Redmond Mayor Angela Birney, fourth from right in the front row, visited Xplore Inc.s 22,000-square-foot satellite assembly, integration, and testing facility earlier this month in Redmond. She’s pictured here with the Xplore team that includes Lisa Rich, founder and chief operating officer, fifth from right in the front row, next to Birney, and CEO Jeff Rich, in back between Birney and Lisa Rich.
Redmond Mayor Angela Birney, fourth from right in the front row, visited Xplore Inc.s 22,000-square-foot satellite assembly, integration, and testing facility earlier this month in Redmond. She’s pictured here with the Xplore team that includes Lisa Rich, founder and chief operating officer, fifth from right in the front row, next to Birney, and CEO Jeff Rich, in back between Birney and Lisa Rich.
Redmond Mayor Angela Birney got a firsthand look recently at the newest company in the Redmond Space District, a brand she unveiled during her State of the City address on March 30 to highlight the growing cluster of companies doing space-related work in the Eastside city and helping fuel the area’s economy.
Birney visited Xplore Inc.’s 22,000-square-foot satellite assembly, integration, and testing facility April 13. Xplore, a space company providing commercial data, moved into its facility at 6742 185th Ave. NE in mid-2021. It has 19 employees and is poised to grow, with more than a dozen openings listed on its website today.
Xplore is one of 15 companies doing space-related work in Redmond, according to OneRedmond, the city’s combined chamber, economic development enterprise, and public foundation, which worked with the city to create the Redmond Space District brand. Other companies are Aerojet Rocketdyne, Aerospace/Safran Corp., Amazon’s Project Kuiper, Astronics, Helion, Honeywell Aerospace, IDD Microstar Laboratories, Kymeta, Microsoft’s Azure Orbital, MLoptic Corp., RBC Signals, SpaceX, Spectralux, and Triumph.
The Redmond Space District employs at least 3,400 workers in the sector across the 15 companies in the ecosystem, which means more than 26% of the state’s workforce in the space industry works for Redmond Space District companies, OneRedmond said. It added that 30% of the companies in the sector in Washington state are located in Redmond, citing 13,000 workers and 50 companies in the sector statewide. Data is sourced from business license lists and the Puget Sound Regional Council, but does not include employee numbers for Azure Orbital, OneRedmond said.
In a 2022 update to a 2018 study on the region’s space economy, a Puget Sound Regional Council report found that over the entire regional economy, space-related businesses contributed about $4.6 billion in 2021 dollars to the regional economy, supporting a total of 13,103 jobs and $1.6 billion in labor income overall. Figures included direct, indirect, and induced employment and economic impacts. Every job in core businesses of the space economy leads to an additional 1.26 jobs created across the region, and every $1 of economic activity in the sector corresponds to $1.54 of total economic activity, the report said. It noted a doubling of space-related employment and activity in the region since 2018.
“The central Puget Sound region is positioned to be a leader in commercial space exploration and development into the future, given longstanding activity in the aerospace sector, high-tech manufacturing resources, information technology assets, and a strong pool of talent,” the report said. “However, promoting successful competition in areas of the space economy will depend on a regular review of assets, strengths, challenges, and gaps in the field.”
Redmond officials hope to build on the space momentum it’s seeing among companies in the city. Companies there produced almost half the satellites in Earth’s orbit and are projected to make more than 75% of the world’s satellites in the near future, the city has said, citing research by Alliance Velocity.
Xplore is among the satellite players emerging in the city. It doesn’t have any satellites in orbit yet, but is building and testing them in its facility, with the first satellites expected to launch in the next year, the company said. Xplore says it provides “Space as a Service” to commercial, government, and nonprofit customers. That includes offering data as a service, where customers purchase the exclusive space data collected by Xplore; sensor as a service, where customers task Xplore instruments to collect space data products; satellite as a service, where customers provide payloads to Xplore; and operations as a service, where customers operate satellites from the cloud, according to its website.
“Positioning Xplore in this hub for space activity and innovation was strategic,” Lisa Rich, founder and chief operating officer of Xplore, said in a news release following Birney’s visit. “We are surrounded by a community of customers and colleagues including SpaceX, Microsoft’s Azure Orbital and Amazon Project Kuiper, and we have fantastic vendors and suppliers such as Cascade Engineering Services, Inc.”
She continued, “The origin story behind the name Redmond Space District is amusing, as the term did not officially exist when we moved in, but we wanted to make it so. It seemed important to put space on the map and let the world know the fascinating fact that Redmond builds more satellites than anywhere in the world, and fuels tremendous growth in the space economy.”
Rich added that in its Redmond location, “Xplore has everything it needs for operations and production under one roof.”
In the same release, Birney said creativity and innovation are ingrained in Redmond, adding that Xplore is a natural fit in the city.
“It was my honor to recently proclaim the Redmond Space District, as we celebrate the stories, talents, and successes of our valued space sector companies and employees, including those at Xplore,” she said.
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