Tom Zelibor will retire as Space Foundation CEO June 30 after more than six years leading the Colorado Springs-based nonprofit best known for its annual Space Symposium.

This year, the symposium will attract more than 14,000 attendees, making it the biggest annual convention in Colorado Springs.

Zelibor, 69, joined the foundation in 2017 succeeding longtime CEO Elliot Pulham. Zelibor had been CEO of Longmont communications technology company Lightwave Logic, was director of a space-focused business incubator in Boulder, was CEO of Boulder information technology company Flatirons Solutions and served as a dean at the Naval War College. He had a nearly 30-year career in the Navy, retiring in 2006 as a rear admiral after serving as director of operations for U.S. Strategic Command.

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He will be replaced by Heather Pringle, who will retire in June as an Air Force major general and commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

The Gazette interviewed Zelibor about his tenure at the Space Foundation, including leading the organization through the COVID-19 pandemic that forced the cancellation of its symposium in 2020 and postponement of the 2021 event for five months. Questions and answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.

What are your plans after you retire?

I have offered, if Heather wants my input, on a couple of projects. The first is refurbishing and doing a complete overhaul of the Space Discovery Center (a space, science and technology center and museum adjacent to the foundation’s headquarters).

The center opened 10 years ago, and we have designed a $2 million project to do that, including refurbishing the Science on a Sphere and the Mars labs and building two new labs, the Drone Zone and the Fab Lab, which will be focused on 3D printing.

We have been approached by local drone clubs to lease the Drone Zone when we aren’t using it and we will make our 3D printers available for public use. We want kids to be able to learn how important 3D printing is in space, especially for missions to the moon and Mars.

The second project is an area for rotating exhibits so there will always be something new to see in the Discovery Center.

I also will be serving on the boards of three companies — Ree Medical, Baker Street Scientific and a new company focused on space that I cannot yet make public. I plan to spend more time with my family since I have been commuting to Colorado Springs from Longmont for the past six years.

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I have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of working here and love this place; it is an incredible organization. It has been a great six years, and I will miss it. The impact we have had on the global space community has been significant over the past five or six years and I want to express my gratitude for all the support the foundation has received.

I do plan on coming to future symposiums — I would love to visit the team and see what I could do (to help).

What were the high points of your tenure with the Space Foundation?

I am very people oriented; I love to lead people and watch them thrive and improve. In 2017, the foundation management structure was very flat, and people were wearing three or four hats with little opportunity for professional development. We created a structure for people at the foundation to expand their careers and professional development has become a big point of emphasis.

When I first arrived, we were nearly singularly oriented toward the Space Symposium, which is hugely important to the space community and Colorado Springs. But I couldn’t sleep at night because we were not diversified in our revenue stream. We were one disaster away from not surviving.

During COVID, we created the Center for Innovation and Education, a lifelong learning platform that doubled the amount and breadth of educators on our staff covering everything from pre-kindergarten to college. We also began helping young entrepreneurs to combat the No. 1 issue facing the space industry — workforce development.

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The first component of the Center for Innovation and Education is the Discovery Center, which we have already discussed. The second is formal education and we now have 10 professional educators working with schools to get kids interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), using space as a hook. The third part is the Space Commerce Institute, which offers professional development for young entrepreneurs and has really taken off with online courses.

We have professionals from the space industry that have recorded programs, and online panel discussions with industry thought leaders. My last (high) point is fundraising — a lot of people want to donate to STEM education and space. We started with 55 employees in 2017 and now we have 110. We started with less than $10 million in annual revenue in 2017 and now we are at nearly $30 million, and that is without doing a symposium for 18 months during COVID.

What was the biggest challenge you faced?

My biggest challenge was people. For an organization that realized the majority of its revenue from a single event and wasn’t able to do that event for 18 months, we had to make some tough decisions. We did it for the good of the company, but that didn’t make it any less difficult (the foundation had to cut nearly 20 people from its payroll in 2021 during the pandemic).

To meet that challenge, we launched the Center for Innovation and Education during COVID, and that helped us learn to present content without being in person.

What challenges will your successor face?

The biggest issue is space awareness, or what benefits space brings to life on Earth. We need to get that message out better. People don’t understand why we have to invest in space. They don’t realize space technology’s impact on Earth.

Heather (Pringle) has been intimately involved in space technology, but she will have to learn more about who’s who in the space industry. I have no doubt she will be successful — she is one of the most positive and upbeat people I have met in a long time. I couldn’t be happier with the selection (of the new CEO).