PITTSBURGH — The photographs hang near the front of the building, and John Thornton walks visitors past them the way some fathers show off old Little League pictures.
Here is a rover he and his colleagues built some 15 years ago. Here is a larger rover photographed at night on a western Pennsylvania slag heap, which, it turns out, looks a lot like the surface of the moon once you light it up.
Then comes the photograph he is proudest of: Pittsburgh’s first spacecraft in space, the sun tucked behind a small crossbeam so the camera could hold the shot.
That spacecraft, the Peregrine lander, launched in January 2024 and suffered a propellant leak hours after liftoff that ended any chance of a landing. “We had an issue,” Thornton said. “That’s a whole other story.”
Behind him, technicians were working on the next one. Griffin, a lander bound for the moon’s south pole, passed acceptance testing at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in October and came home to the North Side for final work before heading to Cape Canaveral, Florida. It will carry 10 payloads from six countries.
“When Griffin touches down, it will be the largest commercial payload delivery in lunar history,” said Dylan Taylor, Voyager’s chairman and chief executive.
The company that built it no longer goes by the name on the old photographs. Colorado-based Voyager Technologies announced in June that it would buy Astrobotic Technology and closed the deal in July, paying a reported $300 million.
“We’re officially Voyager,” said Thornton, who led Astrobotic as chief executive and is now Voyager’s executive vice president of lunar systems.
The deal did not swallow Pittsburgh. If anything, it went the other way.
Thornton came to Pittsburgh from New Jersey to attend Carnegie Mellon University. According to Keystone Space Collaborative founder Justine Kasznica, he turned down an internship at Boeing in Seattle to stay in Pittsburgh and join Astrobotic. Carnegie Mellon robotics pioneer Red Whittaker founded the company in 2007 to compete for the Google Lunar X Prize.
Nobody ever won the prize, “but it gave us a platform to start to talk about it and be a little less crazy,” Thornton said.
What he describes next is less a story about space than about Pittsburgh.
“Pittsburgh is, I think, a city of grit, ultimately, and I think we’re a product of that and product of our environment,” he said. “It was tough to raise money here, so we ended up not really raising any money. We only raised $2.5 million to Astrobotic and turned that into $600 million-plus in NASA contracts before acquisition.”
Voyager’s federal contracts totaled more than $600 million before the acquisition, including work for both NASA and the Pentagon, according to the company. After Voyager bought Astrobotic, NASA awarded the company another roughly $298 million to send a second Peregrine lander to the moon in 2028.
Kasznica remembers the early pitch meetings: “The VCs would literally laugh and be like, ‘A space company in Pittsburgh?’”
Thornton said 99% of the machined parts on the shop floor were made in the Pittsburgh region.
Kasznica’s own path was even less likely. She grew up in Boston, went to Yale University and Rutgers Law School, and came to Pittsburgh to clerk for Judge Thomas Hardiman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. The plan was Washington, New York, or back to Boston.
“I’m like a hillbilly dressed in a lawyer’s clothing,” she said. “I need my space. I need to be able to be myself. You can’t get that in Boston.”
She stayed, built a practice in robotics, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence, and space, and served as Astrobotic’s outside general counsel for 15 years. She is now a partner at the Babst Calland law firm downtown.
“There’s real space and permission to build here,” she said. “This is a really awesome proving ground.” The region still has “a problem going from proving ground to scale, but we can work on that.”
Thornton thinks the company’s future runs through a problem western Pennsylvania knows well: energy.
A lunar day, he explained, brings about 14 Earth days of heat above boiling, then two weeks of night he described as “liquid nitrogen cold.”
“The future of the moon is not just landing and operating for a few days,” he said. “The future of the moon is landing and operating for years.”
His answer is LunaGrid, a commercial power service for the lunar poles built on tall vertical solar arrays. Thornton said they would stand on south-pole peaks that stay sunlit almost year-round, with batteries to bridge short nights, and the power would be sold to other customers on the surface.
“Western Pennsylvania built a grid,” Kasznica said. Bringing that capability to space, she argued, “That’s going to unlock a new industrial powerhouse.”
Thornton offered one amendment: The future is solar and nuclear, not nuclear alone.
“Solar is still going to be cheaper,” he said, though nuclear will be needed to reach permanently shadowed craters.
About 225 people work at the North Side site, most of them engineers representing nearly every engineering discipline, Thornton said. The company is hiring roughly 20 additional workers a month at that location alone.
“It’s essentially as fast as we can possibly hire,” he said.
Many are what he calls Pittsburgh boomerangers, people who left to work in space and can now come home. Others come from Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Pennsylvania State University. Not every job requires a four-year degree — some of the technicians building spacecraft used to be car or aircraft mechanics.
“It’s just people that are really good with their hands,” Thornton said.
In a lab off the main floor, thermal engineer Simeon Frank was testing low-temperature lithium-ion batteries in a thermal vacuum chamber that strips out the air and swings the temperature between hot and cold to mimic space. Frank, who grew up in southwest Missouri, worked on communications satellites in the San Francisco Bay Area before moving here three years ago.
“I like the affordability, but also the big-city amenities,” he said. In his South Side Flats neighborhood, he can get around on foot or by bike, and families with young children gather at local parks.
The recruiting problem pushed Kasznica to found the Keystone Space Collaborative, a nonprofit organization that supports the space industry across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. Recruits, she said, often worried about moving to a city with only one space company.
“There’s so much more space happening here that no one was telling the story,” she said. “Space got lost. There was robotics and later AI.”
An early volunteer mapping effort with Carnegie Mellon turned up more than 100 NASA prime contractors in the region within two months. Keystone now counts 1,124 space industry firms in the tri-state region that together landed more than $9.5 billion in federal work between 2022 and 2026.
That pitch got its biggest audience yet on Oct. 27, when NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, a Pennsylvania resident, delivered the closing keynote at Keystone’s annual conference at the Omni William Penn Hotel downtown. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) introduced him.
“The demand and opportunity for Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia is already here,” Isaacman said at the event. “You know hardware, you know software, and there is no need to wait for somebody in Washington to declare this as a space corridor.”
Pennsylvania has no NASA center, but neighboring Ohio and West Virginia do: the Glenn Research Center and the Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation Facility, respectively. Kasznica sees both as resources for the region’s growing space industry. Capito “has been with us from Day 1,” she said, and Voyager regularly recruits from West Virginia University: “They’re strong workers with that grit.”
“If we do this right, 10 years from now, we will be the go-to place for space supply chain for the country, space talent for the country,” she said. “Build new companies, allow more Astrobotics to be born out of the universities, grow the existing companies and support the existing companies that you have, like Voyager and others, and then attract. That should be the economic development rinse-repeat story.”
The building also houses the Moonshot Museum, run by the Astrobotic Foundation, where visitors can watch lunar spacecraft being built.
“The mantra we always had was making space accessible to the world,” Kasznica said. “And one of the ways that we wanted to make it accessible is to actually have a window to people working in the space industry.”
A few steps away is mission control: rows of seats for engineers, screens across the front, mission patches on the wall. When launch time comes, this is where Pittsburgh will steer a spacecraft to the moon.