The Space Review by Jeff Foust 3/16/2026
In 2023, the Texas state government made a big bet on growing the state’s space industry. It appropriated $350 million for state space projects, including the creation of the Texas Space Commission. The commission was charged with disbursing $150 million of that funding for companies and organizations in the state (see “A whole other spacefaring country”, The Space Review, March 10, 2025.)
That first phase of the commission’s work is now complete. Last month, the commission’s board of directors approved a $14.15 million award to the Rice Space Institute at Rice University to create a Center for Space Technologies. The center would work on technologies for sustainable human lunar exploration and in situ resource utilization.
That award was the last of the $150 million allocated by the legislature. (Rice’s application was actually for $16 million in funding; the commission said it would work with the university to refine the scope of the project to fit into the available funding.) The $150 million went to 24 projects intended to support the state’s space industry, from factories and test facilities to a study of an inland spaceport in West Texas.
The demand for the funding was far greater than what the legislature appropriated: there were 280 proposals from 140 organizations with a combined value of $3.4 billion. “There was a helluva demand signal,” said Kathy Lueders, vice chair of the commission, at the SpaceCom Expo in Orlando in late January. “I don’t think any of us realized we were going to get 280 grant proposals.”
With an average grant size of a little more than $6 million, and none bigger than $20 million, the grants are relatively small compared to the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars needed by companies to develop spacecraft, launch vehicles, and other space capabilities. But companies that received grants say they have been enabling in ways beyond the money itself.
Venus Aerospace, a Houston company developing rotating-detonation rocket engines for use on hypersonic vehicles and orbital launch vehicles, received $3.9 million to build a test stand.
“We'll be able to do six-minute runs in the middle of the city,” said Sassie Duggleby, CEO and co-founder of Venus Aerospace, during a panel at the AIAA ASCENDxTexas conference in Houston last month. “That asset has then allowed us to go raise another round of venture capital funding.” (Duggleby is on the board of directors of the commission but noted she was recused from consideration of her company’s grant application.)
Firefly Aerospace, in the Austin suburb of Cedar Park, received $8.2 million to help build a spacecraft development center. It came as the company was ramping up production of lunar landers.
“We start seeing that our infrastructure is starting to get strained with trying to get to rate on our missions,” said Shea Ferring, Firefly’s chief technology officer. “We already had the contracts, we already had the momentum to move forward. This is just a bonus that helps us perform on contracts we already have.”
Other companies have used the grants to develop new products. Intuitive Machines received $10 million to work on a reentry capsule designed to return experiments and products from orbit.
The grant will mature the design of that reentry vehicle through a critical design review, said Tim Crain, chief technology officer of Intuitive Machines. “That investment has allowed us to go and have some very interesting conversations with a customer base that, otherwise, would have considered us just PowerPoint.”
He added it took a little time to figure out how to best work with the state. “It's not overly onerous, which is different than what most of us in the space business who work with the federal government are used to. It just took an iteration of my business processes to align this way.”
More:
https://thespacereview.com/article/5179/1
