President and CEO of United Launch Alliance, Tory Bruno points at the Orion space craft that will be carried into space with by the Delta IV Heavy rockets designed by ULA on Wednesday, December 3, 2014 at Space Launch Complex 37 at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. (Brent Lewis, The Denver Post)

The halls and chambers of Colorado's Capitol will be filled with talk of rockets, satellites, planetary science and astronomy Monday.

March 23 is Aerospace Day at the Capitol, when the science, engineering and ingenuity of the state's space industry and how space impacts our daily lives takes center stage.

The goal, Colorado Space Business Roundtable board member Joe Rice said, is to educate the public while also getting more lawmakers to advocate for Colorado aerospace.

"It gives legislators an opportunity to learn about the important work we do here in Colorado like GPS, weather satellites and spacecraft," said Rice, who is also Lockheed Martin's director of government relations. "When you inform the legislators, they're connected with other people in the community ... and then we get requests to come and talk to their chambers of commerce and talk to their schools.

"We find when people learn about these things, they see the value in supporting aerospace and a good business climate."

Despite the state's collective aerospace and space science communities being involved in almost every major aerospace story in the last year NASA's Orion Exploration Flight Test-1, NASA's MAVEN and the Rosetta comet landing Colorado isn't the first state that comes to mind when space exploration is mentioned.

It's a big problem, said Stacey DeFore, CSBR chairwoman.

"I did not know that I could work for an aerospace company here in Colorado growing up here as a kid," she said. I thought that's what people in Florida or Houston did ... so as a mom of a 9-year-old daughter, I want to make sure that she knows that she can stay here in Colorado and be an integral piece of the space program."

Aerospace Day aims to bolster the state's reputation. The public is invited to attend the free "space fair" and talk firsthand to the people involved in space exploration. Booths from companies like Lockheed Martin Space Systems, United Launch Alliance, Ball Aerospace, Sierra Nevada Space Systems, top colleges and universities and several space advocacy groups such as Citizens for Space Exploration will be set up inside the Capitol.

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Aerospace Day at the Colorado Capitol on Monday