Mark Williams, senior vice president for Sierra Nevada Corp., said his company will have seven Dayton-area buildings by next year, including four big maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) hangars at Dayton International Airport.
The state of Ohio’s $78.8 million award for infrastructure projects around the Dayton International will make possible an eventual fifth MRO hangar, Williams told the Dayton Daily News.
“We’re all in on Dayton,” Williams said.
Micah North, chief executive of Beavercreek’s Resonant Sciences, announced that his company will break ground next month on a new building at Miami Valley Research Park, thanks in part to strong partnerships with Sierra Nevada, Anduril, Joby Aviation and others.
“It’s all upside for us right now,” North told a sold-out audience at Wright State University’s Student Union.
In his own address, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine Wright-Patterson and the NASA Glenn Research Center outside Cleveland should be considered national “crown jewels.”
“We believe Ohio sets the pace for the world,” DeWine said.
Wright-Patterson’s employment has doubled in the past two decades, bolstered by missions that “buy things” — primarily Air Force and Space Force acquisition missions, said J.P. Nauseef, president and CEO of JobsOhio, the state’s private job-creation arm.
Some 40% of the Air Force’s budget flows through Wright-Patterson, said U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, R-Dayton, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee.
Brig. Gen. Robert Schreiner, the Space Force liaison officer to U.S Northern Command and Strategic Command, told listeners that Space Force depends on Wright-Patterson, which is home to the Air Force Research Laboratory and the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, as well as the National Space Intelligence Center, and a pair of “Space Delta 7″ intelligence squadrons.
“Dayton remains a critical location for today’s Space Force,” Schreiner said.
In the forum’s keynote address, he emphasized that space is a battlefield.
“The Chinese military has adopted space as a warfighting domain within their doctrine,” he said. With Russia, China has created anti-satellite weapons for some time. He remembers working as a young captain serving as a satellite engineer as China conducted anti-satellite tests.
Space Force “Guardians have an obligation to contest and control that region,” he said.
In a panel exploring missile defense, area defense executives agreed that the Trump administration’s proposed “Golden Dome” defensive array must take into account everything from hypersonic missiles to more common drones.
“It’s a very complex threat,” said Matthew Pregmon, a senior director for Sierra Nevada, echoing the words of Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, who is heading the “Golden Dome for America” project, who called the Golden Dome “the Manhattan Project of our time.”
The technology will need to be “open architecture,” allowing communication between different defense systems, participants agreed.
Pregmon noted that the United States already has “extraordinary” missile defense abilities, but, he lamented, “They don’t talk to one another.” Sierra Nevada is thinking through aspects of that, he said.
“One thing we know is, these problems are solvable,” Turner said. He noted that the U.S. Patriot interceptor system has already defeated a Russian missile that Russian President Vladimir Putin had boasted would be invulnerable.
“Even though Putin will boast, we can do this,” Turner said.
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