Michael Greshko in Science:
For nearly a century, this coastal Los Angeles suburb has been the beating heart of the U.S. aerospace industry. During World War II, factories here cranked out bombers for the Pacific theater. Later came generations of air- and spacecraft built by giants such as Hughes and Northrop. Today, dozens of aerospace and technology startups share the neighborhood with SpaceX, just down the road in Hawthorne. At a pizza-and-beer lunch joint, conversations buzz with talk of supply chains for spacecraft components. When the fog rolls in, the low-slung warehouses seem to dissolve into the clouds—as if the neighborhood itself were preparing for launch.
On a Monday night in May, in a nondescript building along El Segundo’s eastern edge, about 50 engineers with Varda Space Industries gathered to witness not a launch, but a homecoming. They ate cold pizza and played Settlers of Catan as they watched a livestream, waiting for word on a spacecraft’s status. Inside a smaller mission control room, eight desks faced a wall of TV screens streaming information from the spacecraft, which was plummeting to Earth half a world away above the Australian outback. The robotic capsule, roughly the size of a washing machine, was preparing for a fiery plunge through the atmosphere before a planned parachute landing in the desert.
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