CLEVELAND — NASA Glenn makes the list of Ohio's top 100 employers, even if barely at #96. The quiet economic engine of the space giant goes beyond its roughly 3,300 good-paying jobs, many of them scientists and engineers, to the jobs it supports in Northeast Ohio outside of these gates, which is another 8,400.
Folks like John Zoldak of Zin Technologies.
"What I have here is some hardware that we flew to the International Space Station," he said, displaying some of the items the 250 employees in Middleburg Heights have produced since 1957 as a contractor to NASA Glenn. "We've flown over 400 experiments to the International Space Station with Glenn. We flew 250 different pieces of hardware last year to the ISS."
Without NASA Glenn, he said these are jobs that wouldn't exist in Cuyahoga County.
Consider this: 60% of NASA Glenn's total spending goes to Ohio vendors, and 90% of that goes to vendors located here in Northeast Ohio.
The same can be said for Mainthea Technologies in Cleveland. Their 80 employees provide the behind-the-scenes support work keeping this place operational.
"When everything goes well, you don't know we're here," said Todd Lockhart, Director of Operations. There is one problem that they have, though, that's beyond their control.
"We're having a difficult time finding the technicians. Your college graduates are easy to find, there's universities in the area that produce a lot of engineering, but to find the next generation of skilled labor has been very challenging."
That's one of the reasons both of these companies were at NASA Glenn on Tuesday, meeting with Senator Sherrod Brown and NASA officials.
More importantly, the companies met with Cleveland area high school students letting them know they have a future that could start at NASA. Deputy Administrator and former astronaut Pam Melroy told the students that over a century ago, the greatest minds in the world were in a race to figure out flight, but it was a couple of bicycle mechanics from Ohio, the Wright brothers, who beat them to it.
"And I wanted to look every kid in the face and say you could invent the next amazing thing that will transform aviation or space," said Melroy.
When Ruben Bell of Cleveland was asked if he'd consider a career at NASA his response was, "Yes, especially yes. Especially doing air pumps and all that, Mach 10, helping planes, helping the air traffic at the same time, it's quite nice."
Louis Tompkins says his eventual dream has evolved for practical reasons.
"As a kid, I always wanted to be an astronaut and go up into space but heights have been a little iffy for me, so I think I'm going to stay on the ground and focus on designing," he said.
With 11,000 jobs in and around this NASA, there's a good chance he'll eventually find one. That's something Senator Brown said needs to be promoted more.
"I think what we've not done well is let people know how important NASA Glenn is to this city and to this state. Again only 10 of these NASA facilities in the whole country and we're lucky enough to have one of them for decades."
