The new frontier of space is a repurposed swimsuit warehouse. It is a gutted shipping container in a nondescript parking lot. It is a rented vibration table in a leased industrial building.

It offers cramped, tandem parking right off an alleyway, kitty corner from the dumpster. Don’t go into the makeshift clean room, but feel free to look. Like the rest of the company, it’s brand new.

The new frontier of space is many things, but it is generally no further than 15 minutes from the nearest In-n-Out. Okay, 20 max, with traffic — this is Los Angeles, after all.

In this new space frontier, Americans are doing what they do best: world-beating innovation. They are growing seed crystals in microgravity for therapeutic drugs. They are developing low-power processes for high-energy lasers to enable deep-space, platinum group metal refinery. They are building modular, plug-and-play launch platforms and orbital vehicles ready-made for scientific payloads and equipment. They are developing more efficient, smaller and rapidly deployed earth stations capable of managing data backhaul to power on-orbit operations. And they are hitching rides on commercial launch providers to do it. Some make rocket bodies so light that you can move them around with one hand.

There are no two ways about it: Elon Musk made this possible.........

© The Hill