Why Choose the Midwest as a Headquarters
As a space tech and deep tech startup, we've been asked why we chose to site our headquarters inMichigan with offices in Indianapolis and the UK. One reason is the talent pool the Midwest. South-east Michigan has the largest concentration of engineers in the US. There are large numbers of engineers covering everything including mechanical, electrical, software, industrial, materials, and chemical engineering. The cities of Detroit, Dearborn, and Warren are top employment centers for almost every engineering discipline.
With plans to leverage high volume manufacturing to commercialize space based solar power (SBSP), the skills and experience base needs to cover a lot of disciplines.
Remote work and relocation can bring talent from anywhere. However, having a deep pool of talent locally speeds everything up. For rapid learning with manufacturing on a new product, it is hard to beat having the engineering and manufacturing team co-located. That way, they can work together around prototypes and manufacturing operations to troubleshoot and resolve problems quickly.
Michigan also offers a quality of life with top rated cities like Ann Arbor [1] within commuting distance of the major engineering centers. It has top rated research universities like the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and Michigan Technological University.
Data from Bureau of Labor Statistics [2] shows how dense the Detroit-Dearborn-Warren cluster is with engineering employment and the eco-system that surrounds it. We're located so we can grow using it.
