Rebound in aerospace sector propels the region's economy

Startups seek out talent in the Southland, following Musk's trajectory

- LAURENCE DARMIENTO

VAST, a startup in Long Beach, plans to build a replacement for the $150-billion International Space Station.

In a giant Long Beach warehouse near where Boeing used to build the C-17 cargo jet, Vast is fabricating what could be the first commercial space station to circle Earth.

Just up the road in El Segundo, Varda Space Industries has grown molecular crystals in microgravity with few impurities for pharmaceuticals that one day could be injected in cancer patients.

And a little south in Seal Beach, a scrappy company called AstroForge aims to land a satellite on an asteroid just a football field wide and mine possibly billions in platinum riches.

The companies aren't anomalies but rather three examples of Southern California's growing space economy, which shrank after the Cold War but is being revitalized with a new wave of startups pushing technological boundaries.

Southern California has an illustrious aerospace heritage, starting with some of the first rocket experiments at what was to become the Jet Propulsion Laboratory — with the region later producing the X-15 rocket plane, the Apollo capsule and the space shuttles.

Today's innovators are following in the flight path of a relative newcomer: Elon Musk's SpaceX, which set up shop in El Segundo in 2002 to draw on the region's deep engineering talent and pioneered the development of low-cost reusable rockets.

Though the company has since moved to Texas, its main operations remain in Hawthorne and many of the new companies have been founded by SpaceX alumni -or are reliant on its Falcon 9 workhorse rocket, which recently surpassed 500 launches.

"The massive drop in the cost of getting mass into orbit, and the frequency with which they do launches ... is almost exclusively due to SpaceX," said Andrew Sather, a partner at Initialized Capital, a San Francisco venture capital firm that invested in AstroForge.