Most Austin and Texas companies come to South By Southwest’s Interactive Festival to woo customers or seek employees.
One company, Cedar Park’s Firefly Aerospace comes just to show off their rocket engines. Firefly’s Eric Salwan says many people don’t know there’s a rocket maker in their backyard. “Our business is not going to be developed from coming to South By, but we just want people to know,hey, we’re in Austin and we’re doing incredible things.”
It’s the second year in a row the rocket engine manufacturer has appeared at the Interactive Festival. Firefly had some shaky moments when initial investors backed out but Salwan says now they’re on better financial footing. “We’re fully financed through launch. We have a great team that we’ve put together. We have almost 200 employees in Austin and 300 worldwide.”
Firefly’s Steve Gorkosch (Go-korsh) says times are good in the aerospace industry. “Business is actually great! The new space business is booming.” He goes on to say “Some people say ‘do you worry about competition?’ Not really, there’s so much business out there that all we got to do is get it up in the air and we’re good to go.”
Firefly plans to expand their rocket engine manufacturing and testing facility in Briggs, and will have a launch pad at Cape Canaveral Florida.
(Photo by Newsradio KLBJ staff)
