Sen. Maria Cantwell and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson met Wednesday at the Washington State Space Summit to hash out what’s needed to grow and strengthen the Pacific Northwest’s aerospace industry — including a potential new manufacturing institute.
The event featured some of Washington state’s top aerospace companies and educational institutions. Blue Origin, the space company launched by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, hosted the event at its headquarters in Kent, just south of Seattle.
The emphasis was on U.S. manufacturing capacity to support the space sector, particularly in the area of cutting-edge thermoplastic composites that can replace metals and other polymers in space and aviation crafts.
“I encourage the [U.S.] Department of Commerce and NASA to create a new manufacturing institute here in the Pacific Northwest,” Cantwell said.
Cantwell is chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, which oversees NASA and the space industry. Cantwell and Nelson, a former senator, were commerce committee colleagues for well over a decade.
“She used to tell me what to do then, and she still tells me what to do now,” Nelson quipped. “So when she said, ‘We’re going to have this manufacturing institute.’ I said ‘Yes, ma’am.'”
Cantwell said she was “happy to hear” that Nelson has been working on an effort with the White House to increase manufacturing aerospace technologies in the U.S.
An institute has not yet been designated for Washington state. There are already 17 innovation institutes as part of the Manufacturing USA network, which is a public-private partnership supporting manufacturing in the areas of semiconductors, advanced lightweight materials, biotech, fabrics and other fields.
Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith was part of the panel discussion at the Space Summit. He agreed that better manufacturing is a key need for the sector.
“One of the things that the aerospace industry as a whole undervalues [is] that manufacturing is the hard problem,” Smith said. Historically the focus has been on the exciting technology, he added, but there is a need to produce high quality materials at scale.
Nikki Malcolm, CEO of the Pacific Northwest Aerospace Alliance, noted the potential for crossover between manufacturing in space and commercial aviation sectors to benefit both.
“There’s such an amazing collaboration opportunity between the two because we’re making the same kind of parts,” Malcolm said. “Quite frankly, a lot of times the machines don’t care whether you’re making space parts or commercial parts.”
As Boeing’s original home, Washington state has long been a global leader in aviation. Over the past decade, it has developed a robust space ecosystem with dozens of companies, including Blue Origin, Gravitics, Stoke Space and Starfish Space, whose CEOs all spoke at the event on Wednesday.
“There is a fascination about spaceflight from the American people, but that’s particularly so with children.”
– Bill Nelson, NASA Administrator
Many Washington companies are working in partnership with NASA — 42 serve as suppliers to the agency’s Artemis program, which plans to send astronauts to the moon and eventually Mars. Blue Origin in May won a $3.4 billion NASA contract to provide a lunar landing system for the Artemis 5 mission, which is set for 2029. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is providing landing systems for earlier Artemis missions, has its Starlink satellite headquarters in Redmond, Wash.
The summit also tackled the issue of workforce training and promoting diversity in the sector.
The state’s space industry has an annual economic impact of $4.6 billion and provides 13,103 jobs, according to Cantwell’s office. In July, the senator helped lead the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act, which included billions of dollars for STEM education and workforce development.
Leaders from the University of Washington, Washington State University and Sno-Isle TECH Skills Center participated in the discussion Wednesday and highlighted their efforts to grow education and training in the sector with an eye to bringing more women and racial and ethnic minorities into the field. The Northwest Indian College had a booth at the event’s accompanying trade show featuring its engineering and aerospace efforts.
STEM students were invited to the event, and a young girl offered the first question of the panel, asking leaders how they planned to get middle school kids interested in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math) and aerospace.
Nelson cited the emotional tug of space.
“You want to get kids interested in space, I can tell you one way NASA does [it]. We have an astronaut in a blue flight suit walk into the classroom and you ought to see how their eyes light up,” Nelson said. “There is a fascination about spaceflight from the American people, but that’s particularly so with children.”
