The Silver Lining

The most important aerospace company you have never heard of has its headquarters on Salomon Circle in Sparks, and it was built by two people who arrived from Turkey barely speaking English.

Sierra Nevada Corporation does not advertise during football games. Its founders rarely make headlines. But the company designs and builds some of the most sensitive hardware the United States flies, and it has done it from Northern Nevada for decades. To understand how a Sparks firm ended up with a $13 billion contract to build the plane the president would command a war from, you have to start with a baklava tray.

The baklava and the buyout

Eren and Fatih Ozmen immigrated to the United States from Turkey more than thirty years ago, with little money and not much English. To put herself through school, Eren cleaned office buildings and sold baklava. Both went to work at a small Reno-Sparks aerospace-electronics company called Sierra Nevada Corporation, founded in 1963 as a niche maker of high-reliability avionics. In 1994, rather than move on, they bought the company, financing the buyout with their personal savings and bank loans.

What followed is one of the great quiet business stories in the American West. Under the Ozmens, SNC grew from a small specialty shop into a multibillion-dollar aerospace and defense contractor. Eren Ozmen, the chairwoman and president, has become one of the wealthiest self-made women in the country and one of the richest people in Nevada. Fatih Ozmen runs the company as chief executive. They still own it privately, together.

What Sierra Nevada actually does

SNC is an aerospace and defense company in the deepest sense: it takes aircraft and spacecraft and makes them do specialized, hard things. It modifies and integrates aircraft, builds avionics and electronic-warfare systems, and supplies hardware for national-security and intelligence missions. It contracts with the Department of Defense, NASA, and private spaceflight companies, and by the company's own count it has participated in more than 500 space missions, including more than a dozen to Mars. It employs roughly 5,000 people across dozens of locations in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Turkey, with the center of gravity in Sparks.

The doomsday plane

In April 2024, the Air Force chose SNC for one of the most consequential aircraft programs in the country: the Survivable Airborne Operations Center, or SAOC. It is the replacement for the E-4B "Nightwatch," the flying command post, nicknamed the doomsday plane, designed to keep national command and control running through a nuclear crisis. The contract is worth about $13 billion, and the work runs into the next decade.

This is not a study or a slide deck. SNC is converting Boeing 747-8I airframes, four of them acquired from Korean Air, into the future E-4C fleet, packing them with survivable communications and command systems. The first aircraft began flight testing on August 7, 2025, with flight and ground testing continuing through 2026 before the heavy modification work begins. A program like this anchors thousands of high-skill engineering jobs for a decade, and SNC is running it largely out of Nevada.

The spin-off racing to orbit

If the name Dream Chaser rings a bell, that is the other half of the story. SNC's space division became its own company, Sierra Space, spun off in 2021. Sierra Space is building the Dream Chaser, a reusable lifting-body spaceplane that lands on a runway like the shuttle did, along with components for commercial space stations. It has raised hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation reported around $8 billion, and its first orbital flight, a cargo run for NASA, is targeted for late 2026.

Sierra Space is now a separate company with its own leadership and investors, so its wins are not strictly SNC's. But it grew out of the same Sparks-rooted ambition, and it is a reminder that the Ozmens were betting on space long before it was fashionable.

Why it matters for Nevada

Economic developers spend their careers trying to lure companies like this from somewhere else. Nevada already has one, and it grew up here. SNC is among the largest woman-owned and immigrant-founded companies in the United States, and it sits in Sparks, not Seattle or Los Angeles, paying aerospace-engineering wages into the Reno-Sparks economy. It is proof that the most advanced, highest-stakes work in the country can be done in Northern Nevada, by people who chose to build it here.

That is the optimistic thread worth pulling on. The Ozmens' story is the immigrant-founder story at its best: arrive with nothing, buy the company you work for, and end up building the plane the nation would fly through its worst day. It happened in Sparks. It is still happening there.

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Reporting drawn from Defense News, The Aviationist, Sierra Space, Forbes, TechFundingNews, and Wikipedia, among others. Some figures vary across sources and are given conservatively: SNC is privately held, so revenue estimates (roughly $1 billion to $1.4 billion) and headcount (about 5,000) are third-party approximations. Sierra Space is now an independent company; its valuation and flight schedule are its own. The pull-quote is attributed to Eren Ozmen in published profiles and should be confirmed against the original source before reuse. The hero image is original illustration; we will swap in licensed or company-provided photography when available.