The Colorado Space Grant Consortium is a state-wide program that provides Colorado students access to space through innovative courses, real-world hands-on space hardware programs, research projects, and interactive outreach programs. We are funded by NASA as part of National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program. There are 52 consortia in the National Space Grant program, with one consortium in each state, in addition to Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.

Since 1989, over 6,000 students have been directly involved in our hands-on space hardware programs. We have launched three sounding rockets (CSOAR, CSHARP, HOMER), three Space Shuttle payloads (ESCAPE, ESCAPE-II, and DATA-CHASER), four orbiting satellites (3CornerSat, Hermes, ALL-STAR, and DANDE), 12 sounding rocket payloads, 6 long-duration high altitude balloon payloads, and over 800 short-duration, high altitude balloon payloads.  In addition, students work on autonomous robotics projects and engage in telescope observing research and other faculty-led, space-focused research projects and NASA competitions. 

COSGC continues to teach and mentor students and faculty from across the country on how to do hands-on programs through their national and statewide workshops.  These workshops include High Altitude Balloon Payloads, which ran multiple times per year from 2002 - 2010 and RockOn, an annual program which just completed its 12th run.  Statewide workshops include robotics, wearables, soldering, balloon payloads and Arduino.  Collectively, COSGC has supported over 3,000 students and faculty who have participated in these workshops.  Additionally, COSGC runs two national sounding rocket flight opportunities for students in partnership with NASA's Wallops Flight Facility called RockSat-C and RockSat-X.  All these experiences plus many more will be utilized on the GLEE mission to inspire and engage student teams from all over the world.