By Wayne Heilman
T.I. Weintraub moved his company, Freedom Space, to the Catalyst Campus for Technology and Innovation to help make the small software company look like a bigger, more established business instead of a startup.
Freedom Space, which is owned by Michigan-based Atlas Space Operations, develops software to connect ground stations (antennas) from across the globe into a single network to download data that satellites collect. The company has grown from having Weintraub as its only employee to a team of 10, and he anticipates even more growth next year as the company’s prime contractor customers win orders under a $1 billion Space Force contract.
“When you walk into [Freedom Space’s office in] Catalyst Campus, we don’t look like a startup because of the staff, facilities and technology here,” Weintraub says. “If you are a startup (and open an office on the campus), you don’t have to buy furniture, all of the technology infrastructure is available on day one and there is someone at the front desk to welcome customers — smaller companies have to look bigger than they are” to win government contracts.
Catalyst Campus started nearly 10 years ago in a vacant former railway station on the east end of downtown Colorado Springs. As a hub for space and technology startups, it has since expanded to nine buildings totaling more than 200,000 square feet. The 12-acre property now houses nine specialized laboratories, dozens of small companies and satellite offices for several military commands that want to use the technology that other campus tenants have developed.
The newest campus tenant will be WMD Squared Engineering, a Louisiana company that plans to hire 42 employees over eight years to provide engineering, design and drafting services to the medical, energy and aerospace industries.
Three years ago, Catalyst Campus opened additional locations near the University of Maryland-College Park campus — which is focused on bringing new capabilities to the Navy — and another in Ogden, Utah — near Hill Air Force Base and three universities.
The campus’ centerpiece is a defense and space accelerator program that helps startup companies grow. The 121 companies that completed the accelerator program at the Colorado Springs and Ogden campuses have won 413 government contracts totaling $332.7 million and creating 1,581 jobs, according to program data. Accelerator participants also landed $311.4 million in private investments.
Campus tenants can seek investments from the Colorado ONE Fund, which partners with the Colorado Venture Capital Authority to invest $34 million in startup aerospace, defense, homeland security and related industries. The fund is composed primarily of current and former employees of Catalyst owner The O’Neil Group and has invested about $4 million in three companies, including two campus tenants.
In late 2024, the campus will open a dining area for tenants and others in historic railroad dining cars and an outdoor plaza surrounded by metal shipping containers that will house restaurants and food vendors.
The nonprofit that operates the campus has received nearly $3 million in federal and state grants since early last year to build two major laboratories and help startups grow into larger companies that can provide groundbreaking technology to Space Force, U.S. Space Command and other military and intelligence agencies. The grants are nearly four times the size of what Catalyst Campus received in previous years.
The new labs include Joint Commercial Operations Laboratory, which is operated by Space Force’s Space Systems Command and staffed by a consortium of the U.S. and 21 allies. The lab monitors non-classified and commercial satellite data for events in space, as well as the Space Domain Awareness Tools, Applications and Processing (SDA-TAP) Lab that operates startup accelerator programs to help them develop technology that military commands can use quickly.
The Joint Commercial Operations Lab opened at Catalyst Campus in 2019, and the SDA-TAP Lab opened in 2023 in northwest Colorado Springs. SDA-TAP is expected to open at Catalyst Campus in November, says Dawn Conley, senior executive director of the campus. To build out the SDA-TAP lab, the campus is using funds from $1.75 million in grants from the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade.
“We will bring companies here and advance their engagement with the government [military commands] so [the companies] can get up and running and work with government-funded research agencies such as Mitre Corp., Aerospace Corp. and MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] Lincoln Labs to drive technological advancements and integrate new solutions into national security strategies,” Conley says.
Also last year, the campus won a nearly $1 million National Science Foundation grant to eventually launch a new program designed to foster technology innovation and technology transfer in the space industry. The grant qualifies the campus to compete for a follow-up grant of up to $160 million — financed by the CHIPS and Science Act — that Conley says would have a “transformative” impact on expanding the space industry in the Colorado Springs area.
The campus will use other federal and state grants to:
- Open a Gaming Lab designed to expose Colorado community college students, especially ones from rural areas, to careers available in the U.S. Department of Defense.
- Open a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Accelerator Lab to bring emerging technology companies to the campus to work with military commands and improve their chances of winning SBIR and STTR grants and follow-up contracts.
- Develop a Data Mine of the Rockies in partnership with the Colorado Springs-based Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs and Purdue University to expand the number of U.S. data scientists.
- Start a program in Oklahoma with the U.S. Small Business Administration to expand the agency’s Growth Accelerator Fund Competition to that state.
