At first glance, it doesn’t feel like the future will be made in El Segundo. A small city of 17,000, just south of Los Angeles International Airport, it’s the sort of place you glance at from your taxi as it whisks you on from arrivals to somewhere more exciting. But here, in a jumble of old industrial buildings under the shadow of a giant Chevron refinery, a group of entrepreneurs are embracing the country’s emerging “hard tech” revolution, something which could soon transform both America and the wider world.
Rather than simply growing the social media sinkhole, hard tech focuses on building real-world equipment. “We’re inventing the new factory town, and recovering the sense of what works in America,” says Cameron Schiller, whose Rangeview Corporation startup uses 3D technology to make castings for the metal parts used in aerospace. And if Schiller feels his team is fighting the right fight, he’s far from alone. El Segundo, after all, is home to around three dozen such firms, the biggest concentration in the region, together making everything from drones to engines, drilling systems to satellites.
As Schiller implies, all this could finally restore America to the kind of blue-collar prosperity it enjoyed after 1945. It could also protect the country against threats from overseas and even take the country to the stars — if, that is, El Segundo can fend off competition from both other states and the looming threat of China’s own high-tech space sector.
The emergence of El Segundo, known to locals as “Gundo”, comes after decades of struggle. With the end of the Cold War, America’s traditional aerospace industry stumbled. Big contractors like Lockheed and Boeing got fat and lazy, particularly given the lack of competition after the Soviet Union’s demise.
Over recent years, and especially with the end of the Pax Americana, the country’s aerospace sector is making a comeback, jumping by 7.1% in 2023. Yet this revival isn’t really focused on poorly managed primes — Lockheed Martin’s Artemis moon rocket has been plagued by delays and failures — but rather on the smaller firms snatching up their engineers. Scattered like lost pennies from LAX to coastal San Diego, a stretch of about 100 miles, these firms are concentrated in old industrial areas like El Segundo, where the daytime population reaches 50,000, or else Long Beach’s Douglas Park, with a million square feet of industrial space.
Around 40 of these new firms are spinoffs from SpaceX, which is now worth an estimated $350 billion and whose founding headquarters once sat just 11 miles east of Gundo. One good example here is Relativity Space, a Long Beach-based outfit that develops reusable rockets and raised $650 million in 2021. Another spinoff is Impulse Space, a satellite developer that lately secured $300 million of its own.
As the SpaceX connection suggests, this is something new. For if American tech was once dominated by coders and marketers, these jobs are increasingly disappearing off to Bangalore, with software firms from Salesforce to Google facing eye-watering job cuts. Not that it’s all bad. For if algorithms are on the way out, America’s virtual economy is being replaced by what Delian Asparouhov calls “harder tech”.
Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: NOAA's GOES-T weather tracking satellite is launched, via Flickr, in Public Domain.
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