Virginia Economic Review

Sixty years after The Jetsons promised a future of personal-sized spacecraft that moved people and things safely through crowded skies, that vision, or something like it, is ever closer — thanks to a Virginia company that’s a global leader in building digital air highways.

The global aerospace industry is reinventing itself, with innovation spanning materials, engineering, and a more expansive vision for how we take to the skies. Virginia sits at the heart of this transformation as a breeding ground for ingenuity.

On 462 acres in Albemarle County, a plot of land along U.S. Route 29 adjacent to a federal intelligence hotspot is the latest addition to a growing cluster of industries coming to define the Charlottesville area.

Maj. Gen. Ted Mercer is the new CEO and executive director of Virginia Space, the owner and operator of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), collocated at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

Unmanned vehicles still seem like advanced technology, but in one form or another, they’ve been making inroads into civilian life for the last 15 years.

Could space-related businesses represent a $1 trillion industry by 2040? That’s the question posed by Morgan Stanley analysts in a recent report.