It’s hard to believe, even with the chaos of the world today, just how far the Space Coast economy has improved in only 10 years.
In 2010, a story featured on CBS 60 Minutes was titled “The Death of the Space Coast” based on the triple hammer that destroyed our economy. While the entire United States was suffering from the housing crisis and recession, the end of the Space Shuttle program cost our area an additional 7,500 high paying jobs (14,000 indirect job losses) and when Congress passed sequestration that summer, a freeze on Defense and Military spending hit the South Brevard area extra hard.
None of our areas “founding fathers” that I spoke with had any optimism about our future as aerospace and defense seemed doomed. I personally began “knocking on doors” on Brickell Avenue in Miami looking for investors to consider our area to hopefully spur economic growth, unfortunately I found no takers at the time…..
Due in large part to the efforts led by Lynda Weatherman and the Economic Development Commission of Florida’s Space Coast, between October 2010 and September 2017, there were over 49 new private projects, 8,700 new jobs and a capital investment of around $1.68 billion dollars. Efforts by Space Florida, the state’s aerospace economic development agency, resulted in 37 new space related companies and nearly 7,639 new jobs between 2018 and 2019.
In the ten years since the shuttle’s retirement, private space companies such as SpaceX (Elon Musk), Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos), One Web, Embraer, along with larger defense industry companies to the likes of Boeing, L3 Harris, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, have fueled the area’s economic rebound, creating an “aerospace ecosystem” with tremendous economic benefits.
Between the 2019 Washington Post article titled the “Comeback Coast” to a recent Florida Trend article touting the “Resiliency of the Space Coast”, we have come a long way in 10 years.
Now my phone rings several times a week with investors from outside of Florida looking for opportunities on the Space Coast!
Onward upward higher and higher!
