By GREGORY ZELLER //
As the billionaire space race and other final-frontier fantasies rekindle earthlings’ interest in traveling to the stars, one Long Island rainmaker is hoping to save Long Island’s socioeconomic future by recapturing its spaced-out past.
And Matthew Cohen, the Long Island Association’s freshly minted president and CEO, is taking his case right to the top.
On Thursday, Cohen penned a letter to magnates Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson extolling Long Island’s unique “space research and business capabilities” and imploring the three billionaires to consider centering at least part of their space-exploration attention on Nassau and Suffolk counties.
Branson, owner of California-based spaceflight trailblazer Virgin Galactic, made history this week as a passenger on his company’s proprietary space plane, the VSS Unity, earning him the crown of “first billionaire in space.” He beat out Bezos, executive chairman of Amazon and head of Washington State-based suborbital spaceflight venture Blue Origin, by mere days: Bezos is slated to ride Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket into space on July 20.
Musk, whose California-based aerospace manufacturer SpaceX is arguably more accomplished than the other two billionaire-backed ventures, figures to be the third of the three to actually slip Earth’s surly bonds: Reports say he’s booked a Virgin Galactic spaceflight for sometime after Virgin Galactic’s commercial operations begin in 2022.
Matthew Cohen: Space man.
While all three financiers have based their extraplanetary operations out west – including SpaceX’s Texas-based “Starship launch tower,” which is currently experiencing a regulatory glitch – Cohen notes in his letter that Long Island is no stranger to aerospace advancement and space exploration.
Way back at the beginning of the 20th Century, the Island was an arrival and departure point for the earliest transcontinental flights; during World War II, the Bethpage-based Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp. delivered more than 17,000 combat planes for the American war effort; and of course, between 1961 and 1972, Grumman engineers built NASA’s lunar modules, including the Apollo landing craft that first put men on the moon 52 years ago this week.
In his Twitter-delivered communique, Cohen mentions Long Island’s “unique place in history in the space race” (and notes that Grumman, now Northrop Grumman, has been “an LIA member since 1960”).
He also references the presence of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Upton-based Brookhaven National Laboratory and notes BNL is already “conducting research with NASA on the impacts of cosmic radiation to humans” – potentially, “an important consideration [for] the space-tourism industry.”
And of paramount importance to the innovative space-travel pioneers, Cohen notes that Long Island boasts “a highly skilled and educated workforce,” courtesy of the multitude of “well-respected engineering programs” at the Island’s myriad universities.
Ready for takeoff: Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket is ready to carry Jeff Bezos to space next week.
Before signing off, the LIA president asks Bezos, Musk and Branson to “consider our vast manufacturing and research capabilities as you continue with your landmark efforts to make the last frontier a destination” – and invites the billionaires to “DM me of you want to chat about this more.”
Far from a PR stunt, the letter is a serious stab at a major socioeconomic score, according to Cohen, who ascended to the LIA presidency in June – after a decade as the association’s government relations director – and “thought the best way to get their attention was to send (a letter) directly through Twitter.”
“I wanted to take advantage of all of the money being poured into space tourism,” Cohen told Innovate Long Island. “These companies should know about Long Island’s history in the space race and also what’s happening right now.
“Not only is world-class research taking place at Brookhaven National Lab in partnership with NASA, but we still have a thriving aerospace sector that can participate in the supply chain of these companies,” he added. “Hopefully, we will get some traction on social media so this gets noticed by larger companies that are working on space discovery.”
