April newsletter publishes Tuesday

The April 2021 issue of the Gulf Coast Aerospace Corridor Newsletter will be published Tuesday. The cover story is about the effort to create two new space-related technology parks near two NASA facilities – one in Louisiana and one in Mississippi.

Enterprise Park is a more than 1,000-acre park on the north side of Stennis Space Center. It’s been in discussion nearly four years now, and much of the delay has been because of the pandemic. But NASA has approved plans for the center to send out announcements for proposals to develop the park. A new office for specialized business development is also being established at the space center, with hiring about to start.

Another proposed park is about 40 miles away outside NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility. Called the Louisiana Space Campus, it's a 50-acre spread at Michoud that will target commercial office development for existing tenants as well as bring in new public and private partners. Should both reach fruition, it would cement this region's reputation in the space field at a time when commercial space activities are growing.

There’s also a story about Gulf Power's recent virtual symposium, including a discussion about Florida and how it fared better than most during the pandemic. While Gulf Power opted to do a virtual event, it still plans to hold a full-blown symposium in September.

There’s also an article about the upcoming TeCMEN Industry Day, where a contender for the Armed Overwatch program will be discussed. Plans are to build that contender, the Bronco II, in Crestview, Fla.

Finally, there’s a story about the recently released Milken Institute Best-Performing Cities Index. It shows that most of the metro areas in the Gulf Coast I-10 region performed quite well and improved their ranking. Two standouts were the Daphne-Fairhope-Foley metro area in Alabama and Crestview-Fort Walton Beach-Destin metro area in Florida.

The April issue will be sent to the inbox of subscribers, but others can go to our website and follow the links to download a copy April 13. For Facebook users, we launched a Facebook page in December where readers can go to see the entire newsletter or individual stories. Comments are welcome. Please consider liking us and becoming a follower. Just search for the Gulf Coast Aerospace Newsletter.

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