Space City, forever
TexSpace debuts with vision to solidify Houston as the star of the industry
Space City needs to be a relevant name, not a relic, say Houston space leaders who are forming a new organization.
“Space isn’t just our history. It’s Houston’s future,” said former NASA astronaut Jack “2fish” Fischer. “We don’t want Space City to be something from the ‘60s.
We want it to be forever and worldwide.”
Houston’s expertise is NASA, but today’s space sector extends beyond the agency’s purview. Commercial companies are launching people and could soon have their own space stations and lunar landers. The U.S. Space Force and Space Command are working to protect U.S. assets, mainly satellites, from adversarial countries.
Space City needs to be a destination for civil, commercial and military space,
Fischer said, and that’s why he helped create TexSpace. This organization is envisioned as a onestop shop for promoting the space industry in Houston and across the state. It’s seeking to attract companies, help provide access to the equipment and funding they’ll need to thrive, and meet with Texas lawmakers as an industry advocate.
“We’re just getting started,” said Bob Mitchell, president of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership. “We’re trying to coordinate all these different opportunities.”
On Friday, TexSpace leaders joined 20 other companies and organizations for their first workshop.
Mitchell said the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership began discussing such an organization in early 2020, but the pandemic paused its efforts. Then he met Fischer, who is now the vice president of strategic programs for Intuitive Machines, a Houston company building a lunar lander.
Fischer’s nickname, 2fish, comes from his time with the Air Force’s 391st Fighter Squadron. He was the second Fischer in the squadron, and Dr. Seuss’ “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” inspired the nickname.
Mitchell and Fischer had a similar vision, and their organizations teamed up. They also turned to Brandy Obvintseva, founder of marketing agency Gallant Culture, to create a brand around their vision. She helped pick the name and develop the website.
For now, TexSpace is little more than its website. But it has a phased plan for ramping up activity.
The first phase is connecting companies that are willing to share the hardware required for building and testing space technologies. For instance, a vibration table (which shakes items placed on top of it) is used to test hardware before it’s launched into space. Satellites can’t have pieces fall off during their ride off this planet.
Rather than every company owning their own vibration table, which takes time to acquire and can cost millions of dollars for the equipment and maintenance, TexSpace is proposing that companies with expensive equipment like vibration tables allow other companies to use it. They would pay a fee significantly smaller than what it’d cost to buy the equipment.
Similarly, the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership’s sister organization has an agreement with NASA where companies can pay to use the agency’s specialized equipment. This agreement, created in 2012, has helped companies to access the Johnson Space Center more quickly.
In its next phase, TexSpace will turn its attention to the 2023 Texas legislative session. It hopes to become a nonprofit that, trusted with state money, can issue grants, tax breaks and other incentives to attract companies.
The Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership already uses incentives in its local work attracting companies, but these incentives are spread out across various state and local entities. TexSpace would like to consolidate them in one spot.
Ultimately, it wants to become a brand people trust for their space needs.
This type of branding has been successful in Florida. In 2006, the state legislature created an aerospace economic development agency called Space Florida.
To create Space Florida, the state dissolved three organizations — a research corporation that helped universities position themselves in space research, a spaceport authority that managed a launch complex and a finance corporation that provided aerospace funding — and took the best parts of each.
“It does allow the state to speak with one voice,” said Frank DiBello, CEO of Space Florida. “It allows for a uniformity of policy to achieve objectives. It helps to guide new legislation to assure the growth of the industry in the state.”
He said Space Florida mostly wields political and financial power. It doesn’t manage incentives, but it helps companies find those incentives — as well as private funding that might be needed for a project. It also has some state funds, between $1 million and $6 million most years, to invest in companies.
Greg Autry, a clinical professor of space leadership, policy and business for Arizona State University, said Space Florida’s biggest strength is signaling to companies and investors that the state wants their business. Florida lawmakers won’t make it cumbersome to operate a space company.
“They might even try to do something to help you if you ask,” Autry said. “That’s huge.”
TexSpace will initially be run out of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership’s office. It will be run by volunteers until it has funding to pay a full-time staff.
One day, it hopes to operate at the Houston Spaceport amid a cluster of thriving aerospace companies. The spaceport’s development has thus far been slow, but TexSpace hopes to become a catalyst.
“We want to create an environment where these companies want to be here,” Mitchell said.