regional profile
tennessee valley
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The Tennessee Valley region is home to one of the fastest-growing high tech economies in the U.S.
“The sky is not the limit,” the Huntsville Chamber of Commerce proclaims on its materials. And it’s the perfect slogan for a city that thrives on rocket science. Here is NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center; here the Boeing space facilities at work on the rocket to take humans once again into deep space; here the companies racing to take people back to the moon. It’s a city where more than half the residents have college degrees and some 20,000 are engineers.
14 Alabama Economic Development Guide 2015
Nearby are Carpenter Technology, making premium alloys that have been part of the nation’s aviation legends since the Wright Brothers, and United Launch Alliance, where the partnership between Boeing and Lockheed Martin makes the rockets that launch virtually all of the nation’s satellites into space. National defense is also a critical element of the Tennessee Valley mix, with most of the biggest defense names — Boeing, BAE, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Finmeccanica, United Technologies, L-3 Communication and SAIC — all represented in the Redstone Arsenal region. Alabama’s Tennessee Valley region is widely known for its other high tech industries as well, and Huntsville’s Cummings Research Park is the nation’s second largest research park. Biotechnology flourishes at the HudsonAlpha Institute in Huntsville, one of the nation’s leading centers for genomics research. Alabama’s largest IT company also calls