Texas preps for its celestial future

With Monday's total eclipse now a distant memory, Texas is taking a long view on a celestial future that runs circles around a four-minute phenomenon.

The Lone Star State, with its long history of space exploration, wants to prepare college students for an economy where space tourism and specially trained engineers thrive.

Look no further than the potential payload - an industry that could expand into a $1 trillion opportunity by 2040.

Texas 2036, an advocacy group that employs data to affect public policy, recently highlighted six ways the state is laying the groundwork to stake its claim to a sizeable portion of that business for companies, universities and future college graduates.

Chief among them is a research facility Texas A&M University plans to build at Exploration Park at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. In the last legislative session, Texas legislators created a Space Commission and pumped $350 million into the endeavor, with $200 million targeted for the new research facility.

Texas A&M is expected to return the favor by creating a space engineering degree to turn out graduates for high-paying aerospace jobs at companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin and not-yet-conceived future startups. As of May 2023, just over 66,000 aerospace engineers were working in the U.S.

Jobs at the two biggest players in the privatization of space are highly desirable to skilled engineers who used to consider NASA or Boeing to be the holy grail of aerospace occupations.

SpaceX, headed by the planet's second wealthiest human, Elon Musk, is investing big-time in its Starbase launch site in South Texas. By one account, the value of the company's land at the Texas-Mexico border alone has already doubled to just under $240 million. Earlier this year, SpaceX filed plans to build a five-level, $100 million Starbase office.

Blue Origin, founded by Amazon founder and fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos, uses a West Texas launch site for its rocket tests, bringing tourism dollars to a sparsely populated part of the state.

In all, some 2,000 aerospace-related companies are doing business in Texas.

Texas' place in space goes back decades to the early days of NASA's manned missions to the moon. The 1960s space race captivated the nation, just like Monday's rare total solar eclipse did for millions of visitors and Texans living along the path from the Rio Grande to the Red River.

The commercialization of space could once again make Texas the center of the universe.