"Growing up, if your parents didn't work for NASA or the army, they were weird," says one lifelong resident of Huntsville, Alabama. Huntsville was a sleepy Southern town until World War II, when the sprawling Redstone Arsenal was built nearby. By 1950 the installation had become the centre of American rocket science as the US developed missiles and, eventually, a space programme. In 1960, the Marshall Spaceflight Center was opened as NASA's main rocketry and propulsion laboratory, and the Huntsville area has been hotbed of technical innovation ever since.

Huntsville is the nerve centre of the half-million-strong metropolitan area and has been represented by Mayor Tommy Battle since 2008. As the economic, technical and social hub of northern Alabama (and parts of neighbouring Tennessee), Huntsville tends to punch above its weight on the national political scene, and Alabama's star is rising as it attracts foreign manufacturers eager to expand in US markets. Mayor Battle is in Paris as part of Alabama's full-strength push to attract more business to the state.

Why should I, as a defence business, move to Huntsville?

Number one, you're going to be close to the command that's actually doing the work. Number two, you've got a workforce that's ready-made to do engineering, to do production, that can do what the aviation field does. Number three, you've got a business-friendly environment here. And then finally, the reason you want to come here is you can make a profit. We're running 92% of the national mean as the cost of doing business, and most of the places that you're going to look at with high concentrations of engineers, whether it's East Coast or West Coast, are 108%, 110% of the national mean; you've got an 18% advantage just by coming to Huntsville, Alabama.

Tommy Battle
 

Alabama makes a big splash at Paris. What's Huntsville's contribution?

We'll support the trip by going over and meeting with different clients over there, and it'll be a myriad of meetings. You'll go over and meet with the upper-level management of a lot of companies that are located here, but then we'll work with some other companies that have opened offices and have one or two men, and we'll work with them to try to show them that there's a reason to add a few more people to the payrolls over here, there's a reason those programmes ought to be executed in Huntsville.

It's just like when you go to Quad-A or AUASA, half the people are in our town. But the other half need to be in our town, because they do business in our town, or they do business with some of the agencies out at Redstone Arsenal or at Marshall Spaceflight Center.

In which sectors of the industry does Huntsville have particular expertise?

It's an interesting overlap of synergies here. You've got unmanned aerial vehicles you've got a helicopter command, you've got missiles, and every one of them has overlapping expertise areas. Every one of them uses sensors, every one of them uses miniaturisation, every one of them uses command centres and navigation.

When you look across the board, that's one of the things that is a sale point for Huntsville; whatever your needs are, somebody out here is working on it. That's part of the synergy of our area; when you start looking across all the disciplines that we have, we can cross-pollinate between the different organisations, and that pollenisation is starting here at Redstone Arsenal. That's a big step for government agencies.

Who are you meeting with in Paris?

We've got several specific companies. I can't tell you which ones, but we're targeting several that we think could have better bases here in Huntsville. I don't want to put them on the spot, but they will be some of the larger companies in the aerospace field. They are companies that are doing some business here but we think that they could do more. One of them has been without a president or a local director of operations for a while, and we need to talk to them about who they're looking at, to make sure that they've got somebody in place so that they can help themselves do business here.

How did Huntsville fare with recent US defence spending decisions?

You look across the board at it. The tanker loss was an industrial loss for south Alabama, and we would love to see south Alabama have that success, but Boeing won it, and that's 200-300 jobs in the city of Huntsville.

When we have competing industries that both have bases here we don't get involved, but we support whoever wins, and we will support them afterwards. The heavy lift engine has to come, and has to be designed, to get us into deep space. You've got to have a heavy-lift that can get you into deep space, whether it's the moon, Mars or an asteroid.

The biggest thing that we keep hammering with our Congressional delegation is that we have to keep pushing NASA, and NASA needs to espouse a mission, where that mission's going to go and how it will get there. It's really one of those things that has not been on the White House's radar. SLS, which is the heavy-lift engine programme, has been moved to Huntsville.

Previously, work was done here but it was administered out of somewhere else. That's a great thing for us. But we have got to have a clearly defined mission and goal for NASA. We think we know what it is our next step is to take that next journey.

How long has Huntsville had a presence in Paris and other shows?

Usually it's the Paris air show one year, and it's Farnborough the next. It's a very consistent thing. We send 20-40 people consistently. We have been in the Far East several times, we have had trade trips to China this year, and we have had trade trips to Japan. We have an international partnership with Japan, an industrial dinner in the state of Alabama that we participate in. We have 60 foreign companies located in Huntsville, which calls for us to have infrastructure for them.

We have foreign military sales out of Huntsville. We sent about $600 million of modified Bell helicopters over to Iraq. The United Arab Emirates has a multi-billion dollar contract for Patriot missiles. Foreign sales are going to be important to us, especially if you have a shrinking military base and a shrinking military dollar. It keeps our companies busy and keeps those synergies alive.

Do you have any formal international representation, such as consulates?

No, we don't have any consulates. Out of the foreign military sales we're going to see different countries setting up offices here. I would suspect that over the next 10 years that they will start setting up offices to deal with the foreign military sales. Mine is mainly a suspicion just because of the amount of activity that is coming in. The protocol office will tell you every once and a while, that we're having groups all the way from Australia, the Middle East, the Far East and Europe coming in on a regular basis, looking at technologies and equipment available here that they can buy, rather than develop them on their own.

What countries are most prominent in Huntsville today?

Several from the Middle East, Argentina and South American companies have some presence. Australia has a regular group that comes over and visits. There may be delegations from their countries, and once every one or two weeks we'll sit down with a delegation from another country. Lately, we've been having a lot of people from the former Soviet republics coming in.

Source: Flight Daily News