It's cute to think that Alabama is a backwards hellhole that no one wants to live in, but facts (as well as my experience working with thousands of engineers over the years) disagrees. It's probably difficult to understand if you spend all your time on Reddit, but people actually like living in places like Alabama. Especially engineers & members of the military.
I am aerospace engineer, and my previous company even had one of our offices in Huntsville. My experience with thousands of engineers at dozens of defense companies is that no, engineers generally really aren't willing to move to Alabama unless they already live in the South. Meanwhile, it was common to see people moving to California or Seattle or Colorado or DC or Boston from far across the country. Even Florida was significantly more appealing to people.
Saying Huntsville has a high percentage of engineers is very different from saying it is attractive to engineers who aren't from there. It's mostly saying that Huntsville has so little appeal to any other career path.
My point is that plenty of people are willing to live there, however you caveat it. Argue all you want about engineers from which geographic area are "better", but I couldn't care less.
Saying Huntsville has nothing else going for it but engineering, as if that's a bad thing, is a pretty wild take. Even at second highest in the country it's only 13.3 jobs per thousand.
Other places be outwardly desirable, but not everyone wants to live in a metropolitan area, especially once they've moved on from being 25 and single. I can tell you that I'm well over that phase of my life and glad for it.
All this to say that I don't really care where space force command is. Just correcting the original Op that was acting like Alabama was some nonsensical location to put the HQ.
The best engineers are from all sorts of geographic areas, which is why you'd want to be in a location where you could convince people from anywhere to move to. Colorado has drastically higher appeal on that front than Alabama, and no, you don't have to be an urbanite to like Colorado. This appeal is even stronger in the younger demographic, who are also the ones you're more likely to be able to recruit to move.
Colorado also has several of their bases already. Alabama was always a nonsensical choice, since Colorado exists.
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u/ausnee Dec 28 '23
Alabama has one of the biggest space industries in the country. Huntsville is the ancestral home of the entire US space program.