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For them, Cape Canaveral, Space Florida, the EDC, and Kennedy are finding they have something to offer that no other place can match. The history. The allure. The legendary images of John Glenn awkwardly climbing aboard Friendship 7; Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins blasting off to another heavenly body in Apollo 11; or John Young coming down the space shuttle stairs onto the Kennedy Space Center landing strip after commanding Columbia through that program’s gloriously promising maiden mission. Giants walked their red carpets here. At a recent event announcing that the Swiss company RUAG Space would set up shop at Cape Canaveral to build satellite parts, that company’s officials had the same little kids’ glints in their eyes that Musk, Bezos, and Wyler had shown in previous visits. “This is the birthplace of human spaceflight,” RUAG senior vice president Holger Wentscher said. “This is the area you think about when you think about spaceflight in general. To be here, to be part of that … it’s really so amazing.” The RUAG deal signals a next phase, which is attracting the supply-line companies that provide components, materials, fuels, and ancillary technologies to serve the spacecraft and rocket companies, DiBello said. Next would be adding software and digital technologies for the space industry, something already centered in Orlando, with the national Research Center for Modeling and Simulation. Florida’s first victory set the precedents that have evolved into the blueprint for Florida’s solicitation of space business. In 2006 Space Florida, Lockheed Martin, and NASA struck a three-way deal that had the Florida agency lease the part of the Operations and Checkout Building at Kennedy, and then sublease it to Lockheed Martin. Florida provided $35 million for Lockheed Martin to transform the building into a factory, to assemble and test the Orion capsule, the next-generation spacecraft being developed as NASA’s deep-space vehicle. NASA got its first KSC commercial tenant for the post-shuttle era. Florida got the jobs. Lockheed Martin got an assembly site that eliminated the costly and risky transportation of large, expensive, critical spacecraft from some other state to the cape. And more. “You cannot hire people off the street anywhere in the country that have the skills that we need to build Orion,” said Jules Schneider, Lockheed Martin Operations senior manager for Orion at Kennedy. “But the people here, due to the fact of the shuttle processing, and all the other spacecraft here, have those skills.” WINTER 2016 INFLUENCE | 31 Clockwise from top left: Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame founded the “New Space” company Blue Origin, which has manufacturing facilities in the area. Avid advocates for encouraging space-related industries in the region are Lynda Weatherman of the Economic Development Commission of Florida’s Space Coast and Frank DiBello of Space Florida. Lockheed Martin will be assembling and testing NASA’s next-generation Orion spacecraft at Kennedy Space Center. County, flipping burgers. And Florida still may have too many competitive disadvantages, critics point out. “It’s an optical illusion,” Mark Soskin, a University of Central Florida associate professor of economics who studies the space industry, said of Florida’s prospects to win the big space industry opportunities. First, the space industry is well entrenched where it’s already at, he said. Legacy companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Orbital-ATK, or Aerojet Rocketdyne aren’t moving their engineering, technology, or big factories to Florida, let alone their headquarters. Nor are the “New Space” companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada, or Bigelow Aerospace. Typically, those companies’ principal centers are surrounded by top research universities with ready pools of the best and brightest. Such companies, he argued, give heavy measure to quality of life matters like excellent public school systems, and tax-supported government services, yet Florida remains mired in the bottom of such rankings. Technology companies want to be in savvy communities. “Florida is not just a low-wage state, it has a labor force which is extremely uneducated,” Soskin said. “There’s not enough money in the world to bribe a business to relocate; there is no business relocation.” Florida’s space industry advocates don’t deny the disadvantages, but insist time will see emerging improvements. They see the biggest challenge as preparing for, finding, and going after the new-facility opportunities when they do arise. The industry is evolving. More will come the way of Blue Origin. “No. 1, there was something to go after,” said Lynda Weatherman, president and CEO of the Economic Development Commission of Florida’s Space Coast. “If you don’t have an industry that’s growing, that’s looking for a site to do work, you can have all the great tools, but you have nothing to capture.” PHOTOS: Via Blue Origin; Scott Powers (Weatherman and DiBellow); Lockheed Martin


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