In 2015, Space exploration played an astronomical role in Colorado but not in its traditional, reliable way. Boulder’s Ball Aerospace created a fancy camera for the US space agency NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to help find out presence of water on Mars.

Southwest Research Institute translated the pictures that NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has beamed from Pluto. However, in 2015, Colorado's space-minded businesses witnessed a quite new frontier that is success without government contracts.

Centennial's United Launch Alliance missed its long-time monopoly of launching the US security satellites in June when the ULA competitor SpaceX, the Hawthorne, Calif. made its way into Air Force. SpaceX is a newcomer founded by Elon Musk.

The first part of the year was spent by Louisville's Sierra Nevada Space Systems in recovering from NASA's ignorance towards its Dream Chaser space taxi to ship astronauts to and from the International Space System (ISS). That one was also nabbed by SpaceX.

Besides, Jefferson County's biggest private employer Lockheed Martin Space Systems lost its bid on a NASA contract for transportation of cargo to the space station.

After facing disappointment about the loss of government contracts, space companies in Colorado have been searching beyond public funding for competing with the likes of SpaceX, which has been working in the direction of reusable and potentially money-saving rocket boosters.

Past fall, ULA was reorganized to become more nimble. It previously worked with Blue Origin, a startup led by Amazon.com's CEO Jeff Bezos for the development of new rocket engines. And it collaborated with Orbital ATK for the development of rocket boosters for a new reusable Vulcan rocket that will launch in 2019. New labs in Pueblo will carry out some of the Vulcan engineering.