'All roads lead back' to Huntsville in SAS' expansion push

Huntsville, Alabama is a hub for the federal government's activities, given the Army's Redstone Arsenal base is there and home to the operations of at least 75 tenant agencies, including NASA.

Therefore, it makes sense that Special Aerospace Services is breaking ground on a new multiple-use manufacturing facility at Cummings Research Park, which is a science and business hub unto itself in Huntsville.

SAS' move to put down roots in Huntsville follows its April sale to private equity firm Godspeed Capital Management and two follow-on acquisitions since to further scale out the space and missile defense-focused company.

In a Zoom interview from the Farnborough International Airshow in the U.K., SAS Chief Executive and Co-founder Heather Bulk characterized today's landscape as having "unprecedented demand for both engineering and hardware" across the entire client set.

"We found that in order to meet that client demand, we needed to make more investments, we needed to hire more people, have deeper capabilities, for which all roads lead back to the facility in Huntsville," Bulk said. "With this [Godspeed] partnership, we're able to move incredibly fast and strategically to help meet the client demand. Without the partnership and the investment, we're continually in a reactionary state."

The commitment to Huntsville is a key signpost of SAS' push to do more for its government clients and those in commercial space as well. Bulk said the future facility there will help relieve some pressure points on the company in terms of responding to client demand.

Bulk described SAS' core service lines as including systems engineering, software, propulsion, and testing and evaluation.

Once fully built and operational, the facility will cover approximately 40,000 square feet with 30,000 of it dedicated to flexible manufacturing. The goal is to complete construction in approximately 40 months.

SAS is having the facility designed to support the kitting and staging of individual parts for client manufacturing and assembly, plus the building of dedicated systems and subsystems for major programs.

Bulk said that SAS' first idea for such a hub centered around finding property available to lease, but found that just about everything is in use already because the demand for the land is so high.

"The immediate pivot was to 'let's build something not just for today, but for the future," Bulk said. "There are so many projects that we're in a very good position to evaluate what makes the most sense for the highest impact."

That search led to Cummings Research Park, which is widely called the second-largest such facility for research in the U.S. and fourth-largest in the world. CRP is home to approximately 300 companies, 26,000 employees and 13,500 students.

As Godspeed partner Nat Fogg put it in a separate interview, SAS is putting down roots in the part of the U.S. that has the highest concentration of aerospace engineers anywhere at 3,900.

"It really is the space research-and-development capital of the United States and SAS is a part of that," Fogg said. "This new SAS campus, as we're calling it, it will become the nexus and hub for SAS in all things space.

"We seek to expand on SAS' legacy expertise in engineering design and modular design, and precision manufacturing to build additional capacity, and engineering and technical resources to help meet the growing demand for these types of custom solutions."