All right. Well, good afternoon, and thank you so much for being here. My name is Bruce Davis. I'm the General Manager for the Longmont site, and I have the privilege of leading a fantastic team here. But overall, I really wanted to thank you for coming out. This facility represents a 26,000 sq ft expansion to our organization. It's a 70% growth to our footprint here in Longmont, and it's really the culmination of years of hard work and continued trust of our customers. So I have the honor and privilege of leading an extraordinary team of engineers, managers, technicians, and support staff that come to work every day with a singular focus, and that is to execute with excellence and to deliver to our customers. It is with this spirit and determination that we've arrived at this incredible moment.
Now, I'm gonna start off and introduce some key members of our, some key guests of our team here today. I'm gonna start off with, Tom, James Thompson, who is the regional director, for U.S. Senator Michael Bennet. Thank you for being here. Next, I'll introduce Chris Rourke, Front Range regional director for U.S. Senator John Hickenlooper. Next is Maxwell Coker, Special Assistant and Outreach Coordinator for U.S. Rep Joe Neguse. And finally, Joe Wood, the Outreach Director and the U.S. Rep for Diana DeGette. Thank you. And I'd also like to recognize our speakers. We'll have three speakers today, in addition to, Adam, Biskner. First is Robert Beletic. He is the aerospace and defense industry manager for the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, OEDIT.
Next, we'll have Les Johnson, who comes from NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. And finally, Dr. Brad Tewesley, Senior Partner at Elara Nova. So thanks again. Really appreciate each of you being here. Your support today plays a crucial role in our success, and we honor your presence today. So thank you. Really appreciate you being here. All right, so looking ahead at our agenda, we're gonna start off with remarks from Adam Biskner. He's our President of Space Systems U.S. at Redwire. And then we're gonna do a photo op and a ribbon cutting on the stage. We'll have 15 folks on stage. Really looking forward to making it official, opening the doors. And then we're gonna go around, and we have some tour groups set up for exhibits.
We have three different regions, and we have experts in the field at Redwire who are gonna talk through the products we're working on and why these technologies are so crucial to both civil, national defense, and commercial. And then finally, we'll close out with a reception over at the far side over here where we can mingle and talk about the great work that's being done. Also note that we have exits in the back corner over there, an exit behind here. And there's bathrooms both in the office space and in the high bay space. There's four bathrooms there, so please don't get caught just with the two over there. Feel free to grab the whole area there. All right.
Well, you know, I look at this technology, and I'm just so inspired by, you know, seeing Solar Cruiser out there. It kind of reminds me of some words that Gene Cernan said back in, I think, 2017. For those of you who don't know, Gene Cernan is the last person to walk on the moon, Apollo 17. And I'll rephrase that. He's the most recent person to walk on the moon because we're going back. It's gonna be great. But, you know, he did a really great job in his latter years of just talking about the importance of space and why we do this, right? And, you know, he said to Congress, you know, "The space pursuit has never been an entitlement.
It's an investment in our future, an investment in technology, jobs, international respect, and geopolitical leadership. And perhaps most importantly, it's the inspiration of our next generation." And so when I look at this solar sail, it's an exact... I think those words really ring true on what we're doing here. We're trying to go above and beyond, you know, what has been done before and think about the impossible. A good way to reflect on that is, you know, our team here in Longmont started off just doing small composite booms, right? And we never, at the time, thought that those booms would transpire into something like this, you know, something that is pushing the most extreme form of the technology, doing things that we've never done before.
Likewise, those same exact booms deployed out little apertures, little antennas, and we didn't think at the time that that would essentially create a whole product group that would lead to this RF chamber that provides a very unique capability serving the war fighter and our international partners. So it's a great sense of responsibility and demands that bring us here every day, and our Longmont team, Redwire as a whole, it's in our DNA. This is what we do, and we do it with excellence. So I'll close. Thank you so much for coming here. I'm gonna turn the mic over to my colleague, Adam Biskner, President of Redwire Space Systems. Adam, please come on up.
Thank you, Bruce. Very well said. Can't be more excited to see all the growth we've had, not just in Longmont, but in Redwire as a whole over the last few years. We have a shared history. I've been in Redwire for three years, but I've been working on the exact technologies that they do at this location my entire career. So it's been a lot of fun for me to come into this site and then see the growth here. Have a lot of the same knowledge that Bruce has of where we started, with booms and antennas and then getting into this bigger programs as a company. So good afternoon, everybody. Bruce said it, like, four times, but I'll say it again. I'm Adam Biskner, President of Redwire Space Systems.
I wanna issue another warm welcome and a sincere thank you for you taking time today to join us as our special guest. And this event, as well as the growth of our company, could not be possible without the trust of our partners and our customers. It's what makes what we do at Redwire incredible, is working with you all. Our team is relentlessly focused on delivering mission success and reliable space products to our customers. Over the past year alone, we've launched sensors on 16 missions. We've successfully deployed 100 kilowatts of solar arrays on orbit, had five antennas launched, and delivered equipment to three different rocket launches, all with 100% mission success. And during that same time, we've delivered hardware to over twice that many missions that will launch just this year.
So very proud of that, of our flight heritage, our reliability, and our on-orbit success. Today, we celebrate Redwire's commitment to investment in the future. This new facility significantly expands our footprint and the capacity that will offer great capability to our customers. But it's just one representation of the investments that Redwire has made into our technology portfolio, our production facilities, and our testing capabilities that position us as one of the industry's leading mission partners. Now, I can assure you, we do not take that role lightly, as most of our systems are critical to missions of national importance. For example, the Space Development Agency Transport Layer is a constellation of 300-500 satellites in low Earth orbit that provide assured, resilient, and low-latency communication to the warfighter. The Longmont team has already delivered antennas to over 50 spacecraft that support that constellation.
Thanks to the investment in this facility, along with the custom RF test chamber, we expect we can triple the amount of hardware throughput in this location in just the next few years. Very proud to be a trusted national security supplier and very committed to expanding our capability as the demands from those customers grow in the next few years. Further, we continue to build on a very strong working relationship with NASA and the agency's prime contractors that will also benefit from this expanded facility. We're developing a deployable solar sail system on display behind you, that you'll see on the tours later today. It spans over 1,600 square meters for the Solar Cruiser program, and it'll allow missions to reach novel and otherwise difficult or impossible locations. We're very excited to deliver this innovative capability to a future flight demonstration mission.
I've been in the space industry my entire career, and the change that we've seen in that time, particularly in the last 10 years, can really not be overstated. But we're still a relatively niche industry that counts on teaming, and very strong team relationships to deliver the mission needs. So Redwire is very proud to demonstrate our willingness to invest not only in our own capabilities, but in furthering the American space industrial base, and developing more new capabilities for our team members, as we partner with cutting-edge aerospace firms, to meet our national security needs in the emerging years. So thank you all again, for taking time to help us celebrate this important milestone today. And thank you to the entire Redwire Space Systems team. We're extremely proud of our people. Without them, none of this is possible.
I applaud you for your commitment to our mission and to execution excellence. Thank you to the Redwire executive leadership team. We appreciate our company's commitment to long-term growth, but most importantly, thank you to our customers and our partners. We truly appreciate the trust you place in us, and we're excited to grow with you. I'm personally looking forward to filling the rafters in this building with mission banners from our shared successes. Now it's time to get to work. Thank you.
All right. Should we cut a ribbon? Yeah! What? All right, I would love to invite our executive leadership team up, starting with Pete Cannito, our CEO, Jon Baliff, our CFO, Al Tadros, our Chief Technology Officer, Mike Gold, our Chief Growth Officer, Tom Campbell, our Chief Operations Officer, and Dean Bellamy, EVP for National Security Space. In addition, I'd love to invite our special guests, our congressional delegation here. Please come on up, as well as our guest speakers. All right. Is there a ribbon? All right, if we could bring the ribbon and scissors up. All right. So you're gonna be, you'll be right here.
I'm here?
Yep. You're gonna be up here. Next to- James, you're here. Chris, you're...
Oh, there's... He's running with scissors.
All right, we have to squeeze in here, guys. All right, we're gonna be prom style. Looks like there's just a laser. All right, it's a little-
There's a-
For sure.
It's a mechanical device.
Hey, Robert, we're gonna center the ribbon a little bit more. Three, two, one! We'll have our guests sit back down.
Can we stand here?
That'd be great. Thank you. All right, we're gonna have three short talks from thought leaders within our industry. We're gonna start with Robert Beletic from the OEDIT office in Colorado.
Thanks. Pete, look what you've built. This is amazing. Congratulations to you. And Adam, I tell you, that list you gave in your speech, you know, most people would like to just have one of those accomplishments, where you listed all the things your company's doing. Congratulations. So I'm Bob Beletic. I work for the state of Colorado as the Aerospace and Defense Industry Manager. On behalf of Governor Polis and Lieutenant Governor Primavera, I just wanna really say congratulations to Redwire and to everybody who's part of this effort. As a guy who spent 34 years in the military, I can tell you, the warfighter thanks Redwire for everything you do. It's really important. A couple things about Colorado I'd like to brag on. Do you know Colorado has the best aerospace ecosystem on the planet?
And that's not an exaggeration. I'll tell you why I say that. We have more people working in aerospace per capita than any other state or nation on this earth, and we have the second-largest aerospace economy here in the United States. California's a little bit ahead of us. We're gonna catch them, but they also have 7 x the amount of people. So here, what we have here is really dense. Obviously, it goes from here at Redwire through Boulder. Denver and Colorado Springs is where probably 95% of it. So it's very dense, and we're very proud of it. Here in Colorado, our aerospace industry has grown 32% in the last five years, which is phenomenal. That's 14% over the national average, and I think it's because of a lot of reasons.
We have all these assets here, you know, industry that none's better represented than Redwire, leading our industry. We have government. We have U.S. Space Force. Three of our six Space Force bases of our country are here in this state. SpaceCom's here. We have world-class universities and federal labs. CU Boulder, of course, is one of the universities that's real close to here. More aerospace students than any other university on the planet. One out of every four astronautical engineering PhDs comes out of Boulder, which is incredible. So anyway, I just want to say on behalf of the state, we're really happy Redwire's here. We hope you continue to grow and find success here. It's my job to make you succeed, so let me know how I can help you. And thanks for allowing the state to say a few words.
Thank you, Bob, for all the work you do, supporting the state. Next, I'd love to introduce Les Johnson from Marshall Space Flight Center.
Well, I'm thrilled to be here today because behind you on the floor is the culmination of several years' work for a new type of propulsion system that's gonna revolutionize our exploration of the solar system. I'm at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, where I've spent 30 years of my career working for NASA, and my job is to primarily work on advanced in-space propulsion. Solar sails is a part of that. And being at NASA Marshall, those of you who know that, that's a rocket center. It's a transportation center. But I don't do no stinking rockets, okay? Rockets are great for getting us the first 300 miles into space. That baby's gonna get us the next 3 billion, okay?
So I wanna let you know, and I, I can't take for granted, that people here in the audience, that everybody knows how a solar sail works, 'cause that's a pretty grand claim for me to say that. A Solar Sail is a propulsion system. It's kind of the ultimate green propulsion. It doesn't require fuel. After a rocket takes it to space, that big sail will unfurl, and you only see one-fourth of it here. He mentioned the size of this building. That full sail, if we were to deploy all four identical quadrants instead of the just one that's back there, it would take up most of the floor area of this building. It'd be 17,800 sq ft. It's 2.5 microns thick in the sail. For those of you that aren't follicly challenged, that's about the thickness of your hair, okay?
You'll be able to pick up pieces of it over there, and I have a sample here that's on a backing, so it's not too flimsy. But the way a sail works is that it reflects sunlight. Light made out of photons, they each have momentum. Going back to college physics here, sorry. A quick tutorial, I get in my professorial mode. But the light reflects from the sail, and just like wind reflects from a sailing boat's sail on the lake, the light pushes on it, and how you steer is by tipping and tilting the sail to change the angle that the light reflects off of it. So with that, you can accelerate, you can decelerate, you can change your inclination.
Now, scientists are excited about this because in propulsion speak, you're limited to where you can go by how much propulsion you can get out of your system, how much rocket propellant you can cram on board to give you what's called Delta- V. Okay, that's the change in velocity to accelerate your spacecraft to go to various locations. Most rockets don't give you much, okay? So, over their lifetime, meters per second, hundreds of meters per second. That solar sail, when it flies in space, will give 2-3 kilometers per second per year of propulsive capability. Now, it's limited right now to small spacecraft, 100-pound, 200-pound, maybe 250-pound spacecraft, inner solar system where the sun shines. But I'm a dreamer, okay?
The reason I got involved in solar sails about 20 years ago, and I've been pushing it so hard, is I firmly believe that your grandchildren are gonna launch robotic probes to Alpha Centauri, and they're gonna be propelled by laser-driven light sails, taking spacecraft to explore the exoplanets that we're discovering with the James Webb Space Telescope and all the fantastic astronomy that's going on. In my day job, I'm working on providing a propulsion system with our partners here at Redwire, NeXolve, Ball Aerospace, and at the Marshall Space Flight Center, who are responsible for what you see back there, to give this capability to scientists to advance our state-of-the-art knowledge and to go places we haven't been before today. But I'm selfish. I want this baby to be the initial step to the stars. Thank you very much.
If you have questions about the sail, please feel free to ask. You can tell I'm not passionate at all about this. So have a good afternoon.
All right. Thank you, Les. Our final speaker will be Dr. Brad Tousley from Elara Nova. Come on up, Brad.
Yeah, on behalf of Elara Nova, a pleasure to be here today and to celebrate with Redwire the opening of this new facility. For those of you that might think, "What? What is Elara Nova?" It's what's called the space consultancy. It was an organization that was stood up last summer by former current space professionals, retired military, and civilian personnel. Kim Crider, Roger Teets, Jettie Papazian, and Mike Dickey, along with General Hyten and General Lyles, stood it up, and it was to provide support from a national security and a commercial standpoint to emerging space organizations and businesses in the United States. What you're doing today, the opening of this facility, is exactly the example of the kind of capability that Elara Nova is supporting, and I congratulate you on that.
The way I think about it is, you know, economic power is military power. Domestic manufacturing is military capability. You're in an industry and an economy that's growing rapidly. As Bob said, the state of Colorado is at the forefront of it, the Front Range, whether it's the universities, whether it's the small, medium, and large businesses, whether it's the military organizations that are here, it is central to the ability of the United States to operate in, through, and from space, and there's nothing terrestrially successful in the United States today or globally that can operate without space. So it's critical. From a business perspective, obviously, the solar sail is critical. I just love when I came in, seeing an anechoic chamber, having understood the criticality of these critical facilities.
I was at Ball for a while, and I was at Raytheon for a while. These facilities are in short supply. They are so needed. So the fact that your leadership has taken the step forward from a capital equipment standpoint and put that in place is critical, and I applaud you for it. From the standpoint of supporting academics and institutions and universities, you're providing a place for future jobs and for students and young employees to grow their careers, that's a big, big deal. And because of that, you're making the state of Colorado and the local communities even better. So with that, I just want to congratulate you on this new facility. Look forward to seeing all the great things that come from it, and as a Niwot Longmont resident, makes me even happier. So thank you.
All right. Well, thank you. That concludes the first portion of our event today. Next, we're gonna move into tours, and we have several exhibits set up around the building. We're really excited to show and show off some physical hardware, and we have experts within Redwire presenting at the booths. So, everyone here has a badge. On your badge, there's either an A, B, or C. So the A group is going to go to this RF chamber first. You're gonna be led by Dean Bellamy, our EVP of National Security Space. So, where's Dean?
There.
There's Dean right there. He's got a big... Oh, right there. You can't miss him, or you can't miss the chamber, I'll say, for sure. All right. Group B will be heading off into this area over here. Dana Turse will be your lead. Where's Dana? There she is, right there. So you can see, she's waving her hand. So we'll move over in that direction, and then finally, group C will be led by Al Tadros, our Chief Technology Officer, right here. He's got a big sign. Thank you, and he'll be starting off in this area. I'll ask our Longmont staff to remain in the area here, and that'd be great. Thank you so much!