MOJAVE — Inside one of the bustling ramshackle hangars at the Mojave Air & Space Port, 23-year-old Kyle Nyberg is tightening dozens of stainless-steel nuts that make up the innards of the rocket sitting before him.
As the searing desert heat creeps in through an open door, beads of sweat form on Nyberg's brow. Dirt coats his baseball cap and his black gym shoes threaded with neon green laces. Some of his fingers are wrapped with ragged bandages.
But the young aeronautical engineer is smiling. He knows the 12-foot rocket is set to blast off any day now.
"How many guys do you know who get to launch rockets three days a week and get paid for it?" he asks. "I wouldn't give this up for anything."
Nyberg, just a year out of college, is one of scores of young rocket scientists, aerospace engineers and technicians who have come to work at this World War II military base to build the next generation of spacecraft.
For half a century, venturing into space has been the primary domain of governments that can afford to spend billions of dollars developing and sending massive rockets into the final frontier. Today, private companies are eagerly competing to capitalize on and profit from the governmental feats.
The 3,300-acre site with a 2-mile-long runway has been transformed into an energetic commercial space hub, drawing projects bankrolled by British billionaire Richard Branson, Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen and other aerospace visionaries.
With technological advances that they say will make rocketry more affordable, these new companies are focusing on an array of ventures such as lifting space tourists briefly into sub-orbit and launching satellites and cargo far into space.
Companies at Mojave are trying to make space travel for tourists as common as cross-country commercial airline flights. In addition, they're trying to win NASA contracts. The space agency has begun hiring privately funded start-up companies for spacecraft development and outsourcing missions.
Nyberg builds and designs a new line of rockets at Masten Space Systems. The autonomous vertical-landing rockets zoom to high altitudes and return under rocket power, testing technologies in the upper atmosphere for a variety of organizations, including NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Mojave is not the only place where this kind of experimentation is underway, but what's going on in the desert is reminiscent of aviation 100 years ago in Los Angeles, said Peter Westwick, author of "Blue Sky Metropolis: The Aerospace Century in Southern California."
In the early days of aviation, pioneers such as Jack Northrop, Howard Hughes, Donald Douglas and the Lockheed brothers started companies clustered around rural airfields throughout the Southland.
"They were all young entrepreneurial risk takers," Westwick said. "That's the same spirit you see coming from Mojave today."
Drawn to the desert
Mojave Air & Space Port's warren of nearly 100 wind-worn hangars sits just off a desolate stretch of California 14, amid the dusty landscape dotted with sage brush and gnarled Joshua trees.
Those driving by may dismiss the area as a hellish and inhospitable desert, but this truck-stop town (population 4,238) has thrived from the arrival of rocketeers and new-age industrialists. There are 69 companies at Mojave Air & Space Port — most of them aerospace-related — bringing about 2,500 jobs, some of them going to local residents.
The Kern County Economic Development Corp. says the space port's growth has contributed to Kern being named by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as the No. 1 county for employment growth in the nation in 2012.
"Communities across the country are increasingly looking at space ports as magnets for economic development," Westwick said. "Luckily for Southern California, entrepreneurial risk takers decided to settle here early on."
Companies are drawn here for a variety of reasons. There's the wide-open stretches of desert where rockets can be tested. There's the long runway, which allows easy takeoffs for airplanes loaded with rockets that have to be launched from high altitudes. And there are few neighbors to complain about the noise — though the space port is only about 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles.
This is where new spacecraft are tested daily. It's where the world's first commercial production plant for passenger-ready spaceships resides. It is also where Paul Allen's Stratolaunch Systems Inc. is breaking ground on a facility to manufacture the world's biggest airplane, which has six jumbo jet engines.
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