Arizona aims to become key player in trillion-dollar space economy Article originally posted on HERE on May 5, 2026 PHOENIX — Florida, California, Texas, even New Mexico. Those are the states people think of when they think about space. Arizona wants to change that. Representatives of Arizona’s space industry gathered Wednesday at the Hyatt in downtown Phoenix for the “Space Congress” event to map out how the state can become a major player in the growing commercial space economy. Brett Mecum of the Arizona Space Commission says the state is already closer than most people realize. “Arizona has all the ingredients to be one of the rising space states,” he said. “We might have been a little bit quiet on the space front, but we have a lot of the pieces of the puzzle right here in Arizona.” The pitch isn’t a hard one to make. Arizona already has deep roots in the space industry. Every Apollo astronaut who walked on the moon trained in Arizona, mostly at Meteor Crater near Flagstaff. Mecum says that tradition continues with NASA’s Artemis program. Northrop Grumman built part of a planned lunar space station in Gilbert. Blue Origin has offices in the state. Virgin Galactic, which launches spacecraft from a carrier plane, builds its spacecraft at Mesa Gateway Airport, though it currently launches from New Mexico. Mecum says that could eventually change. “I think that’s something that we can look at down the road as well,” he said. Two spaceports are already in the planning stages, one near Yuma and another near Sierra Vista. Taryn Struck, co-founder of Space Rising – the group that organized the event – says the opportunity is enormous. “The whole industry will be worth a trillion dollars in the next decade. And Arizona wants to really be a leader in this,” she said. Mecum says the state is positioned to capture a significant share of that growth. “We’re looking at a tripling of the space economy within 10 years. And Arizona has primed that, basically have a big piece of that,'” he said.