Models of NASA spacecraft, Lego sets, patches representing various space missions and geographically accurate globes of moons and planets line the walls of a new store in downtown Chattanooga.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the stars,” Craig Fuller, the founder of FreightWaves and Firecrown, said in an interview. “We’re so small in this massive, infinite universe, and there’s just something captivating about the beauty of it, the mystery of it, the adventure of it that I think is very attractive for space nerds.”
The Space Store, an e-commerce business dating back to 1996, has opened its only physical location after Fuller’s media company, Firecrown, purchased it in February. The brick and mortar shop opened in November in an underused storefront at 412 Market St., which previously served as a museum dedicated to trucking. It’s in the same building as the headquarters for FreightWaves, a company that provides data for the trucking and logistics industries.
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Firecrown owns a series of aviation magazines, Fuller said, and acquiring the Space Store ended up being a good way to blend those audiences. The company also purchased Astronomy Magazine in May.