Two former SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) engineers raised $115 million for TerraFirma, an Austin startup trying to bring rocket-factory speed to construction on Earth before applying similar tools to Moon and Mars projects.

TerraFirma Raises Funds For Robotic Construction

TerraFirma, in a press release on Tuesday, said Kleiner Perkins led a $100 million Series A. CEO Noah Schochet and co-founder Noah McGuinness previously worked at SpaceX on Starship, Starshield and Starlink.

The company remotely operates construction equipment through tools including Xbox controllers and says its semi-autonomous machinery can cut costs and improve safety. It plans to hire 300 workers and to build a Texas factory and mission control center.

"Infrastructure is a bottleneck to basically every single industry that needs to innovate over the next couple of decades," Schochet told CNBC. "There’s such a deficit of people taking all of the great tech that has existed and been built for the last couple of decades and bringing it" to construction.

SpaceX Lessons Target Construction Productivity Gap

The pitch targets a sector with a productivity problem. The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond said U.S. construction labor productivity fell more than 30% from 1970 to 2020, while overall U.S. productivity doubled. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 149,400 annual openings for construction laborers and helpers through 2034.

Schochet said SpaceX showed him what construction lacks. "We’re building rockets the size of skyscrapers at one a month, and all those processes for mass manufacturing automation, none of them are showing up in construction," he said.

"It was all worth it," Schochet said. "We were learning at a crazy pace."

Earth Projects Come Before Lunar Ambitions

TerraFirma’s space ambitions fit NASA’s lunar planning. NASA says Moon Base infrastructure will need power, water, landing pads, and roads; and recently picked Blue Origin, Astrolab, Lunar Outpost, and Firefly Aerospace Inc. (NASDAQ:FLY) for lunar vehicles and delivery work.

For now, Schochet said TerraFirma must prove itself on Earth. "The problem is you don’t want to build a community based around a space economy that doesn’t yet exist," he said. "You want to build it around the economic drivers that truly drive the world today."

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