Utah's First Hard Tech Week and the 47G Zero Gravity Summit: What Happened, What Was Announced, What Is Still Unverified

Utah held its first Hard Tech Week from Oct. 26 to 30, 2026, a five-day run of events across Salt Lake City built around aerospace, defense, energy, AI and advanced manufacturing. The anchor was the third annual Zero Gravity Summit, produced by the Utah nonprofit 47G at the Salt Palace Convention Center on Oct. 28 and 29. This recap pulls together what published coverage says happened, separates the numbers that were reported from the ones that were only projected, and says plainly where we could not confirm something.

We did not attend. Everything below comes from news reports and organizer pages, linked at the end.

The Week at a Glance

What Hard Tech Week Was

The week was organized by 47G and Utah Tech Week, with the Nucleus Institute as a collaborator. Organizers described it as a calendar of events that companies hosted themselves: panels, networking nights, dinners, demonstrations and facility tours. Hosting and attending were free, and events had to be listed on the official Luma calendar and avoid the summit's daytime programming. A pre-event report counted at least 21 scheduled events.

What Happened at the Summit

The Deseret News reported that opening day on Oct. 28 drew about 2,500 attendees. Four threads stood out in the coverage we found.

The missile fleet. Maj. Gen. William "Buck" Rogers, who leads the Air Force's ICBM systems directorate at Hill Air Force Base, described the Sentinel program to replace the aging Minuteman III. Deseret News reports it as a $140 billion effort to design and deploy a new missile and update 450 silos in five states, with Northrop Grumman as lead contractor. The first Sentinel test flight is planned for next year, with deployment in the 2030s, according to that report. Rep. Blake Moore moderated the session.

Drone defense. Jon Gruen, CEO of Utah-based Fortem Technologies, described a ground radar paired with defensive drones that can capture rogue drones. He said threats are growing as drones get cheaper and more capable, and pointed to their use in Ukraine and the Iran conflict.

Electric and autonomous flight. Joby Aviation and Beta Technologies, both 47G partners, are pursuing FAA certification for autonomous electric aircraft. Deseret News reports that early operations would likely be parcel and medical deliveries before passengers, and that current aircraft still carry a pilot. Utah is one of eight states in the FAA's eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, run in Utah as a three-year effort called uFly under the state transportation department.

Politics and workforce. Rep. Celeste Maloy opened day two, according to TechBuzz News, and spoke about young people's worries over jobs. She said: "Technology is not the enemy of our future."

Three Announcements

Deseret News listed three announcements from the summit:

• A new technology and aerospace museum at Thanksgiving Point, including a 3D digital dome theater.
• Southern Utah University's selection as one of NASA's Aerospace Skilled Technical Workforce Hubs.
• A planned advanced air mobility hub in Eagle Mountain.

We did not find dollar amounts, opening dates or timelines for any of the three in the coverage we read.

The Hard Tech Hackathon

The hackathon ran alongside the summit with $15,000 in sponsor-funded bounties. TechBuzz News reported more than 100 developers at kickoff and nearly 200 registered beforehand. Teams were allowed to show existing work as long as they could demonstrate progress during the event, and winners kept their intellectual property.

Nucleus Institute and Startup State bounty, $10,000: Rogue Technologies. Nate Roberts and Peter Hartvigsen used a custom AI surrogate model, trained on simulation results, to speed up design work on a reactor that turns natural gas into jet fuel. The team reported that it ran 51 times faster than regular simulations with negligible error. That figure is the team's own. We saw no independent check, and the coverage does not say how the comparison was run or how error was measured.

Torus bounty, $5,000: Granite Tait. Tait, a site reliability engineer, built software that shifts AI computing jobs to data centers where the power grid has spare capacity, making decisions in real time instead of from historical forecasts. Torus, a distributed energy infrastructure company, posed two challenges: "Rush Hour for Electrons" (grid congestion) and "Compute Follows the Sun" (routing compute to cheaper, cleaner power).

Other entries named in Deseret News coverage include DETOUR, a battery charge-and-discharge planner; Printerest, an AI-to-3D-printing service; a garage-built drone-motor coil-winding machine; and Water Cost, a tracker for data center effects on water. None of those were reported as prize winners.

Reported Versus Projected Numbers

What Was on the Program but We Could Not Confirm

Pre-event coverage listed a Thursday keynote by JetZero CEO Tom O'Leary, a Wednesday fireside chat by a Lockheed Martin executive on Golden Dome, an appearance by Varda Space Industries co-founder Delian Asparouhov, and a closing conversation between Ty Burrell and Shaun White. We found no post-event reporting on what was said in any of them, so we are listing them as scheduled, not as having happened as planned.

Analysis

This section is analysis, not reporting.

The week is a regional-development story as much as a technology one. The organizers' own framing was to put Utah's hard tech companies "into one spotlight," and the free-to-host calendar model is a way to make a conference-sized event out of many small ones. That is a sensible way to build a cluster, and it explains why the coverage reads as promotional. Most of what we found came from Utah outlets, and we saw no independent attendance audit.

The energy and AI overlap is where the new ideas were. The Torus challenge and the winning entries both centered on the same problem: AI computing wants a lot of electricity, and the grid is a bottleneck. Utah's energy ambitions are also in the news elsewhere: see our reality check on Valar Atomics' proposed 456-reactor Project Beehive, where the reported numbers did not add up.

Defense procurement still sets the pace. The most concrete numbers at the summit, a $140 billion missile program and 450 silos, came from the Air Force and its prime contractor, not from startups. The startup-scale news, such as the hackathon prizes, was small by comparison.

What We Cannot Conclude

• We cannot say how many people attended overall. Only opening-day attendance, about 2,500, was reported, and we found no final count for the summit or the week.
• We cannot verify Rogue Technologies' 51 times speedup. It is the team's own number, and no method was published in the coverage.
• We cannot say whether the three announcements will happen on a stated schedule. The reports give no dates or funding.
• We cannot confirm what was said in several scheduled sessions. See the section above.
• We cannot compare this to other regional events. We did not find comparable attendance data from elsewhere.
• We cannot say the Sentinel timeline will hold. The dates are as relayed by Deseret News from the briefing.

Why It Matters

• Aerospace and defense are a large part of Utah's economy, by 47G's account. The group claims nearly 20% of state GDP, a figure we could not independently check.
• Energy for AI is now a hackathon topic. Grid-aware scheduling of compute drew both a sponsor and a winner.
• Advanced air mobility is moving from demos to infrastructure. Charging buildout, a pilot program and a planned hub point that way, though passenger service is not yet near.
• Regional events like this can work as lead generation for a cluster. Whether that turns into jobs or contracts is something to track over the next year.