As reported today in Dale Denwalt’s terrific dispatch in The Oklahoman, a Stillwater company built precision components for Artemis II—the first crewed lunar mission in more than fifty years.
Someone in Oklahoma got a spec sheet for a moon rocket and said, “sure, we can do that.”
A few weeks ago I wrote about Sandy Roark, an 86-year-old woman from Shawnee who spent years without a diagnosis, then years more without a treatment. The drug that eventually reversed her decline was developed in laboratories at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. She’s still here. Still no symptoms. The science that saved her life started in Oklahoma City.
These things don’t happen by accident.
They happen because someone built the capability before the opportunity arrived and because there was enough investment in the right places to make the work possible.
That’s the context I keep bringing to Aerospace Week.
Rep. Nick Archer put it well when I talked to him earlier this year: the difference between a project and a platform. A project produces one outcome. A platform produces conditions for more outcomes. The Stillwater manufacturer is a platform. OMRF is a platform.
What Oklahoma is trying to figure out right now is how to build more of them.
The Legislature is moving several bills this session that, taken together, point in the same direction.
SB 1530 creates a rebate program to reward companies doing serious R&D in Oklahoma, with an added incentive when they partner with a state university. SB 1670 updates how Oklahoma universities handle intellectual property from research, including competitive compensation for inventors and explicit encouragement of aerospace and defense development.
HB 3942 and SB 1990 strengthen how the state evaluates whether its economic incentives are actually working, not just whether they exist, but whether they’re doing what they were designed to do. And HB 4392 creates pilot sites and shared infrastructure for advanced air mobility, giving emerging aviation companies somewhere in Oklahoma to test and scale.
None of these bills is a moonshot on its own.
Together they’re trying to answer a practical question: if a company wants to do serious research and development work, does Oklahoma make that easy? Does it reward the investment? Does it have the infrastructure, the partners, the talent pipeline?
The Stillwater components on a rocket bound for lunar orbit suggest the answer can be yes. So does Sandy Roark still living her life in Shawnee.
As the Reverend Mother tells Lady Jessica in Dune (a fictional yet still relevant universe): “A path has been laid. Let’s hope he doesn’t squander it.”
Swap in Oklahoma for he. The rest tracks.
Luke Reynolds is the managing editor of Oklahoma Business Voice. He can be reached at luke@okstatechamber.com.
