The New Space Industry (I)

choi

(1) The New Space Industry (I) | A Field of Dreamers. Elon Musk may have deserted them. But the space cadetsof southern California remain full of vim and vigour. The Economist, Mar 15, 2025, at page 64

California's space cadets | Dreams of asteroid mining, orbital manufacturing and much more; Ideas for making money in orbit that seemed mad in the 1960s now look sane/ The Economist, Dec 6, 2-25.

the first two paragraphs:

In the name of the firm SpinLaunch, (pictured above) rather than on a rocket. After an hour's steady acceleration, the projectile will be fired out of the chamber at 2.2km a
second. Only when it is around 62km up will a small motor ignite to carry it the rest of the way into orbit.

"SpinLaunch, in Long Beach, is part of a cluster of 'New Space' firms in and around Los Angeles [the cluster is nameless, because only The Economist called it a cluster]. They are heirs to a century-old aerospace tradition, rebooted in 2002 when Elon Musk, a then-little-known entrepreneur, rented a warehouse in El Segundo for a startup called SpaceX. The 200kg payloads that SpinLaunch will handle are minuscule compared with those now launched by SpaceX, whose Falcon 9 rockets can loft nearly 23 tonnes. But small can be beautiful. The Electron launch vehicles made by Rocket Lab, one of SpinLaunch's neighbours, have only slightly larger loads—320kg. Rocket Lab is the only New Space firm so far, bar SpaceX, to make money by launching things into orbit

Note:
(a)
(i) El Segundo, California
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Segundo,_California
(in Los Angeles County; "The city acquired its name ('the second' in Spanish) due to being the second Standard Oil refinery on the West Coast" of the United States)
(ii) English dictionary:
* vim (n; etymology: "Latin, accusative of [noun feminine] vis strength")
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vim
* loft (vt): "to propel through the air or into space  <lofted a long hit to center pin baseball game]>"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/loft

(b)
(i) Reuters Graphics, Nov 25, 2021.
https://x.com/ReutersGraphics/status/1463783026064646145
("Aerospace startup SpinLaunch has devised a new system to launch satellites by spinning them at a high speed (up to 8,000 km per hour!) and then shooting them into space at a 35° angle. https://tmsnrt.rs/3cNCn9O")
(ii) "This [ie, Spinlaunch] means it [rocket] can carry a greater payload because less space is needed to hold rocket fuel. After reaching space the  orbital launch vehicle returns to Earth to be reused again." Dailymail.co.uk
(iii) SpinLaunch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinLaunch
(section 2 Technology: Limitations + Advantages)


(c) "They are heirs to a century-old aerospace tradition, rebooted in 2002 when Elon Musk, a then-little-known entrepreneur, rented a warehouse in El Segundo for a startup called SpaceX."
(i) "Los Angeles quickly became home to several of the world's largest aviation firms. In 1916, the Lockheed Brothers migrated from Northern [San Francisco, to be specific] to Southern California and set up a small aircraft production firm. Within a few years, they became major suppliers to the British Royal Air Force, and by the end of World War II, they had over 60,000 employees. In 1920, Harry Chandler[, publisher of Los Angeles Times (1917-1944) and real estate developer,] persuaded Donald Douglas to open a company in the region. His firm Douglas Aircraft first rented facilities in an abandoned movie studio [of Herrman Film Corporation] in Santa Monica and went on to become one of the chief manufacturers of aircraft in the United States. Jack Northrop opened his first airplane company in Los Angeles in the 1920s, but soon after, merged it with other firms. He started another company in 1939, which benefitted [together with benefitting are British English] enormously from the impending Second World War, and became yet another aircraft giant. Howard Hughes Hughes' Aircraft Company, founded in 1932, started in a rented hangar in Burbank, but ultimately grew to encompass 1,300 acres at the edge of Culver City and became one of the largest industrial employers in the state. The move of North American Aviation['s manufacturing operations from Dundalk, Maryland], later Rockwell International, to Inglewood in 1935 solidified the region as a center of aircraft production. The success of these firms was due in part to a wealth of technical talent graduating from the California Institute of Technology, which had established a School of Aeronautics and an associated research lab in the early 1920s. Theodore Von Karman, head of Caltech at the time, emphasized cooperation with the aircraft industry. * * * By the end of World War II, 60 to 70 percent of the American aerospace industry was located in Southern California * * * At the height of the Cold War, 15 of the 25 largest aerospace companies in the US were headquartered in Southern California."
The Southern California Aerospace Industry. Hughes Industrial Historic District, undated
https://www.hugheshistoric.com/s ... aerospace-industry/
(A) Allan (1889 – 1969) and his older brother (by 3 years) Malcolm Loughead in 1926 founded Lockheed Corporation (spelled that way). The brothers then legally changed their surname. See Allan Lockheed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Lockheed
("Loughead legally changed his name in 1934 to Allan Lockheed, the phonetic spelling of his family name, to avoid spelling confusion. * * * [flashback:] Malcolm Loughead formed the Lockheed Hydraulic Brake Company in 1919 [note this preceded the founding of Lockheed Corp, in 1926] to promote a revolutionary four-wheel hydraulic brake system that he had invented.[4] Tired of his name being mispronounced 'Log-head,' Malcolm changed the spelling to match its pronunciation")

• The Scottish surname Lochhead and its variant Loughead denotes a person living at the lake head.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lakehead
(B) McDonnell Douglas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas
(Donald "Douglas had been chief engineer at Martin [Glenn L Martin Company, which eventually led to the present-day Lockheed Martin] before leaving to establish Davis-Douglas Company in early 1920 in Los Angeles. The following year, he bought out his backer and renamed the firm the Douglas Aircraft Company.[4]")

• "it merged with McDonnell Aircraft in 1967 to form McDonnell Douglas [based in St Louis, MO suburb], where it operated as a division. McDonnell Douglas merged with Boeing in 1997." en.wikipedia.org for "Douglas Aircraft Company."
(C) Northrop Grumman Corp (1994- ; based just outside Washington, DC in Virginia) came about through merger of Northrop Corp (1939-1994; headquartered in Los Angeles County) and Grumman Aerospace Corp (1929-1994; based in Long Island, New York State).
(D) Hughes Aircraft Co
• "Hughes inherited his father's machine tool company in 1923": from the Web
• Howard Hughes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughe
(section 2 Business career, section 2.5 Hughes Aircraft: "In 1932 Hughes founded the Hughes Aircraft Company, a division of Hughes Tool Company, in a rented corner of a Lockheed Aircraft Corporation hangar in Burbank, California, to build the H-1 racer" aircraft)
• The Beginning of Hughes Aircraft Company. Hughes Industrial Historic District, undated
https://www.hugheshistoric.com/hughes-aircraft-company/
("Howard Hughes founded the Hughes Aircraft Company in 1932 as a subsidiary of Hughes Tool Company, a venture that was born primarily out of his passion for aviation racing. It first operated out of a rented hangar in Burbank, but soon outgrew this facility, so Hughes expanded operations to the Grand Central Terminal in Glendale. It was at the Grand Central Terminal that Hughes' own racer, the H-1, was designed and developed. * * * With the development and production of the D-2 aircraft came a need for more space. Hughes began purchasing farmland at the edge of Culver City, in the area now known as Playa Vista, in 1940 for the construction of a larger facility. On July 4, 1941, Hughes Aircraft moved into its new facility [Playa Vista was headquarters of Hughes Aircraft Co (1941-1985), per en.wikipedia.org for 'Playa Vista, Los Angeles'].")
• Glendale, California
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glendale,_California
(a city in Los Angeles County; "Glendale — along with neighboring Burbank and nearby Hollywood — has served as a major production center for the American film industry, and especially animation, and is home to Disneytoon Studios [1990-2018], Marvel Animation, and DreamWorks Animation")

City of Burbank (named after its founder David Burbank) and Hollywood (the latter being a neighborhood of City of Los Angeles) are Glendale's northwestern and Southwestern neighbors.
• Named after its founder Harry Culver, Culver City lies just outside City of Los Angeles, and abuts Playa Vista, a neighborhood of LA City. en.wikipedia.org for "Culver City, California."
• English dictionary:
* culver (n; etymology: diminutive of Latin noun feminine columba dove)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/culver
• Playa Vista means beach view in Spanish. {;ava Vista is separated from Playa Del Rey Beach by Playa Del Rey (Spanish for "Beach of the King"), another neighborhood of City of Los Angeles.
(E) Rockwell International was sold to Boeing in 1996.
• "Settled in 1873 by Daniel Freeman, who named the city for his hometown in Canada"  Encyclopaedia Britannica for City of "Inglewood[,] California, United States."
• Freeman's hometown is presently village of Inglewood, Ontario
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglewood,_Ontario
("In 1885, Thomas White, a member of Parliament, proposed the name Inglewood, inspired by a forest [of that name] in Cumberland, England, which became the official name in 1886")
• Inglewood Forest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglewood_Forest
(F) Theodore von Kármán
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_von_Kármán
(1881 – 1963; Hungarian-American; "in 1930 Kármán accepted the directorship of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT). * * * In 1944 he and others [Qian Xuesen 钱学森 among them]affiliated with GALCIT founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) * * * managed and operated by Caltech under a contract [then from US Army and presently] from NASA")
was never CALTECH president.
(G) A Historic District for Today's World. Playa Vista: Hughes Industrial Historic District, undated
https://www.hugheshistoric.com/
("The Hughes Industrial Historic District is the former home of the Hughes Aircraft Company")