The city of stars was once a major hub for aerospace. Soon it might be again.

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“Southern California as we know it would not exist without aerospace,” the historian Peter Westwick has written. The industry transformed the region, in his words, “from a collection of agricultural groves to a sprawling high-tech nexus on the Pacific Rim,” one whose military and financial power spanned the entire 20th century. There is no single reason why this “aerospace century” came to an end in Southern California, although the end of the Space Race and, later, the Cold War’s rapid thaw decreased the industry’s national urgency. Aircraft like the SR-71 were mothballed and replaced. Spy satellite imagery was declassified and put to use in other arenas, seeding the ground for today’s private satellite-mapping renaissance. Some firms packed up entirely, others were swallowed whole by corporate mergers, and the rest moved east, back into the powerful financial and political orbit of Washington, D.C.

But aerospace in Los Angeles never completely disappeared. Like fossils hidden in the sand, this previous, sky-bound version of L.A. may be hard to spot, but even its most well-disguised traces are still detectable.

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DeMille Field, at the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles, 1920
DeMille Field, at the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles, 1920 - Photograph of an aerial view of the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, showing Rogers Airport, Los Angeles, 1920. The towers of oil siphons fill the expanse of cleared land above the intersection of the two roads. A few striped display tents have been pitched in the clearing below them. There is a possibility that the road on the lower right corner is what eventually became Olympic. The diagonal dirt road above it is what became San Vicente blvd. The road that goes from left to right midway up the photo is Wilshire, and the one that intersects it Fairfax, which at that time may still have been called Crescent Avenue. © California Historical Society / USC Libraries

.... The city’s hidden history is now waking up. A new crop of aerospace firms is taking root, often in the same buildings as those earlier corporations. They are launching an era of personal satellites, non-state space exploration, and—someday—a private, crewed mission to Mars. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, based in Northrop Grumman’s former factory in Hawthorne, is only the most widely known example of a multibillion-dollar industry rapidly coalescing here, from the Mojave Air and Space Port in the desert north of Los Angeles to the coastal launch pads at Vandenberg Air Force Base, even to the streets and offices near LAX.

The sector’s newfound appeal is such that, at the end of April 2018, Jeff Bezos remarked that he could see no other way to spend his Amazon fortune than on private space travel. It was leaving the Earth or bust (or leaving the Earth to go bust, as his critics quickly retorted, rather than, say, raising wages for his own employees). Bezos’s space firm, Blue Origin, is based outside Seattle, not in Southern California, but the broader private space industry is seeing huge windfalls in expenditure from celestial sugar daddies such as Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk, to name only a few, not to mention lucrative contracts and awards from government agencies like DARPA and NASA.

North of Los Angeles, just 90 miles into the desert on the other side of the San Andreas Fault, lies the Mojave Air and Space Port. An industrial village of low-slung warehouses and cinder-block workshops, the facility has a peculiar double life: It is both the first facility in the United States to be licensed for horizontal launches of reusable space-capable aircraft, and it is a boneyard for abandoned jets. Aerospace ruins line the northeastern edge of the site in various states of disassembly. The Space Port is also home to a handful of private space companies, including rarefied firms such as Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic (pending its future move to the firm’s Norman Foster-designed New Mexico headquarters), along with the Spaceship CompanyMasten Space Systems, and Scaled Composites.

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