Spaceship Colorado: Colorado Employs more aerospace workers than all but one state, but its success in the industry rests largely on the flow of money from NASA and the military.

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Spaceship Colorado: Colorado Employs more aerospace workers than all but one state, but its success in the industry rests largely on the flow of money from NASA and the military.

It was a scene as otherworldly as it was distinctly Coloradan. Through a plate-glass window in a new $65 million annex on the Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. campus in Boulder, visitors observed workers assembling a spacecraft--or, rather, parts of a spacecraft, as it was in three separate pieces.

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Technicians padded about in "bunny suits," covered from head to toe in white clean-room outfits vaguely reminiscent of women's fashion under the Taliban. Dust that can fry electronics in a vacuum is such a concern among spacecraft mechanics, even their faces remained hidden behind surgical masks.

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The spacecraft was WorldView-2, a remote-sensing orbiter scheduled to fortify Longmont-based DigitalGlobe's fleet sometime in 2009. DigitalGlobe, a Ball Aerospace offshoot, says the spacecraft will resolve ground features as fine as 0.46 meters across while whipping around its polar orbit at about 17,000 mph.

Engineers Kirsten Sterrett ...

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