Jun 30, 2026 · 53 min · 13 segments
The New Aerospace Economy: Why Arizona Is Taking Off Guests: Jonathan Roll - Program Manager, Biz Dev, & Research Analyst ASU NewSpace (also on Arizona Aerospace Summit planning committee)…
Steve ZylstraHostLeslie MarquezHost
From each of your perspectives, what do you think is driving that momentum? And let's start with you, Tony.
And what I love about when I first came to Arizona and I realized, obviously, we have a huge population influx here.
What I also loved was I didn't know before I moved here was how much investment has gone into the tech community here, obviously with AZTech being born and supporting that community.
And what I really saw that was also a miracle to me in my mind was, the ability for the communities to accept the innovation that's happening.
What I'm looking at from my perspective when it comes to emerging aviation is, again, identifying new ways to travel, commercializing some of this travel that we're looking at with the electric aircraft and that type of thing.
And when you look at the adoption level of a driverless car, if you will, and how that was taken over in Scottsdale, and we see the community didn't give, maybe they did before I got here, but the pushback was already gone by the time I got here in 2020, right at COVID, where it became really valuable to have a Waymo where you weren't sharing germs with everybody, right? So when I look at that technology and I start to apply those same concepts as the overlap to the businesses that I want to bring into this community, I get excited.
AZTech has been a big pusher behind getting some bills passed through that can help us exercise some of that a little bit better.
But I get excited because Arizona is, number one, we have the weather for it, of course.
And we have a welcoming environment to the innovators and the engineers that we need here in order to push this forward.
From each of your perspectives, what do you think is driving that momentum? And let's start with you, Tony.
And what I love about when I first came to Arizona and I realized, obviously, we have a huge population influx here.
What I also loved was I didn't know before I moved here was how much investment has gone into the tech community here, obviously with AZTech being born and supporting that community.
And what I really saw that was also a miracle to me in my mind was, the ability for the communities to accept the innovation that's happening.
What I'm looking at from my perspective when it comes to emerging aviation is, again, identifying new ways to travel, commercializing some of this travel that we're looking at with the electric aircraft and that type of thing.
And when you look at the adoption level of a driverless car, if you will, and how that was taken over in Scottsdale, and we see the community didn't give, maybe they did before I got here, but the pushback was already gone by the time I got here in 2020, right at COVID, where it became really valuable to have a Waymo where you weren't sharing germs with everybody, right? So when I look at that technology and I start to apply those same concepts as the overlap to the businesses that I want to bring into this community, I get excited.
AZTech has been a big pusher behind getting some bills passed through that can help us exercise some of that a little bit better.
But I get excited because Arizona is, number one, we have the weather for it, of course.
And we have a welcoming environment to the innovators and the engineers that we need here in order to push this forward.
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