Commercial Space

TechConnect Magazine | Spring 2022: Publisher’s Letter: Career pathways stretching to space

April 1, 2022

One of Council President + CEO Steve Zylstra’s early careers stops after earning his bachelor’s degree was working as a principal engineer at Ford Aerospace. It was a unique role at a unique company. While he learned early on there were economic opportunities
possible for our nation by traveling beyond Earth’s gravity, Arizona’s universities are showing there is more potential in commercial space than Steve’s peers could have imagined when they started their careers.

TechConnect Magazine | Spring 2022: It takes a village

April 1, 2022

MacVean is co-founder of the Arizona Spaceport Alliance launched, if you will, in 2018 to promote the development of a network of spaceports here and advocate the needs of commercial space businesses. She says the idea for the nonprofit actually started with fellow co-founder Benjamin Hernandez, who “would hear that access to space was necessary for new space companies to develop.”

TechConnect Magazine | Spring 2022: Mission critical

April 1, 2022

Imagine having guests who traveled all day in the harsh summer heat to reach your home for an overnight stay. You would want to make sure that the air conditioning and all else in the guest room is just right so they can rest well before continuing their long road trip. That captures the idea behind Tucson-based Paragon Space Development Corporation’s life support system it is charged with creating for the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) crew module that will be part of NASA’s Lunar Gateway as man returns to the moon.

TechConnect Magazine | Spring 2022: No spacesuits needed

April 1, 2022

Space. Tourism. More than 60 years after the first U.S. space flight, it’s hard to imagine those two words going together. Two generations already have seen handpicked heroes head to the stars and realize most of us are destined to only share packed flights from Point A to Point B. One Tucson company is on the verge of changing that.

TechConnect Magazine | Spring 2022: Startup stars

April 1, 2022

Each year, the Arizona Commerce Authority’s Arizona Innovation Challenge (AIC) awards up to $150,000 to the most innovative companies seeking to commercialize new technology that creates sustainable and growing businesses in the state of Arizona. Winning companies leverage their awards to grow their businesses and facilitate the state’s economic development goals. The AIC has been serving Arizona’s startup ecosystem since 2011, resulting in more than 2,000 applications and 110 awarded companies that are striving
to become the industry giants of tomorrow.

TechConnect Magazine | Spring 2022: On the defense

April 1, 2022

According to NASA, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which launched on Nov. 23, 2021, is “a planetary defense-driven test of technologies for preventing an impact of Earth by a hazardous asteroid.” The mission is the first demonstration of the agency’s “kinetic impactor technique” to change the motion of an asteroid in space. DART’s goal? To demonstrate that a spacecraft can autonomously navigate to a target asteroid, intentionally collide with it at roughly 4 miles per second and change its orbital speed.

TechConnect Magazine | Spring 2022: Challenge in the stars

April 1, 2022

Startup Paramium Technologies is a case study of how a small company can achieve big things with the help of a strong innovation ecosystem. Started by Christian Davila-Peralta and co-inventor Justin Hyatt, the company was founded to commercialize a precision metal plate-forming technology invented at The University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory.

TechConnect Magazine | Spring 2022: From harmful to helpful

April 1, 2022

As global challenges go, significantly reducing the amount of harmful greenhouse gases that have accumulated in the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans is certainly among the most daunting. Those gases, especially carbon dioxide, to a large degree are leading to increasingly threatening climate changes, including global warming.

TechConnect Magazine | Spring 2022: A first in the U.S.

April 1, 2022

For the first time in the U.S., the transmission of COVID-19 from pet parent to pet is documented genetically as part of a study by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope. The published findings from the ongoing study appear in the journal One Health. This is one of five pilot studies nationwide examining COVID in animals. The TGen study, however, is the only one to include genomic sequencing of the virus from both pet and human samples.