Maryland Space Business Roundtable
May 26, 2009
Thank you Phil Ardanuy for that kind introduction. It is great to be here this afternoon. I am honored to be the first Governor to have the opportunity to meet with this roundtable, and am very appreciative of that invitation.
I wanted to spend some time with you today for a couple of reasons. First, because Maryland’s space industry has been, in many ways, an unsung economic hero for our State, and it is an important part of our strategy for growing Maryland’s high-tech sector.
Nearly $1.6 billion flow to Maryland businesses from NASA contracts each year, and nearly 55 cents of every dollar of Goddard Space Center contract dollars are spent in our State. NASA alone employs 10,000 people in our State, and thousands of additional Marylanders are employed in space enterprises related to work with NOAA, the US Geological Survey and many of our national security agencies which we are so fortunate to have in Maryland.
The second – and more important – reason I am here, is to pay tribute to you for the contribution you make to the character and greatness of our State and our country – constantly striving to push the outer boundaries of discovery, possibility, and imagination. It would not be hyperbole to suggest that the Galileos, Magellans, and Da Vincis of our generation work at places like the Goddard Space Flight Center and the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute.
Space missions launched from Maryland have revolutionized what we know about our universe, and helped to unlock mysteries about our own planet. And Marylanders who work in our space industry are playing key roles in things ranging from helping us understand and combat global change, to bolstering our country’s national security.
Just last week, we concluded the most recent servicing mission of the Hubble Telescope – an event that was years in the making, and which was designed and led by Marylanders. A testament to our commitment to innovation even in the face of those who said it could not, or should not, be done.
As great as our accomplishments have been of late, I am still reminded of the words of President Kennedy from his speech at Rice University in 1962, when he said, “The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time.” He added that “no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space.”
What President Kennedy said of our country’s leadership in space exploration in 1962, might also be said about Maryland’s leadership in aero-space today. We are uniquely positioned to continue and expand our leadership in the space industry, but it won’t happen by itself. A failure to seize this moment would put us at risk of losing ground to other states and to other nations.
If you consider that 16 of America’s top 25 space industry manufacturing and service companies are located in Maryland, and if you take into account our world-class workforce and all our federal facilities and public and private institutions of science and discovery – it’s clear that we have the tools to be America’s leading state in the space-related economy, and to leverage our assets for further growth and discovery. In our brief time together today, I’d like to share our Administration’s vision for getting us there together.
Our Vision for Maryland’s Space Industry
Last week, I led a delegation from Maryland to the Bio International conference in Atlanta. Through partnerships between our state government and the private and academic sectors, we’ve been able to see our State’s bioscience ranking rise to #2 among all states in America.
The vision for Maryland’s space industry that we are announcing today applies the same strategies we’ve used to expand and support our life science sector. It is designed to harness the innovation and uniqueness of our nearly 50 federal installations.
I will be naming a Federal Facilities Advisory Panel to be run in partnership with our Department of Business and Economic Development. The advisory panel will include leaders from the private sector, academia, and our state government.
The panel will produce a comprehensive assessment of how our State can best support and leverage the potential of our federal installations – whether it is NASA Goddard, the NIH or one of our key federal military installations.
Specific to the space industry, we will ask the panel to devise a strategic framework for building the federal program base at our space-related institutions – looking to solidify and expand the economic footprint of as many of these installations as possible.
In order to gauge the pace of our progress with accountability among all stakeholders, the plan will secure its goals with defined actions, timeframes, and quarterly benchmarks.
We will work to integrate all the various efforts and initiatives across our state government which impact our space industry – from education and workforce initiatives to public safety to critical infrastructure needs around the physical plants and the communities in which they are located.
Later this year, we will convene the first ever Maryland Federal Facilities Summit to bring together for the first time all of our federal partners in Maryland along with our congressional delegation to talk about our future and how we can better cooperate to strengthen our ties to the missions which these agencies provide for our country.
We will work to harness our expertise in space-based engineering and communications to grow our professional services industry in the space area – whether it is developing and manufacturing instrumentation to study the polar ice caps from space, or building satellites to travel to and study the far reaches of the solar system.
We believe that Maryland can be the nerve center for “green science” in our nation. We hope to work with industry and government so Maryland is the scientific beachhead from which we monitor carbon emissions in any new system of cap and trade regulations. We also intend to work with our congressional delegation to push for a doubling of NASA’s budget as it relates to earth science and monitoring of global warming. As we move forward, we hope and believe that the high performance computing facility at Goddard – NASA’s Center for Computational Sciences –should become NASA’s new Climate Simulation Facility for the 21st century.
We will work to build upon the strengths we developed through Hubble to make Maryland the national hub of efforts to service satellites while in orbit – giving new life to old spacecrafts and saving taxpayer funds in the process.
We will fight to secure Maryland’s place as the world leader in astronomy. As part of these efforts, we will partner with our congressional delegation to fight to protect the future of the James Webb Space Telescope.
As part of our efforts to inspire the next generation of Marylanders to study science, technology, engineering and math, we will work to encourage young Marylanders to seek careers in the space business. One of our best tools for these efforts is the proposed Goddard-based Maryland Science, Education and Exploration Center (SEEC), which would be run by a self-sustaining non-profit organization, and would feature dynamic exhibits and hands-on learning opportunities.
As we move forward toward implementing this vision, I want – and I need – your input. And I believe that the work of the Roundtable these past 18 years can be an excellent model for our state efforts.
Maryland’s Assets
Why do we see potential in implementing these action items? Because Maryland has a unique combination of assets. I mentioned a few of them at the beginning of my remarks and I wanted to run through them in a bit more depth – I think you’ll agree that in tandem they paint a very vivid illustration of our potential in this industry:
Most obviously, we are home to the Goddard Space Center, with its 50 year presence in Maryland dating back to 1959.
We are also home to the Hubble Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, Hubble being the greatest orbiting science observatory ever built. Many of the citizens who helped design, operate, service and rebuild it four times since its launch in 1991 were, and continue to be, Marylanders.
Beyond our federal assets, Maryland is also home to flagship labs such as the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, employing 400 of our citizens who work in space-related pursuits. The Applied Physics Lab, as many of you know, built and launched the New Horizons mission to Pluto and is now working on a new mission to the Sun called the “Solar Probe.”
What’s more, there is cutting edge aeronautics research being conducted at Morgan State University, Bowie State and at the University of Maryland’s College Park, Eastern Shore and Baltimore County campuses.
And then there are the private sector space industry giants located in Maryland like CSC, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, ATK, ARINC, Orbital Services, SAIC, Battelle, General Dynamics, Hughes Network Systems, Honeywell and the list goes on. As I mentioned, 16 of America’s top 25 companies in this industry have operations in our State.
The strength of our business community is bolstered by our diversity. We are home to one of the largest, most robust minority business communities in the country, with significant representation of Minority Business Enterprises in our high-tech sectors.
In addition, Maryland has a unique tradition – that is no accident – where installations like Goddard have nurtured the start up and growth of home grown small businesses – creating opportunity time and again through these companies to put people to work, and fostering entrepreneurial know-how among a more diverse sector of our community.
This tradition includes businesses like SGT, a company started by two engineers in a garage – one, an African-American minister, the other, an Iranian immigrant – which today employs 1,000 people, brings in $300 million in annual sales, and has a backlog of more than $1 billion in competitively-earned work.
As a State, we also benefit from our very promising emerging space businesses on the Eastern Shore, bolstered by the Wallops Island Flight Facility and its suborbital small satellite program.
Last but not least, we have one of America’s most highly skilled workforces – a result of having what Education Week magazine says is the #1 best public school system in America.
There is one other important asset I should mention, and that is our congressional delegation – starting with Senator Mikulski, who fought and won the fight to keep Goddard in Maryland, to save Hubble, and to save Wallops Island. We are blessed to have another great champion of Goddard in Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. And we also benefit from the leadership of Representatives Ruppersberger and Edwards who have been delivering for our space industry in key congressional committees.
Conclusion
We live in truly remarkable times. One might say we are at our own cutting edge of history – a point in our human existence when our own creativity and imagination have expanded the outer bounds of human achievement and potential as never before, and by exponents never imagined.
In a relative instant of human development, we have, through our science and technology, taken the vastness of this planet and made it intimately finite for the first time in human consciousness. We have gone from manned flight to men walking on the moon, from vaccine to human genome, from telegraph to internet all in a relative flash of time.
Our great opportunity here in Maryland is to harness and leverage the possibility of these times. And with your support, vision, leadership, and partnership, I believe that we can and will.
Thank you.
