NASA administrator Bill Nelson said earlier this week that he feels the United States is in a space race with China. Pittsburgh is playing a part in that race.
Last week representatives from the Air Force and Space Force visited businesses in the Pittsburgh area and spoke at a panel hosted by the Pittsburgh Technology Council. Arthur Grijalva, director of SpaceWERX, the innovation arm of the Space Force, discussed how the aforementioned geopolitical trends are impacting investment.
"We are in a pretty hard competition with China," Grijalva said during the panel. "China has a top down approach. They're very focused, they have a full government approach where they can really go after the things that they want and need and one of those is space. They have more than doubled their space assets over the last few years and they're looking to overtake us in space."
Both countries have set a goal of having astronauts on the moon by the end of the decade, which would be the first time a human has set foot on the moon since NASA's Apollo 17 mission in 1972. The U.S. successfully landed its first craft on the moon since then earlier this year by partnering with Texas-based company Intuitive Machines. This landing came a month after Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic failed to land a craft due to a propulsion issue caused by a fuel leak.
But Astrobotic is not done. The company expects to launch a second, larger craft in November. The craft will house a NASA rover with the goal of searching for potential deposits of water ice on the lunar south pole, a relatively unexplored area. Astrobotic has a contract worth over $320 million with NASA as part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, a NASA initiative to send small landers to the moon. Nelson referred to both Intuitive Machines and Astrobotic as "scouts going to the moon ahead of us" in an interview with Associated Press.
"Even though China has done great strides in space, we have American ingenuity and innovation," Grijalva said during the panel.
SpaceWERX is a division of AFWERX, the Air Force's innovation arm. Since 2021, AFWERX has invested over $36 million to companies in the Pittsburgh region, including over 50 contracts to 22 different companies.
"Technology is transforming our way of life and it's doing so at a rate that is unprecedented," Elliott Leigh, AFWERX director, said during the panel. "If we don't get behind that way and also realize that that is going to transform the way we engage in warfare, we'll be behind."
The state government has also taken an interest in the space race. In December, Josh Shapiro announced a $4 million investment in Astrobotic. This came alongside an announcement that the company had acquired a five story building on the North Side, with a portion of the ground floor leased to house space for the Keystone Space Collaborative, a nonprofit focused on the space industry in the tristate area, as well as a regional hub for AFWERX and SpaceWERX.
