When astronauts take another small step on the moon in 2029, they might be stepping off a lunar lander built in King County.
That was the message delivered by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson at the Washington State Space Summit on Wednesday. The summit, held at Blue Origin headquarters in Kent, brought together over a dozen major commercial aerospace manufacturers and researchers with presences across the state.
“We’re going back to the moon after a half a century, and we’re not going back just to go,” Nelson said. “We’re going in order to learn, to live, to work, to invent, to create. In order to go to Mars and beyond. And we do so now with commercial partners.”
The event highlighted Washington’s status as an emerging leader of the commercial space industry in the United States. According to a report by the Puget Sound Regional Council, the sector generates approximately $4.6 billion a year and employs over 13,000 people.
It also highlighted the increasingly central role that these companies play in the expansion of the nation’s space program.
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Most of Washington’s aerospace ventures are NASA contractors or partners. The agency, which itself has no formal presence in the Evergreen State, relies on 42 suppliers for its Artemis program, which aims to put an astronaut on the moon for the first time since 1972.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ space venture Blue Origin, which opened its current Kent facility in 2020, was selected earlier this year to provide a second landing vehicle for the Artemis project. The Blue Moon lander is slated to touch down on the moon in 2029, carrying four astronauts as part of the Artemis V mission.
Other major companies with presences in the Seattle area include Amazon’s Project Kuiper and SpaceX’s Starlink, which are both working to expand their satellite manufacturing programs.
Project Kuiper, which employs about 1,400 people, has its research and development headquarters in Redmond and a production facility in Kirkland. The company plans to launch two prototype satellites and begin mass production this year, according to spokesperson James Watkins, with a goal of eventually building five satellites per day.
Smaller ventures were also present at the event. Gravitics, a 50-person startup in Marysville, is working to develop modular orbital habitats for astronauts. CEO Colin Doughan likened the spacious modules to Lego bricks: large, aluminum-and-steel building blocks that can be arranged to scale “as commercial interest requires.”
The startup, which is working with Blue Origin on its planned Orbital Reef space station, is targeting its first mission for 2025, Doughan said. It was founded in 2022 with the aim of onshoring a manufacturing capability for modular that “right now, largely lives in Europe.”
“That vision [of Washington] 10 years ago was absolutely the reason we came,” Doughan said. “The workforce is here. The innovation is here.”
Aerojet Rocketdyne, which employs approximately 500 people in Washington, has helped build several components for the Artemis program, including the main engines for the Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket and the Orion crew module. Various small reentry thrusters for Orion were built in Redmond.
U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said she is also pushing for the establishment of a Manufacturing USA institute in the Pacific Northwest. The publicly funded institute would help research composite materials and thermal plastics, which are both central to aerospace manufacturing.
“We’ve [had] conversations with academia about this, with manufacturers in the supply chain, and with workforce labor organizations as well,” she said. “People who are already involved in aerospace training.”
The location for such an institute has not yet been determined, Cantwell said.
There are 16 Manufacturing USA institutes across the country, including two in California, that focus on everything from artificial intelligence to material processing.
In an interview, Cantwell added that, because Washington’s aerospace industry is “alive and well,” the state is uniquely attractive for companies involved in space exploration.
“These aviation jobs are darn important to us,” she said. “But they’re incredibly important to the nation. So, the nation should invest a lot in trying to figure out how to be competitive in this area.”
The biggest challenge for commercial space travel in the 21st century, according to Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith, lies not in the science behind space travel but in the manufacturing process itself.
“Manufacturing is the hard problem,” he said. “You think, ‘Wow, isn’t that great technology.’ But unless you can produce it [efficiently] it’s nowhere close to being impactful.”
Instead, Smith said aerospace manufacturers should adopt a model like that of the automotive industry — one that prioritizes quality, but still assures quantity.
“We need to make sure that we can design [a component] well [and] produce it at large scale,” he said.
An enduring commitment to space travel means that demand for aerospace products has increased like never before.
“This isn’t a one-time thing,” Cantwell said. “This is about exploration for the future.”
Many of the panelists at the summit stressed the importance of opening the space industry to workers from all sorts of personal and professional backgrounds — a responsibility for both the public and private sectors.
“Great government actually begets great business,” Smith said. “It doesn’t work the other way. The only way that you actually have a great society, a dynamic and innovative society, is if you have great government.”
Cantwell noted that aerospace opportunities exist for skilled and unskilled workers alike.
Despite their association with NASA, companies like Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are perhaps better known for their “space tourism” — leading to charges that commercial space travel exists as the privileged domain of the uber-wealthy. However, NASA’s Nelson said a healthy commercial space industry is crucial to NASA’s future plans — not just for “private astronauts.”
“That just happens to be one of the outcomes of encouraging these companies to develop a commercial space station,” Nelson said in an interview. “But we want business on Earth to come to low Earth orbit.”
Nelson said NASA hopes to rely on commercial space stations after the International Space Station is retired in 2031 for tasks like astronaut training.
“That’s going to allow [NASA] to get out of low Earth orbit, and spend the precious dollars that [the government] gives us to go explore the heavens,” he said.
Seattle Times aerospace reporter Dominic Gates contributed reporting.
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