SpaceX is coming to Long Beach.
The Long Beach Board of Harbor Commissioners voted during its Monday, April 26, meeting to approve a sublease that will allow the Hawthorne aerospace firm to use a marine terminal for its West Coast rocket recovery operations.
SpaceX will open up the facility on about 6.5 acres at the Port of Long Beach’s Pier T, which was once the site of a U.S. Navy complex, starting Saturday, May 1. The company will use the site’s existing wharf to dock its vessels and offload equipment, according to a statement from port officials.
Representatives for SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
The sublease agreement is for two years, though SpaceX can terminate it at any point with 90 days of written notice. The company will pay $107,000 in monthly rent, which will be subject to annual adjustments.
“This is great news for our aerospace industry and for the residents of Long Beach,” Mayor Robert Garcia said in a statement. “With this addition, Long Beach is firmly the largest space and technology hub on the west coast, and there is still so much room to grow.”
Other aerospace firms that have opened up sites in Long Beach in recent years include Virgin Orbit, RocketLab, Relativity Space and SpinLaunch.
Monday’s news came nearly a year after SpaceX terminated a lease deal to use 12.5 acres in the neighboring Port of Los Angeles to manufacture the Starship, a spacecraft designed to one day head to Mars. It was the second time the company bailed out of a pending deal with the port and city of Los Angeles.
At the time, SpaceX officials said the company would “continue its operations for recovery of its flight-proven rockets and Dragon spacecraft at the Port of Los Angeles.”
But the company has since pulled out of the Los Angeles port almost entirely, a port spokesman said Monday, except for a small storage facility that remains there.
Now, it appears those recovery operations will have a new home base, just down the road.
The Port of Long Beach’s executive director, Mario Cordero, said in a Monday phone interview that he was excited about the prospect of bringing a company like SpaceX to the old Navy property.
“It’s a tremendous opportunity to have for the Port of Long Beach,” he said, “and we’ll see where that leads to. We’re hopeful that it will lead to an expanded relationship of years with SpaceX.”
The way Cordero sees it, the Pier T facility may just be the beginning of SpaceX’s presence at the port.
“We welcome the opportunity,” he said, “to at least start with this footprint.”
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