Yesterday I was listening to an episode of the Common Wealth Club on the B612 foundation. They are fund raising $200M to build a space telescope to detect and track all the asteroids that are big enough to destroy a city.

All of that is really interesting, and a very cool effort. However in doing research this morning I learned another amazing fact.

Ball Aerospace is the private company that will build the telescope. They built the Kepler space telescope for NASA, and are doing the James Web space telescope as well. I’d heard of them, but until google this morning, I’d never seen their logo. Which I know… from all the canning jars my mom used when I was a kid.

From Wikipedia:

1956, Ball formed Ball Brothers Research Corporation to produce goods and services for the aerospace sector. This was converted to a wholly owned subsidiary, Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., in 1995.

Who knew that one of the top aerospace companies has it’s origins in making glass jars. Not I, until today.