Maine’s New Space industry expects heightened interest from educators and overtures from out-of-state companies.
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Activities underway to advance Maine’s New Space industry include heightened interest from educators and overtures from out-of-state companies.
“At the national level, we believe there will be more support for building the space industry in the nation and certainly in Maine,” says Terry Shehata, executive director of the Maine Space Corp., which was established by Gov. Janet Mills in 2022 to be an economic development tool for Maine’s space-related ventures.
The corporation is in exploratory meetings with several out-of-state companies interested in areas such as satellite and ground station development, building on the arrivals of global tech company Teledyne Technologies Inc. and Ukrainian small-rocket startup Promin Aerospace, both at Brunswick Landing.
“We’ll see more companies coming in on the manufacturing side in the next two or three years,” Shehata says. “We’re setting the stage for them to meet folks here in the state and understand what business incentives packages are available for them.”
Pursuing development of a Maine Space Complex, the Maine Space Corp., partnering with Teledyne, is renovating space at Brunswick Landing to set up a facility for training businesses, entrepreneurs and students on how to test and qualify products for space applications and pave the way to help them participate in the space industry supply chain and/or innovate their own products for space applications.
The project received a Maine Technology Institute grant. The National Science Foundation recently advanced the corporation’s application for funding a regional effort with New Hampshire to build region’s space industry under the NSF Regional Innovation Engines Program.
“Maine is not known for a space industry,” says Shehata. “But my interpretation is that they saw the potential.”
