Gov. Tom Wolf got an up-close look at the soon-to-be out-of-this-world lunar and space-related developments taking place in Pittsburgh following a tour of Astrobotic Technology Inc.'s North Side headquarters on Wednesday. Wolf's attendance, and that of the media who followed him throughout the tour, marked Astrobotic's first full-tour for the public of its 47,000 square feet of office space since it moved into the Manchester neighborhood building back in October 2020.
Astrobotic's President and CEO John Thornton guided Wolf along for a tour that took the better part of an hour to complete, offering the governor and the media insights into what all the space company has been up to as it prepares for the launch of its lander — the Peregrine Lunar Lander — onboard NASA's first commercial flight to the moon, set to occur in the second half of this year after initially being delayed amid the pandemic. That larger NASA mission is also the first lunar mission in 50 years since the Apollo program.
"It's fantastic just to have the governor here and to be able to cast the light that this mission and this story deserves and all the hard work that's going on here," Thornton said. "It's an honor and a thrill that he's come to see it."
Astrobotic's tour stops included peering into a vast clean room where workers wore white sanitary suits to prevent any possible contamination with items that will someday end up on the lunar surface. Another stop included an extensive workshop-like area where employees build and then test the company's landers. The company also showed off its mission control room flanked with rows of desks and monitors where it'll take over operations to remotely put the lander on the moon itself following separation from the initial NASA flight, which will occur at some point after launch.
Modern office cubicle workstations and desks separated these other larger areas within the headquarters. Another stop also included a trip up to the company's rooftop, which will someday feature a fire pit and other community-centered amenities that have yet to be installed but which will eventually add to the view of the entire North Shore and downtown skyline that can be seen from the company's terrace.
Astrobotic's new headquarters is unrecognizable compared to the 400-square-foot room above a bagel shop in Oakland that the company started with in 2007 when it, led by Thornton, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. It's also called locations in the Strip District and downtown home over the years as well, but nothing has been as significant as its current location.
"Pittsburgh used to be a city of steel; it's now the city of advanced manufacturing, of AI and now Moonshot," Wolf said at the conclusion of the tour and in reference to the future planned opening of the Moonshot Museum — Pennsylvania's first space-focused exhibition and educational establishment — which is tentatively planned for a public unveiling by fall 2022 inside Astrobotic's headquarters. "This, I think, is reflective of all the great things that are happening here."
The tour also offered Thornton plenty of opportunities to share all the space-related trivia he has acquired over the past 15 years of working in the industry, and he happily did as such for what appeared to be an eager-to-learn governor. From knowing the exact figure of the lesser gravitation forces on the moon that Astrobotic is testing its landers with to the amount of extreme gravitational forces those same landers will be subject to upon their launch from earth, Thornton readily explained the company's various simulation- and real-world-based capabilities its employees are working on every day and the tests it's conducting on its own apparatuses.
Spanning just a few years back, Thornton said NASA has awarded the Pittsburgh company upwards of $325 million in contracts to conduct this type of research and development, making it the region's largest NASA contractor.
"The business model is that we are a cargo delivery service," Thornton said. "Much like a shipping company … we ship things to the surface of the moon. NASA has contracted with us to deliver a certain amount of payload i.e. cargo to the surface of the moon, and our business is to sell that by kilogram; we get paid by the kilogram to deliver to the surface of the moon."
In addition to the NASA contracts, Astrobotic has received other forms of government funding along the way to get it where it is today.
It received a $500,000 Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program (RACP) grant in 2018 for capital equipment purchases. It also earned a funding proposal from the Department of Community and Economic Development to put its headquarters in Pittsburgh, which included $285,000 in job creation tax credits in exchange for the production of 95 jobs that have salaries averaging more than $101,000 annually.
As it relates to its current headquarters, Astrobotic earned $6.9 million from Pittsburgh’s Strategic Investment Fund for the development of its current site, for which Astrobotic purchased the land for at a price of $3.9 million.
Wolf's tour represented the latest public figure in recent months to come to Astrobotic's headquarters for remarks. At the conclusion of the inaugural U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council meetings in Pittsburgh last September, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo shared comments on Pittsburgh's technology and manufacturing evolution over the years.
"When everyone comes to Pittsburgh and sees it, it's not just one robotics company, it's not just that CMU is here," Raimondo said in September. "It's a vibrant and deep ecosystem of technology innovation, and both of my counterparts and their whole teams left believers in what's going on here in Pittsburgh."
