RENDERING COURTESY OF ASTROBOTIC TECHNOLOGY

It’s serendipity that we include stories in our October/November edition that represent two ends of the spectrum of business and industry in Pittsburgh.

In our regular feature “Places We Love,” PM Managing Editor Sean Collier explores Clayton, the beautifully preserved home of industrialist Henry Clay Frick. He and his family lived in the 23-room mansion in Point Breeze from 1882 to 1905 — the height of the Gilded Age. As founder of a coke manufacturing company and chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company, Frick helped put Pittsburgh on the map as America’s epicenter of steelmaking and related industries in the late 19th century.

Fast forward to the early 21st century, when robotics enthusiasts at Carnegie Mellon University founded Astrobotic Technology. This is a private lunar logistics company that designs and builds vehicles for space travel. The founders envisioned that the Steel City would one day become a hub for space innovation. Indeed, earlier this year, NASA launched Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander from Kennedy Space Center in Florida in its first attempt to fly to the moon in 50 years.

I hope Pittsburghers develop an enthusiasm for space travel, as I have after growing up in the shadow of the Space Coast in Florida. To see live launches, my family just walked out to our driveway and looked up to see the rockets soaring through the sky. Our garage doors would rattle from the launch’s vibrations. And as a cub reporter, I was fortunate to be at Kennedy Space Center to cover the first space shuttle launch.

Astrobotic has set its sights on sending its Griffin lunar lander to the moon next year. The company’s CEO John Thornton says Astrobotic was wooed to move its operations out of Pittsburgh. But, he says: “We want to be part of building the region, as well as building the space economy in this state.”

We profile Astrobotic in our “In Good Company” feature on page 32, which also includes new advances in drone technology as well as more down-to-earth innovations in cosmetics, fragrances and metalworking. These all represent further ways businesses are diversifying the local economy, one that was dominated by steelmaking as recently as the early 1980s. And they all say that their efforts were bolstered by the support and entrepreneurial spirit of the Pittsburgh community.