The Space Gold Rush Is Coming to Miami Tomorrow Night. Here’s Who’s in the Room.
- Rich Washburn
- 41 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Tomorrow night at the James L. Knight Center, something worth paying attention to is happening.
The Miami Innovation Aerospace Initiative — MIA — takes the main stage at Startup OLÉ Miami ’26. The panel is called The Space Gold Rush: Miami. And if you’ve been watching what’s building in South Florida, you already know this conversation is overdue.
I’ll be there with a camera. The story is the people on that stage and what they’re actually building. Two of them happen to be colleagues I work with at Data Power Supply, which is how I ended up with a front-row seat.
What MIA Is
MIA isn’t a government program or a press release. It’s a grassroots-first, initiative to activate South Florida’s role in the global space economy — anchored by the strategic potential of the Homestead Spaceport.
The thesis: Cape Canaveral launches things. What South Florida can become is the place that builds what gets launched — the manufacturing, R&D, workforce development, energy infrastructure, and capital formation layer that supports the entire ecosystem. Not a competitor to the Space Coast. The backbone behind it.
At the center of it is Noelle Jackson — founder of The HUB at Office Logic, a 24,500-square-foot coworking and incubator space at 1501 Biscayne Boulevard that has hosted over 500 founders and 500 events since opening in January 2023. Noelle built that from scratch, self-funded, after nearly two decades running her own business. MIA is her biggest swing yet — using The HUB as the operational engine of a hemispheric aerospace initiative. She’s the kind of person who doesn’t wait for permission to build something. Born in Jamaica, built in Miami. She’s the connective tissue that makes this whole thing cohere.
The Panel
Five people, five angles. All of them worth knowing.
Samuel Joseph — CTO and Co-Founder of Magna Petra Corp — is a theoretical physicist with a $22 million NASA Payload Service Agreement to deliver a mass spectrometer to the lunar surface via ispace-EUROPE. His team includes former NASA Kennedy Space Center researchers. He’s going to talk about where the trillion-dollar space economy actually goes. Samuel doesn’t theorize for sport. He has a contract with the moon.
Ann Krstevska of Gaia Horizons is handling the workforce and job development conversation — the one that often gets skipped but determines whether any of this actually takes root locally. Who builds this ecosystem? Where are they coming from? What does South Florida need to create?
Jimmy Hayes — CMO of Data Power Supply and MIA co-lead — is taking the energy and infrastructure segment. The question Jimmy answers is the one most people don’t think to ask: what does a serious aerospace hub actually need under the hood? Not rockets. Power. Compute. The physical backbone that has to exist before any of this can fly.
Todd Tindall of MS2 Ventures builds space-tech companies from scratch, using AI to identify market gaps before they get crowded. He’s also part of Orbital Gateway Holdings — focused on the sky-to-ground orbital data connectivity layer that makes the entire space data economy function. Todd sees where the money is moving and where the venture opportunities are before most people even recognize the category.
Phil Ehr is running for Florida’s 28th Congressional District — which includes Homestead — and brings the policy and infrastructure dimension. Former U.S. Navy commander, Hoover Institution fellow, energy startup background. He was the person who originally brought Noelle into the MIA conversation. When geography, policy, and ambition converge in South Florida, Phil is the one who understands all three.
Why Miami. Why Now.
South Florida has the land. It has the proximity to Latin American markets — the fastest-growing aerospace consumer base in the Western Hemisphere. It has existing venture capital activity, a growing defense tech presence, and a spaceport most people haven’t looked at closely enough.
What it hasn’t had is the connective tissue — the organized, intentional ecosystem architecture that takes all those individual assets and turns them into something that compounds.
The macro forces are real: AI compute demand doubling by 2030, the orbital economy accelerating, defense tech buildout intensifying, grid infrastructure under pressure globally. Every one of those trends has a
South Florida answer — if the right people are in the room building the right things in the right order. Tomorrow night, a lot of those people are in the same room.
If you’re in Miami — it’s free. Come.
Tuesday, April 21 · 6 PM · Main Stage · James L. Knight Center, Miami
Comments