Once known for its dairy farms and cattle ranches, Westminster is now home to some of the brightest minds in the aerospace industry. People right here in our community are tasked with highly specialized missions at the forefront of space exploration. This unique work is all performed by Advanced Space. Originally established in Boulder in 2011, Advanced Space was founded on the mission of enabling the sustainable exploration, development, and settlement of space.
Advanced Space in Westminster
Brad Cheetham, co-founder, CEO and president of Advanced Space, recalled the company’s beginnings. “We weren’t billionaires, so we couldn’t afford to start building rockets. Instead, we focused on building orbits and tools and providing value in other ways.”
Their three main areas of business are mission enabling services, technology solutions, and mission solutions. “We don’t actually build satellites in Westminster, but we design what they need to look like, what the missions need to look like, and then we operate them out of those facilities,” Cheetham explained.
The company’s reputation took off due to the success and multiple extensions of a mission called CAPSTONE, an acronym for Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment. Advanced Space designed and launched the microwave-sized spacecraft that has been orbiting the moon for three years. “It was really the first part of NASA’s Artemis program, which is going to land humans back on the moon,” Cheetham said.
However, Advanced Space missions don’t end at the moon. “We have a mission that’s set to launch to Mars for NASA that we’re helping with the services, launching later this year.” Advanced Space is also partnering on missions to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Cheetham looks forward to pioneering and implementing trustworthy artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies into future missions.