This article has been updated and corrected.

Despite SpaceX decamping its longtime Southern California headquarters for Texas last year, the region remains an integral part of the national space program.

In particular, Long Beach – affectionately known by the local business community as “Space Beach” – has churned out companies that could be the critical government contractor.

Long Beach is a uniquely dynamic hub for neighborhood space startups to expand, given the readily available access to an airport and the Port of Long Beach. In addition, it’s a pipeline of talented engineers and a collaborative local government. The area is also close in proximity to Los Angeles Air Force Base in El Segundo, which houses Space Force’s Space Systems Command center.

“We have one of the fastest-growing space ecosystems in the country right now, and we continue to see startups and fast-growing companies, as well as existing companies, grow and expand within the city,” said Bo Martinez, the director of economic development for the City of Long Beach, a role he has held for nearly three years.

Martinez added that the city continues to work with the companies that call it home to attract and recruit new businesses and talent to the city. This includes streamlining city regulatory processes so that companies face minimal red tape when developing and launching products, including rockets.

“We really take pride in working with our space companies, (both) those that are existing and those yet to come, to make sure that we work on a timeline that meets their entitlement and permitting processes and make sure that we get them speed to market,” Martinez said. “That’s very important to our space companies.”

Companies surveyed for this article all emphasized the Long Beach government’s willingness to collaborate. This is partly because of Mayor Rex Richardson’s initiatives to make the area a hub for business development.

“Knowing that the mayor is interested in high-tech jobs and in being business-friendly and supporting companies like us has been great,” said Vast Chief Executive Max Haot. “The City of Long Beach has also been great (with) non-political infrastructure in permitting and in facilitating all the things we need to do, and they’ve certainly been great to work with.”

Cultivating a reputation as a city that “rolls out the red carpet, not the red tape” for businesses is key to Long Beach, Martinez said.

“We continue to see a lot of interest from advanced manufacturing companies,” he added. “When you think about the opportunity here in Long Beach, it really is all about the talent and speed to market; I think that’s very important to a lot of companies we work with.”

Some businesses aren’t headquartered in Long Beach but are worth mentioning as they are active in the area, including Colorado-based defense technology startup True Anomaly. Chief Financial Mark Seidel was with Relativity Space – also in Long Beach – as its vice president of finance and strategy for nearly three years before joining True Anomaly in 2023.

“Long Beach has a deep history tied to aerospace with major players operating in the area,” Seidel said. “So it made sense for us to have a strong presence in a place where we could further strengthen the ecosystem and take advantage of the technical talent needed to expand our capabilities.”

Vast eyeing space station replacement

Vast has the lofty ambition of building a commercial space station – Haven-2 – from its headquarters in Long Beach that can be fully assembled and launched in the United States by 2035. Leading into that, it plans to launch Haven-1 next year.

Vast’s Haven-1 space station would hold up to four crew members and eventually contain “an innovation lab for private astronauts and government missions,” according to its website. It has plans to be part of the team that redesigns the aging International Space Station, which will be decommissioned by 2030 after more than 30 years of continuous orbit.

Haot said the company knew it had to be based in Long Beach from its inception. Founder Jed McCaleb recruited ex-SpaceX engineers who had worked on the Crew Dragon rocket, and “they concluded that with the amount of talent we would need to create a space station – crew space systems are even more complex than satellite systems – he concluded Los Angeles was the right spot,” Haot said.

Vast was originally based in El Segundo, but quickly scaled out of its location. “When we were looking for that scale, it became obvious that Long Beach was the right spot,” Haot said. “The properties we were able to visit were the right size, the right specifications, and we have satellite offices in different places, but definitely have no plans to relocate.”

Vast is currently funded entirely by McCaleb, though the company has not disclosed its total funding to date. Like many of the companies on this list, Vast has secured advance customer interest which has generated some revenue, despite having yet to launch a craft.

“We will be opening up the cap table this year to new investors,” Haot said though he didn’t provide specifics. “By the time we fly Haven-1, between the revenue from our customers and the investment of our founder, we will have invested more than $1 billion.”

Rocket Lab as busy as ever

One of the best-known names in Long Beach is Rocket Lab Corp.

The SpaceX competitor was founded in 2006 by chief executive Peter Beck, who also serves as chief technology officer. While it has roots in Auckland, New Zealand, Rocket Lab’s headquarters is in Long Beach.

Rocket Lab makes a reusable orbital rocket called the Electron, which flew its 68th mission on June 28. The company has completed numerous missions launching small satellites into low earth orbit for commercial customers on the Electron, 10 of which have happened so far this year. Rocket Lab is the only publicly-traded space company in Long Beach, having debuted on the NASDAQ through a SPAC merger with blank-check outfit Vector Acquisition Corp. in August 2021. At the time, Rocket Lab’s public offering netted it $777 million and it was valued at $4.8 billion in equity.

Last month, Rocket Lab said it would acquire infrared sensor developer Geost for $275 million, taking over its workforce and laboratories in Arizona and Virginia. After the deal, Rocket Lab will have roughly 2,600 total employees globally. The acquisition is part of Rocket Lab’s larger ambition to become a key U.S. contractor – it could use Geost’s infrared sensor technology to work on President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” project, which would create a sophisticated nationwide missile defense apparatus.

The company also recently completed its fifth launch for a Japanese Earth imaging startup called Institute for Q-shu Pioneers of Space Inc., in a launch window that opened on Aug. 5. Three more missions for IQPS are scheduled for later this year.

True Anomaly sets up satellite outpost

Space defense technology company True Anomaly was founded in 2022 to “enable a secure, stable, and sustainable space environment for the U.S., its allies, and partners,” Seidel said.

It makes two products: Jackal, a spacecraft that can be used as a satellite in any orbit, and Mosaic, a software program that enables mission training, planning and analysis as well as flight operations for the Jackal craft.

The company raised a $260 million series C round from investors including Venice-based Riot Ventures, this April. To date, it has raised $400 million, Seidel said, and is backed by funders including Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures.

Like every other company surveyed here, True Anomaly considered Long Beach’s talent pipeline when moving to the city.

“As tech investors pour more money into defense startups, we’re seeing more and more tech talent moving from Silicon Valley to places like Long Beach, where there are new and exciting opportunities to work on really hard, technical problems, and build really amazing hardware products,” said Seidel. “Having a permanent, large-scale presence in Long Beach allows us to tap directly into that talent pool.”

Relativity Space goes 3D printing route

A Rocket Lab and SpaceX competitor, Relativity Space is building 3D-printed reusable rockets at its facilities in Long Beach.

Relativity created the Terran 1, the first methane-fueled, 3D-printed rocket to reach orbit in March 2023. It also is working on a larger model, the Terran R, which can take heavier payloads into space.

The company operates a launch site in Cape Canaveral, Fla., where the Terran R is expected to take its first flight from next year. Doing so is costly, though – Relativity has raised more than $2.3 billion since its 2015 inception, from investors including the University of Southern California, downtown-based Calm Ventures, and Wavemaker Partners, which used to be based in Santa Monica but recently relocated to Singapore.

Novel idea powers SpinLaunch

SpinLaunch entered the space ecosystem in 2014 and is building an unconventional method of launching spacecraft through a ground-based mass accelerator.

It looks like a massive upright nautilus and will rotate a mechanical arm up to 5,000 miles per hour to fling the craft into space. The company argues this will save up to 70% of fuel of a traditionally ground-launched rocket.

Originally founded in Sunnyvale, SpinLaunch moved to Long Beach in early 2019 to capitalize on the area’s wealth of engineering talent.

“For the last five years, we’ve really been building out the launch technology, as well as some satellite systems,” said SpinLaunch vice president of technology David Wrenn. “Following our relocation down to the Long Beach area, we built out the suborbital accelerator, which is the system that we have in New Mexico at Spaceport America.”

SpinLaunch also recently announced plans to launch its own constellation of low earth orbit 5G communications satellites called Meridian. The cluster of 250 microsatellites could target the government, corporate networks, aviators or industrial companies as its first customers, but is still being built.

The orbital launch system is in many ways modeled after the New Mexico suborbital accelerator, which was built in 2021 and has launched 10 successful test flights. The goal is eventually to have SpinLaunch’s orbital accelerator send payloads into space rapidly from its Adak, Alaska, location, eliminating the costly process of shipping equipment around the globe to launch it, Wrenn said.

SpinLaunch has raised roughly $202 million to date, most recently in an April funding round worth $12 million. The company’s investors include Kleiner Perkins, Gaingels and Kongsberg Gruppen, a Norwegian defense contractor.

“We’re really excited Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace has come in as a partner investor,” Wrenn said. “We are working with them on integrating the unique communications and antenna technology we’ve developed with the existing satellite systems that they have, so it’s a parallel path with the launch technology and satellite systems. We’re really happy to be here in Long Beach, of course, given how incredible the talent is.”