Space is the place for first-ever industry summit
A ranking NASA administrator opened a talk in Hartford on Monday morning with a slide showing Vice President Mike Pence announcing a big space push for the nation in 2017.
In the last few weeks, the space official told the crowd, the deadline for returning to the moon has been moved up to 2024 — a much more aggressive timetable. And the goal is now a “sustained presence” on the moon by 2028.
“Don’t you love it,” quipped Melanie Saunders, acting deputy associate NASA administrator, “when your boss moves the deadline up by 50 percent?”
It’s a scramble. Reaching for the moon is easy enough, we’ve been there, done that 50 years ago this August. But setting up camp, for the ultimate goal of reaching Mars, that’s a very different trip. It’s called sustainability — not necessarily for the environment, but for humans dwelling on moons and other planets.
Saunders may be feeling pressure, but it’s sweet music to most of the 275 people at the Marriott in the capital city, who are in the aerospace industry, as in making the hardware and software that will get the job done. This week’s event, with space program officials and companies from five countries, is believed to be the first-ever industry summit dedicated to the space business.
“This is all about taking out supply chain from five countries into space,” said Anne S. Evans, director of the U.S. Commerce Department’s export assistance center in Middletown, which organized the event along with the department’s Connecticut District Export Council.
“We’re going to be on the moon in five years and this is all new equipment,” Evans said. “This is not your 1960s equipment.”
That’s a boon for companies such as Straton Industries in Stratford; Precision Combustion Inc. in North Haven; Jonal Laboratories in Meriden; and Kaman Corp., a publicly traded corporation based in Bloomfield.
They’ve all been connected with the space program, more or less. Now they’re all seeing chances for highprofile growth not only in the official U.S. space programs, but also, for some, in commercial ventures including the private space launches of billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Russia’s Yuri Milner.
Straton, for example, makes precision parts — there are no non-precision parts in space — for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Mars 2020 mission. That includes titanium tubes that collect samples, which, in missions in the next few years, will return back to Earth for the first time.
“We feel very proud of that,” said David Cremin, the Straton president. “It’s something that gets everyone’s attention.”
The summit, which started Sunday night and runs through Tuesday, brings together small firms such as Straton — which has 75 employees and growing — with giant contractors such as Lockheed and United Technologies’ Collins Aerospace unit, and national space agencies from five countries. They are the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
They’re not random nations; these are the “Five Eyes,” a global intelligence alliance working together in space programs — in a race against Russia and especially, China.
Aerospace remains strong, with no sustained downturn in many years, as the new generation of jet engines and airframes comes at the same time as a ramp-up in military development. That’s great for Connecticut, which would basically float out to sea if not for this industry.
“The world continues to be a dangerous place,” Cremin said, explaining the need for aerospace advancements. Of the summit, he said, “This is really a gathering of high-end manufacturing opportunities.
Space travel literally and figuratively takes it to a new level. Marc Nemeth, president of Jonal, a maker of sealing rings, explains the stakes this way: On a jet airplane, the pilot has about 15 minutes of warning when a system fails. He or she can, in extreme cases, make an emergency landing.
“In space, if you have a failure, it’s over,” Nemeth said. “It can’t fail.”
Jonal, with 125 employees, is growing rapidly, doubling its manufacturing capacity in just over a year, said Nemeth, whose daughters, the third generation in the business, joined him at the summit Monday. Space applications represent only about 5 percent of Jonal’s volume, but it’s a highprofile 5 percent.
At Precision Combustion, engineers are developing a portable battery charger for the Army, using jet fuel processed through the company’s filtering and reactive technologies — which are also used in space, to turn volatile organic gases into harmless carbon dioxide and water.
“That’s why it’s exciting now,” Tony Anderson, director of marketing and business development at Precision. “It’s our opportunity to get on the next generation that’s going in space.”
For most of these companies, space represents a small fraction of their volume, but a high-profile point of pride and more to the point, a shot at development that helps the rest of their business.
In the new moonshot program, dubbed Artemis — the sister of Apollo in Greek myth — the idea is to prepare for much longer, manned (and womanned) missions to Mars. “We’re able to learn how to live off the land,” said retired astronaut Dan Burbank, now a senior engineering fellow for UTC and its sprawling Collins Aerospace unit, at the old Hamilton Sundstrand plant in Windsor Locks.
It’s a lively culture, these space folks, with plenty of competition as you’d expect. In using the next moon missions as a “test bed” for Mars, said Saunders, of NASA, “there’s considerable challenge to make everything smaller and more sustainable longterm, both economically and technologically.”
Mary Preville, a top official at the Canadian Space Agency, declared that her nation was the third in space, after Russia and the United States. Maybe so, said Karl Rodrigues, of the Australian Space Agency, but he quipped, “We were the third country to launch a satellite from our own soil.”
And minutes after Preville held up a $5 Canadian bill with a space motif printed on the back — replacing a hockey scene, of all things — Rodrigues shot back, smiling, that the bank note was made of Australian polymers.
“We’re a competitive nation,” Rodrigues said.
The hope is that he and the others spend the week competing for Connecticut technology.