On January 23rd, 2026, a groundbreaking ceremony took place at Tulsa International Airport for a $20 million rocket engine testing facility.
Agile Space Industries spent 15 years building propulsion systems in Colorado before deliberately choosing Tulsa for its new Space Test Center, a world-class hub that will serve NASA, commercial space companies, and the U.S. Department of Defense. Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine called it the foundation for “a Tulsa Space Park that will drive future space innovation.”
Agile’s decision reflects a broader trend: the commercial space economy is expanding beyond traditional coastal hubs, and regions like the Midcontinent are beginning to attract serious attention from both industry and capital.
Here’s the opportunity: space companies can be built almost anywhere with the right infrastructure and talent, but venture capital remains highly concentrated on the coasts. This mismatch creates an opening for regions that can offer what coastal hubs increasingly cannot: cost structure, manufacturing heritage, and operational scale.
The Midcontinent — Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas — has natural advantages in this race: decades of aerospace manufacturing heritage, energy sector expertise that translates directly to complex systems engineering, and cost structures that allow companies to significantly extend their runway.
The question is whether founders, investors, and policymakers will recognize it in time.
The Space Economy Is Becoming Commercial
For most of modern history, space belonged to governments.
Not because the private sector lacked ambition, but because the cost of entry made it impossible. The United States spent roughly $257 billion to reach the moon between 1960 and 1973. At its peak, NASA accounted for 4.5% of the federal budget. For context, NASA’s entire 2024 budget was $25.4 billion, which is less than what the agency spent in a single peak year during Apollo, adjusted for inflation.
This is changing dramatically.
Over the past 15 years, space technology has transformed from a government-dominated domain to a commercial opportunity. Low Earth Orbit (LEO) launch costs have fallen 20x from the Space Shuttle era, and the number of active satellites in orbit has exploded from 3,371 in 2020 to roughly 11,500 by the end of 2024, a 3.4x increase in just four years.
According to Goldman Sachs research, tens of thousands of additional satellites will be launched over the coming years, with as many as 70,000 satellites expected to be launched by 2030. Their base case projects the satellite market will grow from $15 billion in 2025 to $108 billion by 2035, with optimistic scenarios reaching as high as $457 billion.
When getting to orbit becomes affordable at scale, entirely new business models become viable.
Founders across the globe are taking advantage of this opportunity. Satellite broadband is connecting the unconnected. In-space manufacturing is moving from concept to contract. Companies like NUVIEW, an Orlando-based company, are using LiDAR technology to map the entire Earth from orbit, unlocking entirely new datasets that didn’t exist five years ago.
Concepts that felt like science fiction a decade ago are now on term sheets.
The Capital Is Flowing, But Not Everywhere
According to Space Capital’s Q4 2025 report, 2025 was a record year for space investment: $55.3 billion raised in venture capital, with $17 billion coming in Q4 alone. Over the past decade, more than $347.7 billion has been invested into over 2,300 space companies. McKinsey and the World Economic Forum project the global space economy will reach $1.8 trillion by 2035.
But here’s what the macro view doesn’t show: this capital is not distributed evenly.
While China and Europe invested €1.9 billion and €1.5 billion respectively in space startups in 2024, the United States still leads in commercial space innovation. But for the first time since 2019, America attracted less than half of global space investment. The lead is shrinking, and the race is accelerating.
And within the U.S., venture capital remains highly concentrated: California captured roughly 49% of all U.S. venture capital in 2024, while the Midwest claimed just 4%. The South’s share fell from 23% to around 12% between Q1 2023 and Q1 2024, according to Carta.
This creates a strategic opening: Space infrastructure can be built in regions with strong aerospace heritage and lower operating costs. But the flow of capital doesn’t reflect this reality yet.
The commercial space economy is no longer hypothetical. It’s scaling quickly, and the regions that build early infrastructure, and attract the capital to support it, will shape where and how this industry grows.
Why the Midcontinent?
When people think of the space industry, they picture coastal hubs: SpaceX in Hawthorne or Blue Origin in Kent. But the Midcontinent has been quietly building an aerospace foundation for decades, and it’s structurally positioned to capture a meaningful share of this market..
The Heritage Is Already Here.
Oklahoma is home to Tinker Air Force Base, one of the largest aerospace maintenance and logistics complexes in the world, along with a deep bench of Boeing and Lockheed Martin supply chain companies. Oklahoma didn’t just support the Space Shuttle program; it built essential pieces of it. Every shuttle that flew carried payload bay doors manufactured at Rockwell International’s Tulsa plant, the largest graphite-epoxy composite components in the world at the time. Tinker AFB’s Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center handled ongoing maintenance and modifications.
Colorado is home to Lockheed Martin Space’s headquarters in Littleton, with roughly 20,000 employees, including the team that designed and built the Orion spacecraft that just carried the first humans to the Moon in over 50 years on Artemis II.
Kansas hosts Wichita, the “Air Capital of the World,” with generations of aerospace manufacturing expertise. New Mexico operates Spaceport America, where Virgin Galactic conducted horizontal takeoff testing and became the third U.S. state to launch humans into space.
The Midcontinent has been building aerospace systems for generations, and this legacy is critical for success.
The Energy-to-Space Workforce
Oil and gas built some of the most sophisticated engineering cultures in the world right here in the Midcontinent. Companies like Devon Energy, Continental Resources, Chesapeake Energy, and Williams Companies developed world-class expertise in complex systems engineering, capital allocation under uncertainty, large-scale operations management, and risk modeling.
As Cortado Ventures has noted, those skills translate directly to automation, advanced manufacturing, AI, aerospace, and defense. The overlap is significant: both industries require expertise in high-pressure systems, complex materials, and large-scale project management. The workforce that built the energy economy has skills applicable to the next frontier.
The Infrastructure and Proof Points
The infrastructure is already in place, with numerous airports, test facilities, and a growing supply chain. The Midcontinent has been building aerospace systems for generations, and the regional proof points are starting to emerge.
The Tulsa Space Test Center proves that cutting-edge space infrastructure can exist outside of California and Florida, and it won’t be the last.
The proof isn’t only in big groundbreakings, too. When Artemis II launched on April 1st, the astronauts flew the Orion spacecraft using hand controllers and switch panels built in Stillwater, Oklahoma, by Frontier Electronic Systems. This is direct proof that world-class space flight and deep space technology can be built successfully in the Midcontinent.
Texas gave us Firefly Aerospace, with $746 million raised in total, most recently closing a $175 million Series D in November 2024 at a $2 billion-plus valuation. They’re launching rockets, with 4–6 flights planned for 2025 and government contracts worth over $93 million from NASA.
Colorado has Sierra Space, with over $2 billion raised since 2021. Sierra Space just closed on their $550 million Series C raise, bringing their valuation to a staggering $8 billion. And the state already proved space exits work: Maxar Technologies was acquired by Advent International for $6.4 billion in May 2023.
New Mexico’s Spaceport America generated $240 million in economic output in 2024, more than tripling since 2019. The facility supports 790 jobs and hosts Virgin Galactic’s commercial spaceflight program, which plans to resume operations in late 2026 with 125 flights per year.
Oklahoma’s aerospace sector generated $8.8 billion in economic output in 2025, supporting over 80,000 jobs. Tinker Air Force Base, the state’s largest single-site employer with 27,000 personnel, contributes $4.5 billion annually and serves as the nation’s largest aircraft and jet engine repair center. The region hosts 338 aerospace firms, and Agile Space’s decision to build its $20 million Space Test Center in Tulsa proves Oklahoma’s infrastructure can attract cutting-edge commercial space companies. The expertise is here. What’s needed now are more catalysts like Agile.
Together, these states form a region with everything space companies need: legacy expertise, federal relationships, manufacturing capability, and cost advantages.
The Capital Mismatch Is the Opportunity
The Midcontinent is structurally advantaged for building space companies, but structurally disadvantaged in accessing capital.
Even Colorado, home to Sierra Space and a growing aerospace corridor, only claimed 3% of national VC in 2024, despite posting the largest year-over-year market share gain of any state except California. The Midwest as a whole claimed just 4% of U.S. venture capital.
But there’s a counter-trend worth watching.
Venture capital investment in the heartland has more than tripled over the past decade to $55 billion, according to Heartland Forward. Oklahoma City has been among the fastest-growing metros for VC investment over that same period.
Midcontinent companies like Firefly and Sierra Space demonstrate that deep tech companies can be built outside Silicon Valley. Cortado Ventures is leaning into this trend with its new $10 million angel fund launched for Oklahoma founders, focused on technology-driven businesses across software, AI, deep tech, and tech-enabled services. While not exclusively focused on space, this fund signals that regional capital is backing frontier technology at exactly the right moment.
The ecosystem is being built, one company, one fund, and one groundbreaking at a time.
The strategic question isn’t whether space can be built in the Midcontinent. It’s whether capital will flow there before the opportunity closes.
The Opportunity and the Risk
In order to build a flourishing ecosystem, we must be clear about the risks. The Midcontinent has real advantages, but advantages don’t automatically mean success.
Critics will point to talent pipelines, and it’s a fair concern. Deep tech companies need specialized engineers, and for years the Midcontinent has lost graduates to coastal hubs. Devon Energy and Expand Energy’s headquarters departures to Houston are a recent and pointed reminder that building a tech economy in the Midcontinent isn’t automatic.
But Oklahoma is resilient. The state is home to 22,000+ tech workers. Tech wages are up 17% over five years. More than 1,000 tech graduates enter the workforce annually. The tech sector contributed $4.2 billion to local GDP in 2023. As Cortado Ventures General Partner Susan Moring put it: while headquarters may move, the talent that built this state does not have to.
The real opportunity is that we’re in the early stage of a massive, still-forming market. Space isn’t like fintech or consumer SaaS, where the incumbents are entrenched and the distribution moats are vast. The commercial space economy is still being built. The supply chains are still being assembled. The regional hubs are still being chosen.
That means the window to establish a meaningful Midcontinent presence is open, but it won’t stay open forever.
What needs to happen next: more Midcontinent VC’s deploying capital into space-adjacent companies, more anchor institutions like Agile Space choosing the region, and more policymakers treating aerospace as the economic development leverage it already is.
Conclusion: The Next Frontier Is Already Here
Space isn’t the Midcontinent’s future. It’s the Midcontinent’s present.
The Tulsa Space Test Center broke ground. Oklahoma-built hardware flew to the Moon. The heritage, the infrastructure, the cost advantages, and the talent are all here. What’s been missing is the narrative, the recognition that this region isn’t just watching the space economy take shape from the sidelines, but it’s actively building it.
The Midcontinent has always been a place that does hard things at scale: extracting energy from the earth, feeding the country, moving goods across a continent. The transition to doing hard things in orbit is a natural evolution of the region’s identity, not a departure from it.
The Midcontinent doesn’t need to compete across the entire space stack. It needs to dominate what it does best: testing infrastructure, manufacturing scale, and defense-aligned systems.
The space economy will be built somewhere. The Midcontinent has the heritage, infrastructure, and cost advantages to claim a significant share of it. What’s needed now is urgency: more founders building here, more investors backing them, and more policymakers recognizing aerospace as the economic lever it already is.
The window is open. The question is how long it stays that way.