New partnership targets Utah's aerospace/defense industry for growth

SALT LAKE CITY — As Utah's leading aerospace company contracts under proposed NASA funding reallocations, a public/private coalition is doing what it can to give the state's $5.4 billion aerospace and defense industry a boost.

With recent layoffs at Alliant Techsystems in Promontory, and with Hill Air Force Base perennially among the sites for possible defense spending cutbacks, the Utah Cluster Acceleration Partnership believes the state needs to take a more pro-active approach, not just to ensure the industry doesn't wither, but to actually accelerate its growth.

Utah has played a vital role in building and maintaining the country's solid rocket motor industrial base, which is as old as the Minuteman I missile and as current as the latest space shuttle mission. While the defense side of Utah's industry is in no immediate threat of losing federal funding with the passage of the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act — $398 million for the National Cyber Security Initiative Data Center at Camp Williams, $7.5 million for Minuteman III and $2.8 million for an F-22 engine testing facility at Hill — the course for aerospace is suddenly off course.

And that's not good for national defense, says U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, who in recent months has become NASA's biggest critic, mainly for its recent decision to essentially mothball a state-of-the-art solid rocket motor engineered, built and tested by ATK in less than four years.

It was mostly for naught because NASA, which is always subject to the changing political winds, is abandoning the Constellation program, a Bush administration-era project to take astronauts back to the moon and eventually to Mars. The Ares I rocket motor built by ATK is part of Constellation. But President Barack Obama has proposed in his first budget that NASA shift the exploration of the solar system to a strictly unmanned effort. Further travel into space by Americans will be through private companies, not government agencies.

Ares I leaves a vacuum for the industry, at least in Utah's economy, and partnership officials said they will be exploring every possible option to make sure companies won't overlook Utah's history and expertise in space and how to get there.

Over the past 50 years, aerospace and defense have combined to become one of the top Utah economic engines, F. Ann Millner, president of Weber State University, said last week announcing the Utah Cluster Acceleration Partnership. She noted that the federal budget decisions and the pull of politics have more sway than ever on the course of the industry.