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Johnson Space Center director shares ‘grand vision’ of Exploration Park, Houston space economy

By Jishnu Nair – Reporter, Houston Business Journal
Mar 18, 2024

Five years ago, Nasa Johnson Space Center Director Vanessa Wyche and her team were on overdrive.

At that time, the International Space Station was only funded until 2024, and the idea of replacing it was still emerging. Many factors had to be considered — the amount of missions on NASA’s calendars, the new space companies that were looking to replace the ISS, and the agency’s workforce, which needed assurance that NASA had a strategy for low-earth orbit.

The answer: follow the path of transitions made at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida. That means using Exploration Park, NASA’s new 240-acre development just outside of the center, as a hub for final design, development, testing and operations. Exploration Park has already leased two tenants — the Texas A&M University Space Institute and Austin-based American Center for Manufacturing and Innovation or ACMI.

“How do we make ourselves a place where these industry partners want to come? We needed to be looking at that holistically and the workforce needed to understand what that meant for them,” Wyche said in an interview with the Houston Business Journal. “We knew that other NASA facilities had been successful, and that also spurred us to go ahead and start leasing out our land."

ACMI will continue to lease its planned spaces to tenants. CEO John Burer told the HBJ at a media event in March that the company is in discussions with tenants for its buildings, which include room for research and development, testing beds, and office space that can be used by single or multiple tenants.

Wyche said her idea of future tenants include international partners, academic partners, and different companies working on projects relevant to Johnson’s budgetary goals, such as vehicles and installations on the moon’s surface. As an example, Wyche highlighted an unnamed international company working on a pressurized rover that is habitation-capable.

“You’ve got all these installations, your astronauts in their spacesuits, you may have a lander with science payloads,” Wyche said. “Where can you go to make sure all of these things are integrated, that they can share data, robotically interface with each other? Ultimately, our responsibilities include those technologies being potentially spun off to help other solutions right here on Earth.”