Colorado continues to carry the torch as a dynamo for the nation’s aerospace industry — at a transcendent time for space exploration and space-based defense.

As The Gazette reported last week, Denver-based Voyager Technologies generated a record $52.7 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2026, up a staggering 51% from the first quarter. The surge in demand in the company’s aerospace and defense sector is accelerating so rapidly, bookings, or sales orders, were up more than 200% from the same time last year — to $113 million.

In Golden, Lunar Outpost, the Colorado aerospace startup known for its lunar rovers, was tabbed by NASA in its quest to build a moon base to develop software to run robotic instruments in space. The software, dubbed “Starweave,” will operate an autonomous fleet of thousands of robotic systems in extreme locations where GPS coordination is tricky — places like the moon and Mars. The software is designed to plug a gaping hole in progressing exploration on the moon and Mars, as being able to operate when mission controls from Earth are delayed is a major factor in potentially creating a permanent human presence on, say, the moon.

Sure, the preceding paragraph sounds like a part of the script to a 20th-century sci-fi movie, where humanity is trying to figure out how to self-subsist elsewhere in the galaxy. But the reality is we are closer to living out that idea in reality than we may think. And, as Colorado has a huge role in this, it’s imperative our state’s leaders at the U.S. Capitol, under the Gold Dome in Denver and in the economic-development sector continue developing relations with the aerospace industry nationally to play an even bigger part into the future.

And that future is teeming with potential. Just look at Voyager’s versatile portfolio of industrial possibilities: propulsion, advanced electronics, autonomous mission systems, artificial intelligence technologies and commercial space.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s mission to develop the “Golden Dome” missile defense system is lighting a fire worth $25 billion under many of these different sectors. It’s an opportunity for the Centennial State, and our legislators, to seize. 

It increasingly appears Colorado Springs’ loss of Space Command to Huntsville, Ala., wasn’t the end of the book but rather the start of a new chapter for Colorado’s aerospace and defense industries. Here in the Rockies, we are living in the middle of a gold rush-like potential windfall for startups in these sectors. 

Colorado truly does possess the keys to the Golden Dome. And that’s because the U.S. defense effort needs Colorado. The nation is better at protecting our people, exploring space and fighting wars with what the Centennial State brings to the research labs, the war-room tables and wherever in the galaxy we end up next.