Rubber-band powered plastic rockets bounced off ceilings and walls in the normally quiet Plaza Convention Center in Longmont on Wednesday morning as hundreds of students learned first-hand the work of some of the country’s top aerospace companies.
It was all part of the Longmont Space Symposium, during which a cadre of aerospace gurus entertained some 450 St. Vrain Valley elementary, middle and high school students as part of an effort to cultivate early recruits.
Joe Troutman, senior manager for aerospace battery maker EnerSys, which has a 48-person operation in Longmont, led students through a dissertation on batteries.
The lithium ion batteries EnerSys makes for space, for instance, are a lot like those used in Teslas and Chevy Volts, as well as cell phones, lap tops and even those hover boards that kept blowing up last year.
Those space-ready batteries, though, are bit bigger and pricier than the average consumer unit, coming in at $12.3 million for the SLS rocket, Troutman told his entranced audience.
And making them, he told the students, is nothing like working on a staid component for an automobile.
“We don’t do car batteries at EnerSys,” he said. “We only do space. We do the cool stuff.”
Next door, the students encounter Alicia Carrillo, a 16-year veteran of the aerospace industry and a senior manager for Dulles, Va.-based Orbital ATK, which makes solid rocket boosters.
In addition to her work overseeing research and development at Orbital, Carrillo is a commentator for NASA TV. She said she loves to get in front of students to open their eyes to the opportunities in space.
“It’s cool to see,” she said, as she collected dozens of the rubber-band powered rockets that were whizzing through the air moments earlier.
The daylong event, sponsored by EnerSys, the Longmont Economic Development Partnership (EDP), Colorado Citizens for Space Exploration, and the Colorado Space Business Roundtable, was also designed to grow community awareness of the regional aerospace industry. According to the EDP, six aerospace companies operate in Longmont and employ more than 650 people.
And those companies are interested in building a local pipeline of new talent, students interested in acquiring the skills the industry needs, Troutman said.
“We need an educated workforce,” he said. “We need to educate them in Colorado and keep them in Colorado.”
He said the industry has to overcome the perception that aerospace workers are all engineers.
“You don’t have to be an engineer to be in aerospace,” he said. “We need accountants and liberal arts majors too.”
The glamour-of-space message apparently wasn’t lost on the students, as dozens walked out the door clutching royal blue bumper stickers that said, “Actually, I AM A ROCKET SCIENTIST.”
Jerd Smith: 303-473-1332, smithj@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/jerd_smith
