When SpaceX Remade Los Angeles
The City of the Futures
One of the main reasons I ended up writing a biography1 on Elon Musk goes back to my first visit to the SpaceX factory in Los Angeles. This was about 2012, and I was not a space nerd and had really not paid that much attention to what SpaceX was doing. My expectations were low.
At the time, the media liked to tell people that you could not manufacture things well in the U.S. and that you certainly could not make things somewhere like California. And yet, I stepped into the SpaceX factory, which is just a few miles from LAX, and there were thousands of people working on not just one rocket but lots of rockets.
Over the past decade, SpaceX has grown and grown and now employs tens of thousands of people. These engineers work at the very edge of what’s possible with new manufacturing techniques.
As is the natural course of events, many of these SpaceX vets have left the company to start their own new ventures and a ton of them are pursuing very modern forms of manufacturing. There are so many New Age manufacturing start-ups in LA now that I’m convinced the city will be the center of the next chapter in the US’s manufacturing story.
In this new episode of Hello World, I cover LA’s aerospace, automotive and manufacturing past and its possibly glorious future in a bid to explain what’s going on in Hollywood.
Another crop of SpaceX veterans have started commercial space companies. They’re busy turning LA into the capital of New Space.
One of the cofounders of SpaceX - Tom Mueller - did most of the dirty work explaining LA’s space past and future to me in this episode of the show.
I have a tendency to got optimistic about things. And this LA situation could play out in a variety of ways. California certainly needs to start doing itself some favors by making it easier for these companies to set up and operate.
That said, people often forget that LA is the largest manufacturing center in the U.S. already and that it has the largest port. If - and it’s a huge IF - the U.S. can outflank the rest of the world as a type of super modern manufacturing power, I’m pretty sure that will happen first and on the largest scale in LA.
Please excuse the self-promotion that follows.
We just launched a new season of Hello World and have been rolling out an episode a week. The two above are from the new season, and we also have -
A Nerd Revolution of Sorts in Kyrgyzstan
And Guns, Balloons and Rocket Engines in Colorado
And Sergey Brin’s Massive New Airship
New episodes will be coming, and the whole back catologue is here if you feel like celebrating my entire collection.
Meanwhile, I’ve been out watching Bryan Johnson do a blood boy swap and will have a ton of longevity tech reporting to come over the next few weeks.
As ever, I adore you all.
Screw that other guy.