SpaceX has expanded its operations at the port of Los Angeles, leasing 19 acres of land to build a rocket manufacturing facility.
The area at the port of Los Angeles was chosen by SpaceX due to the need for a property with sufficient water access, as the rockets they intend to build are far too large for normal transport via rail.
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Director of Construction and Real Estate at SpaceX, Bruce McHugh, features in the video commenting that development will be “an 80,000-foot building, that’s 80 feet tall … and when we add onto it, it’ll wind up being a total of 200,000 square foot.”
The 19-acre plot of the land was once the site of the Southwest Marine Shipyard, which closed in 2005 and has since been in disuse — save for a number of high-profile film and television shoots, including “Die Hard”, “24” and “CSI: Miami”.
The Southwest Marine Shipyard, the new location for SpaceX's facility
SpaceX has been using the port of Los Angeles as a base for its recovery operations on the West Coast, and on May 8, 2018 they unloaded the recently re-entered Dragon Capsule from a resupply mission to the International Space Station.
