The New Frontier: Inside the Space Event Race
Why event producer Erick Weiss is stepping into the fight to convene the space economy.
There is a phase in every ambitious event idea that almost never gets written about. It comes after the spark, before the scaffolding, when the vision is vivid enough to demand attention but unfinished enough to remain vulnerable. It is the moment when pressure begins to build, when the outcome is uncertain, and when the person holding the idea has to decide whether to apply more force or step back. This is the moment Erick Weiss is in right now.
The idea pulling him forward is the Transnational Space Alliance Summit , a gathering envisioned for Houston in December 2026, designed to bring together aerospace and government alongside finance, healthcare, education, culture, technology, and families themselves to explore the human future of the space economy. It is an idea with ambition and competition already circling it, and one Weiss understands is still in its most precarious phase. That uncertainty does not trouble him. It defines the work.
By the time he found himself contemplating something of this scale, Weiss had already spent much of his adult life operating where pressure leaves no room for improvisation. For nearly two decades, he served as the creative and operational steward of the Grammy Celebration, the Recording Academy’s official post-Grammy event, overseeing a six-thousand-guest production year after year under some of the most exacting expectations in entertainment. It was the kind of assignment that tolerates no ambiguity, where failure is public and success must be invisible. Long before he began thinking about space, Weiss had learned what it meant to build and rebuild the same room under maximum scrutiny.
The realization that led him here, however, did not arrive through a strategy memo or a funding pitch. It arrived the way the best event ideas often do, inside another event.
Erick went to PCMA as not searching for reinvention but for stimulation. His career was already full. He had spent decades producing complex, high-stakes gatherings for presidents, global nonprofits, Hollywood institutions, and civic leaders. He understood scale, power, narrative, and pressure. He knew how rooms worked when they mattered and how they failed when they didn’t. He arrived expecting familiarity.
What he encountered instead was a fracture.
The panel that inspired him was not about events at all. It was a discussion of international collaboration that drifted, almost casually, into the idea of space cities and the economic networks forming around them. Houston. Christchurch. Toronto. Lusanne. Someone mentioned the scale of the space economy — already massive, accelerating rapidly — and then the conversation moved on, as if the implications were already resolved.
Erick didn’t hear clarity. He heard strain.
The speakers talked about rockets, satellites, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, artificial intelligence. What they did not talk about was how human beings were meant to enter this economy, not as astronauts or engineers, but as workers, educators, designers, caregivers, storytellers, students. There was no language for culture, no place where ethics, labor, education, and daily life could be seen alongside the technology. There was no room where the full system came into view.
That absence stayed with him.
For Weiss, the feeling was familiar, because his life has always been shaped by moments when something solid began to feel insufficient. He grew up in a household that valued seriousness and inquiry. His father, Dr. Volker Weiss, was a physicist and metallurgist who later served as Associate Director for Science and Technology at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. His life’s work focused on understanding how materials behave under stress — how things bend without breaking, how resilience is engineered rather than hoped for. At home, the lesson was simpler: systems fail when you ignore their limits.
His mother, Dr. Peg Weiss, is a world-renowned art historian and Getty Fellow whose archives now reside at the Getty Research Institute. What Erick absorbed from her was not academic prestige, but patience — the belief that meaning often reveals itself slowly, if you’re willing to look long enough.
They were accomplished, rigorous, and deeply invested in their disciplines. Like many parents, they assumed their children would find paths that reflected those values in recognizable ways.
Erick didn’t.
He was drawn to performance, to storytelling, to the uncertain work of human expression. He wanted to act, to sing, to inhabit other lives. It wasn’t rebellion. It was divergence — the kind many families recognize when a child’s instincts don’t align neatly with parental expectation. His parents supported him, but the path he chose always sat slightly outside their frame of reference.
That divergence followed him into Los Angeles, where he arrived pursuing acting and directing and took a temporary receptionist job at Along Came Mary, a pioneering experiential event company that transformed Hollywood premieres into immersive environments long before the term “experiential” became fashionable. What Erick walked into was not a fallback, but a crucible.
He began typing cost breakdowns. What distinguished him almost immediately was impatience with inefficiency. The system was slow, redundant, and fragile. He rebuilt it, automating calculations and standardizing formats. That instinct carried him quickly into the creative core of the company, where he began writing proposals as narratives — not menus — describing what it would feel like to arrive, to enter, to move through a space.
Over the next seventeen years, Weiss rose from executive assistant to Vice President and General Manager, and eventually Executive Vice President, overseeing a full-time staff of more than forty and hundreds of on-call crew. When he arrived, Along Came Mary was a modest operation. When he left, it was a multi-million-dollar powerhouse. During those years, he produced large-scale premieres for films including Mission: Impossible and Men in Black, Forrest Gump, Braveheart, Titanic, Apollo 13 and countless others transforming parking lots into theatrical worlds that blurred the line between cinema and reality.
By the mid-2000s, Along Came Mary had reached a structural ceiling. There were opportunities to scale further — major venue deals, institutional partnerships — that would require shared governance and transparency. Those opportunities did not materialize. Leaving was not a rupture. It was recognition.
In 2007, Weiss founded Honeysweet Creative, narrowing his focus to live shows, nonprofit fundraising, and events with narrative stakes. Over the next decade and a half, he produced presidential events, major medical and veterans’ fundraisers, Hollywood guild awards, and large-scale cultural gatherings, raising hundreds of millions of dollars and earning a reputation as someone trusted when the room mattered.
That education in scale deepened further in 2015, when Weiss served as Executive Producer of the World Indoor Lacrosse Championships, hosted by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in Onondaga. It was the first internationally sanctioned sports tournament ever hosted by an Indigenous nation, requiring navigation of sovereignty, international governance, broadcast logistics, and cultural protocol simultaneously. The event was broadcast globally, and its documentary, Spirit Game: Pride of a Nation, is now part of the Smithsonian’s permanent collection. For Weiss, it reinforced a lesson he already knew: the hardest events are not logistical puzzles, but human ones.
That long arc explains why he recognized the moment at PCMA for what it was. He has lived through growth, scale, dysfunction, success, repetition, and reinvention. He knows how systems behave under pressure.
Which is why, when he found himself listening to a conversation about space that did not yet account for people, he didn’t hear an opportunity. He heard a system bending.
What began forming in his mind was not a finished vision, but a test. What would happen if convening were applied deliberately to the human side of space before the story hardened? What if education, workforce, ethics, culture, and public imagination were placed alongside engineering and investment, not as side conversations but as equal forces? What if the room itself became the experiment?
That question became the Transnational Space Alliance Summit.
Houston entered the picture not as branding, but as reality. The city carries the labor and mythology of space more deeply than most. It is also actively imagining its next chapter, including ambitions around a broader Space Week. When Weiss walked through the George R. Brown Convention Center, he did what event people instinctively do. He imagined movement. He imagined proximity. He imagined what would happen if people who did not yet see themselves as part of the space economy were placed in rooms where that realization became unavoidable.
He understood immediately that this was not a vision to defend, but a stress test.
What happens next is unresolved, and that is the truth of the story. Weiss’s vision that our country, our world and the planet itself can be saved by what he calls “the new industrial revlolution” has yet to coalesce. The Summit has not yet happened. The funding must still be raised. The partnerships must still be secured. The audience must still be convinced.
But this is the phase that defines the event entrepreneur.
The space event race is already underway. Legacy conferences, startup summits, and cities are jockeying to define the conversation. The Transnational Space Alliance Summit may succeed, it may struggle, or it may simply open a door someone else walks through more fully later.
Events are not just reflections of industries. They are engines of imagination. And sometimes the most important rooms are built not when the outcome is clear, but when the pressure tells you it is time to see how far the idea can bend without breaking.
The Circle Forming Around the Idea
Big ideas move when people with real operating experience decide the risk is worth sharing. The circle forming around the Transnational Space Alliance Summit reflects that reality.
Bill King built his career advising senior leaders and institutions on how to communicate clearly during periods of uncertainty, crisis, and public scrutiny—experience essential when ideas move faster than consensus.
Chris Cassidy flew multiple space missions as a NASA astronaut after serving as a Navy SEAL, conducted numerous spacewalks, and now serves as Executive Director of the National Medal of Honor Museum, bringing operational leadership from extreme environments into public service.
Dete Meserve has spent her career producing television that translates complex subjects for mass audiences, including her current role producing Weather Hunters for PBS Kids, a model for making science accessible rather than abstract.
Jeffrey Sudikoff has invested for decades in early-stage companies and talent across technology and innovation sectors, shaping how emerging ideas become economic reality rather than speculation.
Jordan Evans serves as Deputy Director for Flight Projects at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he has led flagship missions that connect vision directly to active exploration programs.
Luther Beegle, a senior scientist with NASA and Northrop Grumman, has worked on Mars missions and life-detection science, ensuring scientific rigor and ethical responsibility remain central.
Lee Zeidman most recently served as President of the Staples Center (now Crypto.com Arena), LA Live, and the Peacock Theatre as a senior executive at AEG, overseeing one of the world’s most complex urban entertainment districts.
Michael Fletcher served as CEO of EarthxTV, where he built a platform combining media, events, and partnerships into a sustained organization.
Susan Kilrain commanded Space Shuttle Endeavour and flew multiple missions as a NASA astronaut, grounding the conversation in direct human experience of spaceflight rather than abstraction.
Taken together, this is not a symbolic advisory board. It is a working circle of people who have operated at scale, under consequence, and inside complex systems—assembling around an idea still in formation.
Powerful strategic visionary