Blue Canyon’s gyroscope has a winning attitude

LAFAYETTE — A company whose reach extends all the way to Mars is one of four winners of BizWest’s IQ (Innovation Quotient) Awards, which were unveiled in May.

Lafayette-based Blue Canyon Technologies won the IQ award in the Aerospace category for its control moment gyroscopes, which are built to provide spacecraft with the expanded agility necessary to navigate a successful mission. The gyroscopes offer improved torque performance at lower power consumption versus reaction wheels.

A control moment gyroscope is an actuator, an attitude control unit, that consists of a spinning rotor, also referred as a fly wheel, and one or more motorized gimbals that tilt the rotor’s angular momentum. As the rotor tilts, the changing angular momentum causes a gyroscopic torque that rotates the spacecraft.

Blue Canyon “has leveraged its deep technical knowledge of reaction wheels and ultra-low-disturbance motors to develop high-precision CMGs with increased agility at a lower power compared to traditional reaction wheels,” said Matt Carton, component development executive director, on the company’s website. “This increase in performance provides improved spacecraft agility that has applications for a wide range of customer missions.”

Previously reserved for larger, more traditional satellites, the company says control moment gyroscopes offer at least 10 times the torque of reaction wheels with up to five times less power. They enable a spacecraft to reorient and point in another direction much more quickly, multiplying the return on investment for any mission limited by the responsiveness of its platform, especially Earth observation. That increased spacecraft agility, coupled with low jitter that maximizes the quality of mission data, allows the gyroscopes to provide  the performance needed to maximize payload-pointing operations while in orbit. The gyroscope has a design life of more than 10 years, the company says.

Blue Canyon was co-founded in 2008 by Boulder entrepreneur George Stafford, who earned a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1997 and then worked 13 years as a principal engineer at Ball Aerospace in Boulder.

Stafford and his partners in Blue Canyon initially ran the company from a Peet’s Coffee location in Boulder, where they could access free wifi. They moved into their first location in 2010.

The company was honored as a BizWest Mercury 100 fastest-growing company in 2017, and in 2019 it moved its headquarters and production to an 80,132-square-foot facility in Lafayette and purchased New Mexico-based radio frequency antenna maker Antenna Development Corp.

Late in 2020, Blue Canyon was itself acquired by global aerospace and defense company Raytheon Intelligence and Space, a subsidiary of Arlington, Virginia-based RTX,

Blue Canyon built its reputation on components, launching hundreds of sun sensors, star trackers and reaction wheels. It now specializes in development of small satellites and Evolved Secondary Payload Adapters, which allow multiple payloads to be launched via the same spacecraft.

Blue Canyon has supported missions for the Air Force, NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, and provided attitude control systems for the first interplanetary CubeSats, which successfully traveled to Mars in 2018. Those systems tell the spacecraft where to point or position itself within orbit by using a map of the constellations. The company manufactured those systems for CubeSats that accompanied the NASA Insight Lander to the Red Planet.

The company has been recognized with awards from Inc. magazine’s 5,000 fastest-growing private companies, the 2020 Best in Biz Award and the 2020 Tibbetts Award, issued by the U.S. Small Business Administration. It won the Tibbetts recognition, which recognizes technology firms that have achieved success through the SBA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, for its development of XACT, the company’s first component funded by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.

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