The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) will host a special ceremony celebrating the opening of Moonshot Labs, the agency’s first-ever, unclassified, collaborative innovation space, on Friday, July 23, at 2:00 p.m., at the T-REX innovation center in downtown St. Louis.
Moonshot Labs is about 12,000 square feet of shared workspace at T-REX that aims to foster collaboration among the government, industry and academic geospatial community members in the St. Louis region. The interactive, unclassified space is the first of its kind in existing NGA facilities, said NGA Director Vice Admiral. Robert Sharp. “Moonshot Labs will bring an accessible, new level of unclassified and solutions-oriented developmental capabilities to NGA, our partners and the warfighter,” said Sharp. “Moonshot Labs is about forging connections between NGA, academia and industry to help transform how we do business for the better.”
Moonshot Labs at T-REX is intended to fill a near-term gap and offers a preview of the unprecedented collaborative environment that will come at the agency’s new west campus when it opens in 2025 in north St. Louis. Plans for the $1.7 billion, new, NGA campus include an Innovation Center that is being designed as open, collaborative space where NGA personnel can work with traditional and non-traditional partners in an unclassified environment.
The new NGA campus is scheduled to be open and fully operational by 2025. The focus of Moonshot Labs will be on software development as tradecraft. While NGA’s software developers will anchor the center, other agency technologists, data-science personnel and teammates from other areas also will be in-residence. Agency collaborators and customers, as well as industry and academic representatives, also are expected to use the digital maker space while working to optimize unclassified and open-source solutions to meet specific and strategic NGA technological challenges.
