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JT Elder never wants American servicemen and -women to walk into a fair fight—he wants to give them the advantage. Elder spent the lion’s share of his career flying helicopters for the Navy. In 2017, he was offered the opportunity to serve as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s deputy director for the architecture and engineering group. The NGA is responsible for providing imagery and information to the military to enhance national security.
Key to the future of that work might be St. Louis civilians—private sector employees and academics. “As the federal government, we don’t have all the answers,” Elder says. “Industry and academia have a lot to help us with there, and we can help them at the same time.” Through a new geospatial technology outpost, Moonshot Labs, a collaboration with technology incubator T-REX, the NGA is looking to do just that.
As NGA Director Vice Admiral Robert Sharp wrote in his recent Director’s Intent, the NGA is at an inflection point. “Great power competition is increasingly challenging our shared prosperity and security; at the same time, new technology and commercial capabilities are redefining [geointelligence],” he wrote. “Our competitors are seeking to press the advantage in every domain.” Sharp created a strategy, dubbed the Moonshot, for increasing the country’s competitive advantage. The name references a 1962 speech by President John. F. Kennedy in which JFK explained the goal of reaching the moon in that decade—and before the Soviet Union.
Lab Hours
Moonshot Labs is set to open in July. For more information, visit downtowntrex.org/geospatial.
The NGA is in the process of building a $1.7 billion campus, Next NGA West—the largest federal investment project in the city’s history—just north of downtown. But it didn’t want to wait until construction is completed, likely in 2025, to start collaborating with St. Louisans. Moonshot Labs is expected to be operational next month and is one piece of the puzzle that supports Sharp’s Moonshot vision. T-REX, which already houses multiple geospatial startups downtown, will also open the nation’s first Geospatial Innovation Center, a 16,000-square-foot incubator on the floor above NGA’s Moonshot Labs. That incubator is set to make its début post-COVID-19.
With Moonshot Labs, the NGA can engage private companies and academics, getting outside of security-restricted areas to talk to people who might hold the solutions to its most challenging problems—“whether that be a code, algorithms, architectures, or just the stimulating conversations to learn more about IT solutions that we can potentially bring back into NGA and vice versa,” Elder says. That’s because the Department of Defense is funded by taxpayers. By law, it must make shareable assets like facilities, equipment, and even people, available to the public, Elder says.
That’s not to say nothing will be classified. There will be some top-secret missions, but the solutions aren’t necessarily among those secrets—and that’s where the challenge comes in. “Our [task] is to take our hard problems from inside the building that are classified and decompose them down into unclassified tasks and problem statements that can be solved in a nonclassified environment,” Elder says.
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On Location
GEOSPATIAL COULD BE ST. LOUIS’ NEXT BIG THING. HERE’S ANOTHER ACCELERATOR GROWING THE SECTOR LOCALLY.
Greater St. Louis Inc., a group of civic leaders looking to grow St. Louis’ economy and make the city more nationally competitive, released a draft of its STL 2030 Jobs Plan in December. In it, the group named geospatial technology as one of the sectors that will shape the future of St. Louis and the region’s economy. It estimates that geospatial and the Next NGA West project will create 27,000 jobs and $4.9 billion in regional economic activity.
Recently, the NGA Accelerator Powered by Capital Innovators picked eight startups as part of an inaugural cohort for its geospatial corporate accelerator program, which, while virtual (thanks, COVID-19), is based in St. Louis. The technology from these startups will help solve some geospatial challenges in data management, advanced analytics and modeling, data integrity and security, and artificial intelligence. The eight startups—Anno.ai, Boston Geospatial, Granular.ai, InfraLytiks, Kinnami, Polysentry, Stratodyne, and Xona Space Systems—each get $100,000 in grant money and mentorship. The accelerator has already recruited for the next class of startups, but visit capital innovators.com for more information. To read the STL 2030 Jobs Plan draft, visit greaterstlinc.com.
