FEMALE-FOUNDED SPACE COMPANY SUPPORTS ARTEMIS MISSION TO THE MOON

By Alexandra Sullivan

Every day, Carol Craig walks into her office, which is illuminated in purple light — her favorite color. Her office at Sidus Space overlooks the facility where she can see the product of what she has worked so hard for. She looks out through the glass and sees people hard at work helping her execute her goal of bringing space down to Earth and making it accessible to everybody.

Craig is used to being a woman in a man’s world. The space industry was nothing new after she studied engineering in college and joined the Navy. But this didn’t bother her. For Craig, being a woman in a man’s world meant opportunity.

She was still coming to terms with being considered a role model by owning a company in the space industry as a woman, service-disabled veteran and Hispanic minority. When thinking about how many solely founded female companies have gone public, she discovered there were only 22. Craig is the founder of the first female-founded space company.

Craig incorporated Craig Technologies in 1999, which is an engineering, technology and manufacturing firm based in Cape Canaveral. It provides engineering, software design and development, research, support and other technical services to both government and commercial customers.

She is also the CEO of Sidus Space, which “focuses on commercial satellite design, manufacture, launch, and data collection” to deliver data and analytics to customers. When Sidus Space first started in 2012, it was as a government contractor. Everything changed in December when Sidus Space became a public company and became a commercial satellite constellation operator.

The team at Sidus Space plans on having 100 satellites in space by 2026. Craig said that the satellite constellation, which is a group of artificial satellites working together as a system, will be used for customers to gather data and analytics.

“Our tagline is “Bringing Space down to Earth” and the idea behind this was making it more accessible to the masses, sort of democratizing the space economy,” Craig said.

Working With Customers

The team at Sidus Space will work with customers to decide what features to add to the satellite to ensure they’re getting access to and receiving the data they need to accomplish their goals. Customers could be anyone—from realtors who want real-time footage of homes to environmental groups who want to see changes in various habitats. One mission that Craig hopes to accomplish is to focus a few satellites in an area to gather real-time data and then have different groups benefit from it, such as monitoring the environment in the Florida Keys.

“Part of our challenge is Space data education. Our goal is to help everyone understand the importance and potential opportunity of real time Space data and what it can do for their company or business” Craig said.

Craig Technologies and Sidus Space also supported the Artemis Space Launch System (SLS) by designing and building ground and flight hardware for every primary system on the rocket. Many suppliers helped support the SLS mission, but not quite as much as Craig. Over the last 10 years, Sidus Space and Craig Technologies have been a part of every major portion of the SLS rockets from the Launch Control System to the Rocket Boosters.

“I think the more opportunities we can provide for people to understand how Space data collection can be beneficial goes beyond government and corporation use,” Craig said. “It offers us an opportunity to make a global impact with green initiatives which will impact generations to come.”