Space Beach, explained: why Long Beach's industrial buildings are filling up with rockets and drones

Long Beach has been an aerospace town for most of a century, going back to Douglas Aircraft and later Boeing's C-17 production line. What is different now is the speed. In the last two years, a cluster of space and defense companies has moved in, and they are not looking for office space. They are looking for industrial buildings with real power, real clear height, and real security, and there are not many left.

Who is actually here

• Voyager Technologies unveiled a 140,000 square foot facility at Conant Street and Lakewood Boulevard in March 2026, building components for missiles and spacecraft and employing 150 to 200 people
• True Anomaly opened a 90,000 square foot campus for design, production, and offices, choosing Long Beach specifically for access to the "Space Beach" talent pool and proximity to its Space Systems Command customer
• Anduril Industries signed a lease for more than a million square feet at Douglas Park near the airport, a $1 billion project expected to bring roughly 5,500 jobs at full build-out
• Rocket Lab and Relativity Space both run rocket manufacturing out of Long Beach, on ground SpaceX and Boeing occupied before them

Why it is happening here specifically

It is not an accident. Long Beach has decades of aerospace-trained labor still in the area, a university (CSU Long Beach) with a formal Space Beach initiative feeding new talent in, and a supply of large-format industrial buildings originally built for aircraft manufacturing that happen to have the power and clear height defense contractors need. Cheap land was never the draw. Infrastructure and workforce were.

What it means if you are not in aerospace

Even if you never intend to lease to a defense contractor, this cluster is absorbing the exact category of building, older industrial stock with high power and clear height, that used to sit on the market for months. If you own one of those buildings, you are competing for tenants in a different, tighter pool than you were three years ago. If you are shopping for a building yourself, expect less inventory and faster decisions from other buyers.

The rest of this series digs into specific pieces of this: the building specs these tenants require, what the near-zero vacancy near the airport actually signals, and what it means if you own one building rather than a portfolio of them.