A three-day aerospace tradeshow saw about 2,500 industry professionals, government officials and academics converge on Long Beach recently — further reinforcing the city’s recent burgeoning reputation as “Space Beach.”
The Space Tech Expo saw aerospace experts gather at the Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center this week to market their newest products, learn about rising trends and network with representatives from organizations like NASA, Northrop Grumman or Aerojet Rocketdyne.
Long Beach has recently become an aerospace hotspot, home to companies like Rocket Lab and Virgin Orbit, as well as longtime local industry giant Boeing. Even SpaceX, headquartered in Hawthorne but with major operations in Texas, has set up shop at the Port of Long Beach for recovery operations. These companies have staked build rockets, satellites and all the parts that go inside them.
The industries growing presence in the seaside metropolis has led some to call the city “Space Beach,” and the industry has created many new jobs — high-paying ones at that.
“Long Beach could rename itself ‘Rocket City’ because of all the launch companies that have sprouted up,” Eric Stallmer, the executive vice president of Voyager Space Holdings, said in an interview Friday morning, Oct. 8.
“Long Beach is a growing player, like others,” he added. “So many communities want to be part of this growing space market and it’s competitive.”
Long Beach, Stallmer said, reminds him of other space hubs across the country, like Huntsville, Alabama, or Denver.
Lucius Martin, a special projects officer in the city’s economic development office, said the city has a lot of momentum in the aerospace industry, and a lot of companies are following that. Long Beach, for its part, does not provide any tax incentives or give land to these companies, Martin said. Instead, the city has grown naturally into a space hub, he said.
He also said the Long Beach area has a lot of commercial space for companies that need it and there’s a lot of local talent for aerospace companies to hire from.
“We have companies in Silicon Valley looking for space in Long Beach,” Martin said.
Southern California — including Long Beach — has a long aerospace industry, first booming after World War II when folks migrated out west for prime engineering jobs; much of the work, however, was in aviation, though there were also jobs related to the space race.
Long Beach, for example, was home to a massive Boeing plant that produced the C-17 Globemaster — a military cargo plane — for two decades, until the last one left the city in 2015.
But now, the space race has renewed — with companies such as SpaceX and Virgin Orbit shooting to one-up each other.
While this iteration of the aerospace industry is fairly new to the city, it’s been in Los Angeles County for a while. Aerojet Rocketdyne is originally from Canoga Park in the San Fernando Valley and SpaceX has called the South Bay home since its inception.
“The West Coast is probably the central place for aviation to start,” said Mike Ash, director for business development at CalTech’s Center for Technology and Management Education. “You have a lot of skills in the Long Beach area and mechanisms to help companies grow and survive.”
And it’s important for these companies to grow, Ash added, because developing aerospace technology is good for humanity. In the short term, he said, being in space and studying the atmosphere gives scientists on earth an opportunity to learn more about the weather and climate change.
In the long term, Ash added, innovations in aerospace technology will also lead to improvements that benefit everyday consumers.
“If we can keep innovation happening at a strong clip, a lot of that trickles down to us normal people eventually,” Ash said by phone Friday. “There’s so much great stuff happening in space that makes us better stewards of the planet. We’re learning about the weather and the climate and the atmosphere. We benefit from that immediately.”
Stallmer, whose Voyager Space Holdings acquires other space companies to further space exploration, also said space travel could ultimately benefit other industries, such as agriculture, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals.
Of course, there are always vacations on Mars. Companies from Long Beach help could get us there.
“I would wager a bet that commercial companies get settlements on Mars before NASA,” Stallmer said.
