George Sowers, professor of practice in mechanical engineering at Colorado School of Mines, was recently interviewed by the Denver Business Journal about the $642 million in Air Force satellite launch contracts awarded this month to United Launch Alliance and SpaceX. Sowers was vice president and chief scientist at ULA before joining the space resources faculty at Mines. From the story: ULA, an 11-year-old joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co., had been the sole space-launch provider for U.S. military and spy agency missions for a decade until Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX ....