CU-Boulder Space Building Expands with $13M Project

Ground was broken last month on a $13 million expansion project at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

The expansion of the primary research building will add much-needed elbow room for LASP's booming space construction, mission operations and research programs.

Located inside the university's Boulder Research Park at 1234 Innovation Dr., the 60,000-sq-ft-building will gain 45,000 sq ft for laboratories, offices and conference rooms.

LASP has grown steadily since the early 1990s when the laboratory employed 72 research and professional staffers and focused on one project at a time under contract to NASA, its primary funding source.

Today LASP, which receives about $35 million annually from federal funding sources, employs 180 full-time research and professional staffers and 100 students. It is conducting five major flight-build projects - all in various stages of completion.

Besides those five projects, LASP also has contracts for more than 140 data and research programs with NASA and the National Science Foundation.

The success of LASP in delivering high-quality, space-worthy equipment and in conducting world-class scientific research and mission operations for NASA has led to increased funding and more projects, according to LASP Executive Associate Director Caroline Himes.

"After the SORCE [Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment] project, which was the largest project we had ever taken on, NASA was impressed with our capability and we began getting more project awards and adding more people," LASP Director Dan Baker said.

SORCE is an $88 million NASA satellite designed and built at LASP to study how and why variations in the sun affect the earth's atmosphere and climate. A performance evaluation of SORCE by NASA last June rated it excellent in all categories - a rating received by fewer than 4% of NASA missions.

The building expansion will allow LASP to bring its physical space in line with increased project demand brought on by its shift from single-project operations to multiple, overlapping projects.

"It used to be that LASP would work on one program at a time and that we would be finishing construction of a satellite and instruments for a satellite before we would go on to working on another instrument," Himes said. "We currently have five projects all in the design phase and once those designs are completed, we will need lab space to build them all. We've already doubled up on lab and office space to the point that we're literally crammed to the gills."

In addition to the growth in the engineering division, the missions operations division requires additional program space since CU-Boulder is the only university to simultaneously operate three spacecraft, Himes said.

Also, the new building will allow the science division to accommodate a Center for Integrated Space Weather Modeling and give LASP the space it needs to bid for a Regional Planetary Imaging Facility.

The new building, which may be attached to the current structure by a two-floor enclosed walkway, will house labs on the first floor with office and conference space on the second and third. The first floor will be built with a 3,000-sq-ft, two-story "clean room." It will be changeable so that the space could support a second floor later if project requirements shift.

AR7 Hoover Desmond of Denver, architects for the existing Research Park building, is the architect for the expansion project. Final design will be completed early this summer with construction set to begin by early fall.
Completion is set for November 2005.

LASP Projects

The five NASA design-build projects under way at CU-Boulder's LASP: