FM 1209, Bastrop County
SpaceX Bastrop
Starlink terminals, chip packaging, the Gigasat AI1 satellite and solar campus, and a turbine blade foundry; about 1,600 employees
Overview
A Space Cluster That Did Not Exist Five Years Ago
Austin had no NASA center, no Air Force base and no legacy prime campus. It now has SpaceX building Starlink hardware and the Gigasat satellite campus in Bastrop, Firefly building rockets and lunar landers in Cedar Park and Briggs, Blue Origin's first Texas factory in Hutto, CesiumAstro scaling phased-array payloads, and the defense, software and Trusted Foundry nodes that Golden Dome draws on.
The cluster forms two concentrations, as Inside the Singularity describes: SpaceX's captive compound at Bastrop in the south, and a multi-company launch, lunar, satellite and defense concentration forming at Cedar Park and Hutto in the north.
The companies
Who Builds What
Select a category to highlight it on the map and in the cards.
Show
Cedar Park and Briggs
Firefly Aerospace
Alpha and Eclipse rockets, the Blue Ghost lunar lander (first commercial Moon landing, March 2025) and the Elytra spacecraft; Rocket Ranch test site at Briggs; 700+ employees
Hutto Crossing, Williamson County
Blue Origin Constellation Park
$554.8M, 1.3M sq ft and 2,000+ jobs over 10 years for TeraWave satellites, ground equipment, solar arrays and avionics; announced October 8, 2026
West Austin
CesiumAstro
Phased-array payloads for satellites and aircraft; $470M Series C in February 2026; 270,000 sq ft factory and headquarters from 2027; RF-SoC chips through the Jariet acquisition
Cedar Park
CTSDC Spaceport and Defense Innovation Campus
Four buildings, 115,000 sq ft, $78M to $108M: labs, environmental test bays, a SCIF and spacecraft assembly; a Williamson County and Cedar Park nonprofit
Ben White Blvd, Austin
SkyWater Fab 25
The only DMEA Category 1A Trusted Foundry in Texas: 200mm, 130nm to 65nm, about 400,000 wafer starts a year; an IonQ company since July 2026
Giga Texas, Travis County
Terafab Research Fab
The Tesla and Intel pilot line for AI6 and the radiation-tolerant AI7 (D3) orbital chip
Parmer Lane, North Austin
BAE Systems
$150M, 390,000 sq ft Electronic Systems campus: RF and EO/IR countermeasures, electronic warfare and sensors
Austin
Palantir and Anduril
Co-leads of the Golden Dome command-and-control software consortium; Anduril is in the space-based interceptor prototype pool
Downtown Austin
T2COM and Capital Factory
The Army's four-star Transformation and Training Command, and the Center for Dual-Use Innovation hosting DIU, AFWERX, SpaceWERX, NavalX and Army Applications Lab
Why Austin
Built on the Tech Base, Not a Military Base
The cluster formed around the same things that made Austin a technology market: grid power, permitting speed, land, engineers and chip manufacturing. SpaceX put Starlink production at Bastrop near Giga Texas and its labor pool. Firefly found land in Williamson County for a cleanroom and a 200-acre test ranch within 30 miles. CesiumAstro recruits RF engineers from the pool that feeds NXP, Cirrus Logic and Silicon Labs.
Defense came through the same door. Army Futures Command arrived in 2018 and is now T2COM; Capital Factory's Center for Dual-Use Innovation has hosted DIU, AFWERX and SpaceWERX since 2016. When Golden Dome became the organizing program for US missile defense, Austin already had the sensor makers, the software companies, the Trusted Foundry and the satellite factories.
One step away
The Rest of the Chain
| Site | Where | Role for the Austin cluster |
|---|---|---|
| SpaceX McGregor | McLennan County, 100 miles north | Every Merlin and Raptor engine fires here before flight |
| Texas A&M Cyclotron Institute | College Station, 90 miles east | Radiation testing for the chips that fly |
| Terafab Gibbons Creek | Grimes County | Volume production of the D3 orbital chip |
| SpaceX Starbase | Boca Chica | Starship launch for Starlink, AI1 and Golden Dome |
| Fort Hood | Killeen, 60 miles north | Where Austin-built autonomous systems are tested with Army units |
The full chip-to-orbit chain across Texas, and the Golden Dome contracts that run through it, are on the Golden Dome Texas Corridor page.
Record
Dataset Record
- Sources
- Company announcements, Governor's office, Texas Space Commission and local filings through October 2026
- Map
- Locations approximate
- Last verified
- Q4 2026