Home Base for Aerospace

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. 

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.” 

That demonstrated value and the company grew organically and quickly. Once Advanced Space outgrew a small workspace in Boulder, it relocated in 2020 to its current Westminster location off I-25 & 120^th Avenue. Advanced Space now employs over one hundred workers. 

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. “CAPSTONE was the first commercially owned satellite to operate at the moon, and it was also the first satellite to ever fly a very specific orbit called a near-rectilinear halo orbit.” Cheetham described CAPSTONE as a pathfinder mission, one that proved the orbit could be achieved. CAPSTONE’s success will help NASA as it develops and delivers a much larger space station capable of housing astronauts to orbit the moon.

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. 

He made careful note about the importance of locating his business in Westminster. “[Aerospace] is an industry that is important for our region, but it’s also important for our nation. Colorado in many ways, gave the world GPS. We use it all the time. So we’re trying to basically give the moon a sort of equivalent GPS capability, which I think is something that’s really in our community, something that we’ve done here in Colorado.”

Cheetham says the location of Westminster was the sweet spot for Advanced Space, being centrally located for many Front Range commuters, close to many aerospace partners and clients, a short ride to Denver International Airport, and has a thriving community and workforce. 

Asked what else Westminster residents should know about his work, Cheetham simply said: 

The City of Westminster is here to support all of our businesses, with programs and grants available to help you succeed. The Economic Development team also works closely with local and regional partners to provide access to even more resources. To learn how we can serve you, visit www.westminstereconomicdevelopment.org.