Region leaping into space industry

New idea could help lure new businesses to South Florida

For decades, South Florida has been largely a bystander to the state’s space exploration industry, leaving eye-popping rocket launches and manned space missions to Florida’s Space Coast, which enjoyed the international cachet and economic benefits.

But now, Broward County’s new Alan B. Levan NSU Broward Center of Innovation is making a leap into the nation’s burgeoning commercial space industry, which by some estimates is already worth $1 trillion.

The idea is not to build launch pads for window-rattling rocket blastoffs from the county’s last remaining tracts of vacant real estate.

Instead, the center’s newly created LEVL5: Space Dock aims to help put South Florida and Nova Southeastern University “on the map in the space sector,” said John Wensveen, the university’s chief innovation officer and executive director of the Levan center.

He hopes Nova will be viewed as a place for entrepreneurs to develop new companies in the field, drawing on regional financial backers and the university’s academic talent.

Ideally, South Florida would benefit from a spillover effect driven by the commercial space businesses that have helped revive the economy of the Space Coast, which encompasses Brevard County, since 2016.

“Obviously the Space Coast of Florida has had its ups and downs,” Wensveen said by phone on Thursday. But with the arrival of commercial space projects,

“there has never been a more opportune time for the entrepreneur.”

The center at Nova has retained Andrew Aldrin, son of Apollo 11 moon walker Buzz Aldrin, as director of its space program.

The younger Aldrin is a longtime business development executive in the space industry.

Over the years, his career has spanned work in industry, academia, and charitable work for education. In industry, he focused mainly on business development for TRW, Boeing and United Launch Alliance.

He currently teaches at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. He starts his new job on July 1.

“Florida has tremendous advantages obviously, with the Space Coast,” Aldrin said in an interview. “One of the things we’re trying to do is bring the technology and science into the entrepreneurial environment of South Florida.”

Still, it remains unclear how many South Florida investors, entrepreneurs and young people in search of well-paying careers are interested in commercial space.

The center hopes to inspire interest from close to a dozen existing industries in South Florida that have the capacity to take the plunge. They include aviation and aerospace, financial services, logistics, medical and health, manufacturing, marine and general technology.

Broader targets include oil and gas, insurance, agriculture, telecom, location-based services and defense and security.

“It’s a big, really dynamic industry and it’s just starting and it’s going to develop in a way we can’t even imagine right now,” Aldrin said. “The real key to this is integrating these disciplines from law to medicine to technology.”

Both Aldrin and Wensveen believe South Florida has certain advantages over the Space Coast: funding sources and lots of entrepreneurs who are willing to take risks.

“One of the challenges the Space Coast faces is not having the type of financial infrastructure that exists in South Florida,” Aldrin said. “South Florida is one of the great entrepreneurial hubs in America.”

Since coming on the scene late last year, the center has been contacted by “a number of tech companies” that want to hear more about what the

Nova hub can offer them generally with various business initiatives, including space, a spokeswoman said.

And the COVID-19 driven migration to South Florida of financiers and money managers from the Northeast offers a potential pool of financing for entrepreneurs who want to get started.

There are investor groups in the region that have committed millions to back commercial space projects. One is Miami-based Cisneros, which, among other things, focuses on global communications. The firm was among the first to invest in AST & Science, a company that is developing worldwide mobile phone coverage via a low-earth-orbit satellite network.

Under the radar

Over the years, South Florida has been the home of companies working in the space sector, said Bob Swindell, president and CEO of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance, the county’s economic development arm. But much of the public has remained unaware of them.

He cited Heico, the aviation and aerospace firm in Hollywood that has an array of subsidiaries around the

U.S. supporting the industry. Four of its companies contributed components to NASA’s Perseverance rover, which touched down on Mars in February after a six-month, 293 million-mile journey, the company said in a recent statement.

Sintavia, another Hollywood firm founded in 2012, uses three-dimensional printing to develop new flight and launch products for the aerospace, defense and space industry.

“This type of advanced manufacturing, while not well known in South Florida, exists here,” said Swindell, who added he has been working with Sintavia founder Brian Neff on an expansion plan.

Neff confirmed he hopes to expand his company of 98 people and agreed South Florida is a good place for growing the commercial space business.

“The great thing about Florida is it is the land of opportunity,” he said. “If you want to be a space manufacturer or commercial space designer, it’s a really good location.”

Swindell hopes the Levan Center in general and its space initiative in particular can serve as a support hub for other founders of new companies who want to join the commercial space industry. “I think there is going to be a demand for it,” he said.

Aldrin said he sees a “wave” of interest since the Space Coast rebounded from the loss of NASA’s taxpayer-funded space shuttle program in 2011.

When the program ended, the economy of the 72-milelong Space Coast, which stretches from Melbourne to Titusville, took a major hit, said Jonathan Guarine, a research economist for Florida TaxWatch, the nonprofit business policy group that among other things tracks statewide economic development.

The shuttles’ retirement wiped out the jobs of 7,500 workers at the Kennedy Space Center, nearly half of the people who worked there in the mid-2000s. The program’s loss led to the elimination of an estimated 14,000 jobs in the hospitality and retail sectors, Guarine found.

Space Coast comeback

Then along came industrialists such as Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, who is investing a huge fortune in the field. The subsequent arrivals of other companies effectively jump-started the economy.

Blue Origin, founded by Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos, and OneWeb Satellites, founded by former Google executive Greg Wyler, are among those that are playing a role in adding back employment to the region.

Smaller companies are playing important roles, Guarine said Thursday.

“When we think about the commercial space industry behind the scenes, there are a lot of these smaller businesses involved,” he said.

Many of them are generating higher-wage jobs.

So is it realistic to think that the commercial space industry will expand its presence in Broward?

“I can unequivocally say, ‘yes,’” replied Tony Carvajal, executive vice president at Florida TaxWatch.

Most people think about space programs as “placebased,” he said.

“It’s a rocket that goes up and comes down,” Carvajal said. “They forget why a rocket goes up and why it comes down.”

In Florida, a wide variety of businesses from every one of the state’s 67 counties helped make those travels possible, he said.