No big deal. It'll be fine. This will work out even better.

That's essentially what we were told a few days back when the bombshell exploded in Loveland.

I'm referring, of course, to the news that the Colorado Association for Manufacturing and Technology was walking away from the effort to revitalize the old Agilent Technologies plant. CAMT's plans were "not aligned" with the plant owner's vision, the organization said.

CAMT wasn't doing this alone. Its partner in helping companies commercialize promising technologies is that little space and research agency known as NASA.

Oh. My. Goodness.

We were told that stepping into the void is a Longmont-based consulting firm, DA2, headed by David Lung, who for $10,000 a month in taxpayer dollars will try to leverage his own NASA contacts to, among other duties, lure companies to what is now being called the Rocky Mountain Center for Innovation and Technology.

The owner of the old plant, Kentucky-based Cumberland & Western Resources, assured us all that NASA's role in the project would come "in a more focused, more robust fashion than ever before."

Details, however, were scant, as they have been ever since Cumberland &