Author: Wayne Heilman
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Best and Brightest 2025: Serial entrepreneur has aerospace engineering goals
Emmett Smith is just finishing high school but he’s already a serial entrepreneur. He has started 10 businesses in the past decade and is headed to Stanford University in the fall to pursue his dream of developing more environmentally friendly air travel. He got his entrepreneurial start at age 7 by starting a lawn care business…
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Best and Brightest 2025: Excelling despite turmoil and adversity
The road to graduating high school has not been easy for Eshan Jain, but he hasn’t let family turmoil, the lack of a golf team at his school or anything else stand in the way of his goal of finding solutions to global issues while in college. Jain, who will graduate next month as a…
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Best and Brightest 2025: Facing failures with resolve and determination
Garrett Bristol didn’t give up after finishing last in his first trip to the state cross-country meet, and he won’t stop trying to win acceptance at the U.S. Air Force Academy after he was turned down on the first attempt. After attending a preseason team practice at the urging of a friend, Bristol joined the…
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Best and Brightest: Bringing unique attributes to an engineering dream
Brynn Makros nearly ended her dream of becoming an engineer before it started as a result of bullying by classmates but instead used her experience to start an organization to support women in a field where they are vastly outnumbered. Makros and Maddie Orlowsky started Women In STEM Engineering (WISE) two years ago at Discovery…
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After building boom, Colorado Springs hotel occupancy and room rates fall
After one of the biggest hotel building booms in Colorado Springs in three decades, occupancy rates and room rates are falling as the supply outstrips demand — and experts are warning of challenges ahead, including cuts to federal employee travel. That hot streak in construction is now cooling. After developers added 2,100 rooms in the past three…
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Women recall historic space mission: ‘There is nothing ordinary about going into space’
Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon thought they were attending routine meetings in 2021 at SpaceX when they were invited to become part of the crew for what would become the record-setting Polaris Dawn space mission. Gillis said both women had separate meetings with billionaire astronaut Jared Isaacman, who has been nominated to become NASA administrator…
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Satellite manufacturing coming to Colorado Springs
Thousands of software engineers, systems engineers and software developers work for some of the nation’s largest defense contractors in Colorado Springs to develop software used in satellite control. But no aerospace or defense contractor manufactures satellites locally. That’s about to change, however. Colorado Springs-based Spectrum Advanced Manufacturing formed a partnership late last year with D-Orbit…
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Colorado Springs’ commercial real estate market healthy but faces challenges
Colorado Springs’ commercial real estate market faces significant challenges, from the closing of big-box stores to office workers still toiling at home after the pandemic to the uncertainties caused by an escalating trade war. But overall, the local market is relatively healthy and in a better position than in Denver and many of the nation’s…
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Apartment construction slows after years of frenzied building in Colorado Springs
The red-hot pace of Colorado Springs-area apartment construction turned ice cold last year. From 2019 to 2023, multifamily developers pulled permits to build just over 14,000 apartments in the Springs and surrounding El Paso County — one of the hottest stretches of local apartment construction in recent memory that averaged a little more than 2,800…
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Colorado Springs nonprofit works to improve standard of living in Asian and African countries
A little-known Colorado Springs nonprofit that strives to build people instead of building roads and other infrastructure is having a big impact in improving the standard of living in developing nations in Asia and Africa. Resource Exchange International — REI — was launched in 1990 by three executives of another Colorado Springs nonprofit to train…