Governor Josh Shapiro announced a $4 million state funding award for Astrobotic Technology Inc., which the North Side space company plans to use as part of the estimated $20 million renovation plans it's eyeing for a former warehouse on Reedsdale Street.
Astrobotic announced it acquired the roughly 50,000-square-foot property for $2.5 million last March and it's just a few blocks away from the company's slightly smaller 47,000-square-foot headquarters on North Lincoln Avenue in Manchester, the site of the funding announcement.
During a press conference announcing the funding, Astrobotic CEO John Thornton said construction work on the building will begin in the new year and could become operational by early 2025.
As part of the funding, which Department of Community and Economic Development Secretary Rick Siger said will be split nearly in half in the form of a loan and grant award, Astrobotic will look to provide space for an additional 283 workers on top of the more than 200 people it employs today.
"That's 283 more Pennsylvanians who will get an opportunity to succeed here in Pittsburgh, 283 more families who can support local small businesses and give back to their communities," Shapiro said. "This project will help cement Pittsburgh's place as a leader in the space industry not only in this region but all across the country."
Shapiro said the formation of a space hub centered around an entity like Astrobotic will help promote new business development, a mission he said the state is committed to supporting. With this funding, state-backed investment for Astrobotic has reached $9 million since the company's spinout formation from Carnegie Mellon University over a decade ago.
Thornton backed that claim by noting that the nonprofit Keystone Space Collaborative, which will lease the first floor of this renovated facility, has already identified an entire supply chain that can help feed Astrobotic and other companies with the materials and expertise that's needed to build lunar landers, rovers and other spacecraft. Some of these suppliers have even expressed an interest in co-locating with Astrobotic in this new space, Thornton said while noting that large portions of the Manchester neighborhood could prove enticing for space-related development as well.
"Our dream of this part of the North Side is we see just massive opportunity because the infrastructure is already here; you've got a really exciting venue with the Steelers that attracts people in, you've got the end of a [light-rail] T stop and then just empty parking lots," Thornton said. "Every parking lot we see as an opportunity to turn into underground parking and private businesses above."
Astrobotic is actively planning for the Dec. 24 launch date of the Vulcan Centaur V rocket from United Launch Alliance, which will take Astrobotic's Peregrine Lunar Lander to space so it can then travel on its own and land on the surface of the moon about one month later, a mission that will be carried out from Astrobotic's mission control room inside its headquarters building. If successful, Peregrine will take on the title as the first commercial landing on the lunar surface and it'll mark the first time the U.S. has returned to the moon since the end of NASA's Apollo program in the 1970s.
