Exclusive: Here's how Space Florida will grow its portfolio to $10B

One hundred thousand satellite launches. Thousands of high-tech employers. A portfolio of aerospace projects $10 billion strong. 

That’s the picture Space Florida CEO and President Frank DiBello paints of the Sunshine State’s aerospace industry in 2030. As the state’s spaceport development agency, Space Florida negotiates with aerospace and aviation employers interested in bringing projects to Florida.

 Why this story matters: The aerospace and aviation projects Space Florida helps bring to the region create high-wage jobs, as the Florida High Tech Corridor reports local jobs in that industry pay an average annual wage of $102,159. 

The scope of the 17-year-old agency’s operations expanded significantly in the last decade, DiBello told Orlando Inno. “In the last 10 years, we went from a portfolio of things we finance of about $100 million to $2.7 billion by the end of 2020. Our goal is to take that to $10 billion by 2030.”

To do that, Space Florida not only needs to engage with space companies interested in setting up shop in Florida, but it also needs to beef up local infrastructure, workforce and access to capital, DiBello said. 

Here’s more from DiBello about Space Florida’s efforts to beef up its portfolio of aerospace projects lured to the Space Coast and Sunshine State. 

Many tech-focused industries in Florida exploded after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. How has the local aerospace industry fared? Just before Covid we were busy, but our average number of qualified opportunities we were working on was about 40. The number of deals from pre-Covid to Covid doubled. Our average number of deals was running around 80. Just a week ago, we updated the numbers. We're at 108 now on an average.

What do you attribute that growth to? We see an exodus coming out of Connecticut, New York and the New England states, as well as in the Midwest and certainly in California. That plays in Florida's favor. It creates a demand for what we can offer, but it also creates a demand for a workforce. 

Where are the biggest opportunities ahead for Space Florida to bring work to the state? We just had an economic analysis done on what we have contributed. The big changes were the sectors of the economy that were most impacted by what we do. As we look at the next five years, from 2021-2026, manufacturing will be dominant. Even though knowledge-based industries — like AI, robotics, software skills, simulation, modeling, gaming — they're going to remain high, manufacturing is going to be the area where we expand the most. 

When Space Florida talks about expanding access to capital, is that startup capital or private equity money? We've got to do both. For the largest type of companies, we have to have access to what I call deep capital: equity and debt. We've been working with the Florida Venture Forum and a whole host of what I call financing groups that are both early stage, as well as growth capital.

What is Space Florida working on to improve the local talent pool? Florida produces a tremendous number of engineers, and many of them leave to go to other states. So we've started something called an early clearance program. If a promising candidate looks like somebody Lockheed or Boeing might want, the university will give them a provisional degree in the junior year. On Day One, the student has a clearance and is productive immediately as opposed to waiting 18 months. What that does is help us keep more of our graduating product here in Florida. 

Space Florida pursues all kinds of projects with companies hidden behind codenames like Project Kraken and Project Oz. How does Space Florida come up with those names? When you get a group of creative minds around the table, they come up with something, or there's something peculiar about the project. It gets introduced to us and the person who introduced it happened to be eating his lunch, and he was eating a banana. So we call it Project Banana. It could be something like that. Oftentimes, we share the project name with Enterprise Florida, so sometimes they choose. For the most part, it's just something that's relevant but not obvious.

Space Florida

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