Port of Los Angeles approves SpaceX portside construction site

To read this post please scroll down.

Readers! A November fund-raising drive!

It is unfortunately time for another November fund-raising campaign to support my work here at Behind the Black. I really dislike doing these, but 2025 is so far turning out to be a very poor year for donations and subscriptions, the worst since 2020. I very much need your support for this webpage to survive.

And I think I provide real value. Fifteen years ago I said SLS was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said Orion was a lie and a bad idea. As early as 1998, long before almost anyone else, I predicted in my first book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, that private enterprise and freedom would conquer the solar system, not government. Very early in the COVID panic and continuing throughout I noted that every policy put forth by the government (masks, social distancing, lockdowns, jab mandates) was wrong, misguided, and did more harm than good. In planetary science, while everyone else in the media still thinks Mars has no water, I have been reporting the real results from the orbiters now for more than five years, that Mars is in fact a planet largely covered with ice.

I could continue with numerous other examples. If you want to know what others will discover a decade hence, read what I write here at Behind the Black. And if you read my most recent book, Conscious Choice, you will find out what is going to happen in space in the next century.

This last claim might sound like hubris on my part, but I base it on my overall track record.

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. I could really use the support at this time. There are five ways of doing so:

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation. Takes about a 10% cut.

3. A Paypal Donation or subscription, which takes about a 15% cut:

4. Donate by check. I get whatever you donate. Make the check payable to Robert Zimmerman and mail it to

Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652

You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.

March 19, 2018 10:22 pm Robert Zimmerman

The Port of Los Angeles has granted SpaceX approval to begin construction of a booster construction and refurbishment facility on a large abandoned lot with direct ocean berthing access.

A request summary completed on March 6 details SpaceX’s proposal, laying out a bright future of rocket manufacturing for the abandoned 18-acre lot at Berth 240, one that might soon support “composite curing, cleaning, painting, and assembly [of commercial transportation vessels]” that “would need to be transported by water due to their size.

The article then speculates that this facility will be used to build SpaceX’s BFR. Maybe so, but my guess is that the facility is needed now for bringing reused Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters back after launch and prepping them for reuse.

While it is likely to take a fair amount of time to prepare the lot for the construction of a facility capable of manufacturing advanced composite rocket components, the wording in the Port documentation also suggests that SpaceX means to transfer its Falcon 9 recovery work to the new berth as soon as it’s available. Indeed, the comparatively massive space would give SpaceX far more room for recovery operations with the drone ship Just Read The Instructions (JRTI), and could potentially become a one-stop-shop for booster recovery and refurbishment. As of now, boosters recovered on the West Coast are transported to the Hawthorne factory for all refurbishment work, operations that themselves already require brief road stoppages to accommodate the sheer size of Falcon 9.

One comment

Dick Eagleson
March 21, 2018 at 5:42 pm
I was told by a SpaceX-er back in Dec. that a BFR-BFS factory site had already been settled on and was in the process of being acquired. As to location, all he would say then was that it was somewhere in San Pedro. Yup.

But it’s a big site. SpaceX may elect to level the site and build both the F9/FH recovery/refurb facility and the BFR-BFS production/assembly plant from scratch, though there seems to be at least one existing structure that might work for the recovery/refurb stuff if rehabbed first. SpaceX, and its contractors, have considerable experience both quickly rehabbing existing structures – SpaceX’s Hawthorne factory was a derelict ex-Northrop factory when it was originally acquired – and running up big structures from scratch – e.g., the Horizontal Integration Facility at LC-39A.

Pure speculation on my part, but SpaceX may elect to put up the assembly facility for BFR-BFS first and the production facility later. Rumor has it that a subcontractor is building the early big pieces for BFR-BFS somewhere else. These could easily be landed at the SpaceX San Pedro site and fitted out with smaller stuff – like Raptor engines – built in Hawthorne. SpaceX could, thus, “back into” vertically integrated production on-site – or not – as it chose.

Given that there has been talk of BFR-BFS “factories” at both Boca Chica and Kennedy/Canaveral, perhaps these will simply be assembly-only facilities or assembly-plus-refurb. We’ll have to see how things develop for the full story. Gonna be an interesting next few years.

Port of Los Angeles approves SpaceX portside construction site

One comment

Leave a Reply