Houston Spaceport’s Collins Aerospace facility to provide 'cutting-edge innovations'

Houston Spaceport has established a new partner company, Collins Aerospace. 

The company plans to open the facility and begin operations by summer of next year. Houston City Council Member Abbie Kamin expressed her support for the development.

"Space is back in Houston. Hearing about the exciting progress being made at #spaceport #Houston [on Thursday] at our economic development committee," Kamin said. "Some great companies investing in @HoustonTX, like @Axiom_Space and @CollinsAero."

Collins will set up the shop at the Houston Spaceport at Ellington Airport in Clear Lake. The company, which is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, plans to break ground on a 116,000-square-foot facility that will include office space, manufacturing laboratory space and 10,000 square feet of accelerator space. The Houston Airport System held a ceremony in honor of the $18.8 million project’s first phase completion at 13150 Space Center Blvd. 

The first part of the construction includes streets, water, electric power and communication, and fiber optic facilities, among other features. The development will span 53,000 square feet of lab and office space and 154 acres of land on the first phase alone, according to the HAS website. 

Texas Sterling-Banicki JV LLC has been tasked with completing the infrastructure. Its pre-construction planning will cost $13.1 million of the total funding. JV partners Houston-based Texas Sterling Construction Co. and Phoenix-based Banicki Construction both serve as subsidiaries of The Woodlands-based Sterling Construction Company.

“When complete, Phase 1 will provide the groundwork to support the companies that produce the cutting-edge innovations needed to take commercial space travel and aviation into the subsonic, super-sonic and hyper-sonic realm,” Houston Aviation Director Mario Diaz said in the release.

The facility will make room for larger contributions to the aviation industry. The safety measures and important aerospace engineering activities set to be enforced through the development include ram air turbines, zero-gravity scientific and medical experiments, microsatellite deployment, astronaut training and development and space tourism.

“As airplanes become larger and as airplanes require more power our ram air turbines have gotten bigger and bigger over the history of the product,” said Collins Aerospace Vice President Stan Kottke.

Collins has also secured an $18 million state-of-art facility in Illinois. The project is expected to be a boon for the aviation industry. The Houston-based Intuitive Machines, which served as the first spaceport tenant, will soon launch for the lunar landing of its Nova-C spacecraft amid a $77.1 million contract with NASA. The Houston Spaceport is the country's 10th commercially licensed spaceport. It was granted a launch site license by the Federal Aviation Administration in 2015.