar arrays.

A game changer

“With the recent announcement that NASA’s looking to accelerate the Artemis program, we’ve got a lot of energy going into what that means for Colorado,” Benfield added. “It’s really a game changer for how that came out in the last couple of weeks.”

Northrop Grumman also has a big footprint here, with 2,600 direct employees, according to the company’s corporate director of civil space programs, Martin Frederick. He estimates that another 8,500 to 9,000 work through Colorado subcontractors.

Sarah Bailey Glasgow, who represented ULA at the event, said that 1,200 direct jobs with the Centennial-based contractor are Artemis linked. ULA directs Artemis’s second stage program that will push Orion on toward the moon.

Assuming that Artemis’s growing complexity will mean more business for the Front Range, how is Colorado prepared to grab hold of the opportunities?

Those will require getting the most out of the state’s capacity to attract subcontractors and deliver a workforce.

The good news, according to a recent report by the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp., is in the resources that have driven Colorado’s huge growth as an aerospace hub — 32.5% over the past five years, 15 percentage points ahead of the nation.

Speakers at Aerospace Day noted that the aerospace-related university base here is unmatched for gaining that business — including University of Colorado Boulder, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Colorado School of Mines’ Space Resources Program (reported to be the world’s first multi-disciplinary space graduate program), UC Colorado Springs and more than a dozen other schools that provide related courses.

With that as a buffer, it remains to be seen if Colorado ultimately skirts the loss as the Trump administration moved the U.S. Space Command headquarters from Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Alabama.

“Colorado is home to one of the strongest aerospace and defense industries in the country, and I know that it will only continue to grow stronger,” Gov. Polis had said after the loss of the space command.

Meanwhile, the bad news is that research institutions are raising red flags about Colorado’s ability to sustain economic growth.

“We really think that Colorado is at an inflection point,” Rachel Beck, executive director of the Colorado Chamber Foundation, told The Denver Gazette. She chaired Monday’s speaker forum.

“I’ve worked in economic development and policy for 25 years, and it used to be that we could just kind of rest on our laurels,” Beck said. “We didn’t have to do a whole lot actively.”

Natural appeal

She and other speakers pointed to the natural attractions that make Colorado such a preferred destination for job moves.

“We used to have slightly below the national average cost-of-living and cost of housing. We had a competitive tax environment and regulatory environment. And so much of the business came to us kind of naturally,” Beck said.

“Colorado’s never really put a lot into incentives, particularly in aerospace,” Beck said, “into attracting companies and giving them incentives in land, in building incentives, job incentives, and cold hard cash.”

“And we still have our natural environment, but we’re not the only state who has great mountain biking,” Beck said.

Meanwhile, the attractions of the state are running up against cost-of-living issues, including affordable housing, and regulatory burdens that make the state less competitive in attracting subcontractors and employees, Beck said.

Those factors put Colorado outside a list of states heading into the future with the best business climates, according to Colorado Vision 2033, a multiyear strategic plan launched by the chamber to boost economic competitiveness. Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, South Dakota and Montana all offer better environments for business growth, the plan states.

A member-survey notes that 60% of businesses see the state’s economy heading the wrong way, and two-thirds say the environment is more burdensome than elsewhere they conduct business. The large majority view slowed in-migration to Colorado as being the result of high living and housing costs, furthered exacerbated by state regulations.

Beck told The Denver Gazette that the chamber’s plan addresses the areas that need to improve to take advantage of Artemis and other aerospace growth opportunities, including dealing with housing, cost of living, and issues around the business climate.

That, Beck said, involves pushing back against some costly environmental initiatives pushed by the Colorado legislature.

“And we’ve set some pretty ambitious renewable energy goals for ourselves in the state,” Beck added. “We want to make sure we can implement those.”

A six-day window

NASA has a six-day window to launch the craft beginning April 1, before the moon’s orbit will take it out of range for a mission. That would push a launch date back to early May.

On board will be Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission and Mission Specialists Christina Koch and Canadian Jeremy Hansen.

Lift-off will be followed by a 23-hour trip to a high earth orbit at 46,000 miles up to test out the Orion ship.

Then the crew will fire the engines for the long trip out to the moon.