LONG BEACH >> Long Beach will be part of the “quiet revolution” that sends small satellites into orbit, said Virgin Galactic President Steve Isakowitz during Thursday’s Innovate SoCal conference.
• VIDEO: Virgin Galactic President Steve Isakowitz on commercial suborbital flights
“There’s a lot or really exciting emerging opportunities, and we decided to tap into that market to build actually, a rocket, a launch vehicle,” he said.
• VIDEO: Virgin Galactic President Steve Isakowitz on emerging small satellite industry
Long Beach City College hosted the Innovate SoCal conference, which took place at the Pacific Ballroom at Long Beach Arena. This was the second time the college has hosted the event, which is intended to benefit Long Beach area entrepreneurs.
Virgin Galactic, best known for its highly publicized efforts to commercialize suborbital flights, plans to build its LauncherOne rocket in Long Beach to further its other objective of competing in the private satellite launch industry.
LauncherOne is specifically designed as a two-stage rocket to carry smaller satellites into space and, according to the company, has the potential to make satellite launches more accessible to startups, universities and others who would lack the resources to send anything into space without “hitchhiking” on bigger launches.
• VIDEO: Virgin Galactic’s Steve Isakowitz on Long Beach’s workforce
Virgin Galactic’s operations in Long Beach are expected to begin in 2016. The company held a job fair earlier this month at the former Boeing site where the company plans to assemble rockets. Although Virgin Galactic had only 100 jobs on its immediate hiring list, Isakowitz said some 6,000 people showed up to the event.
“I think what was really exciting to us was the quality of the folks that we saw come out, many of them local here, but also from the surrounding communities. We had people fly in or drive in from other states,” he said.
Virgin Galactic plans to carry LauncherOne rockets into the air by its twin-fuselage WhiteKnightTwo aircraft before shooting them off into space. Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia said he could imagine the possibility of such flights taking off from Long Beach Airport.
“The idea of flying a spacecraft out of Long Beach Airport. I could get excited about that,” he said.
After speaking on stage, Isakowitz said in an interview that Virgin Galactic wants to have the same kind of success promoting private space flight in Long Beach as Space Exploration Technologies, also known as SpaceX, has had in Hawthorne.
He also remarked that aspiring aerospace professionals have come to view private spaceflight as an increasingly attractive proposition.
“(They) were in line for NASA jobs. They’re now in line for the private commercial enterprises,” he said.
• VIDEO: Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia speaks on city’s prospects for economic growth
The inaugural Innovate SoCal conference took place in January 2014, when college President Eloy Ortiz Oakley announced the establishment of the Innovation Fund SoCal, intended as a source of money for Southern California startups.
The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City provided the college with a $100,000 grant to create the fund, according to foundation spokesman Neil Neumeyer.
Last May, college officials announced the first round of companies to receive financing through the fund.
Among those companies was Revoterial, a Los Angeles startup seeking to introduce environmentally friendly technologies to the fashion industry.
Revoterial Chief Executive Yotam Solomon said the coaching and advice he has received through the fund since winning the award last year has helped his firm refine its attempts to bring its goods to market. Revoterial earned the fund’s support last year while working on a product called Silxt, intended to replace materials used in shoes and other products.
“We’re actually working on quite a few more technologies right now,” Solomon said.
At Thursday’s conference, two new startups were selected to receive $50,000 no-interest loans through Innovation Fund SoCal.
Long Beach City College spokeswoman Stacey Toda said the winning companies are AuraLife, a Newport Beach firm behind a mobile app that measures a user’s blood pressure and Trace-Ability Inc., a Culver City concern involved in PET scans, a medical technique in which a radioactive material is injected into the body to produce an image of what’s happening inside the body.
