A Falcon 9 first-stage booster stands outside SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, where the company designs and manufactures its rockets and spacecraft. Photo by Stephen Witt, Los Angeles County Politics.
By Stephen Witt, Los Angeles County Politics
All roads to freeways in the sky and space travel go through Hawthorne.
Hawthorne Mayor Alex Vargas will deliver his State of the City address Sept. 10 under the banner “Building Tomorrow, Together,” with Archer Aviation’s Midnight aircraft on display outside — a fitting emblem for a city that has spent the past year quietly becoming the epicenter of Southern California’s aerospace and advanced air mobility boom.
The event comes weeks after Archer and AEG announced on Aug. 24 an exclusive multi-year partnership to build downtown Los Angeles’ first vertiport at L.A. LIVE, AEG’s four-million-square-foot sports and entertainment district next to Crypto.com Arena. The announcement also makes Archer the district’s exclusive air taxi provider ahead of the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
“We see this as a one-of-a-kind opportunity to add a flagship downtown location to our planned Los Angeles air taxi network ahead of the LA28 Games,” said Archer founder and CEO Adam Goldstein.
The L.A. LIVE site joins planned network locations including LAX, John Wayne Airport, SoFi Stadium, USC and Hollywood Burbank Airport — but Hawthorne Municipal Airport remains the network’s central operating hub, according to Archer.
Archer also announced today that it is launching a multi-state “No Roads” flight tour, showcasing city-to-city Midnight flights that can cover routes taking an hour or more by car in just 10 to 20 minutes by air.
The tour follows more than 70 test flights completed in August alone and is meant to build operational readiness for Archer’s role in both the LA28 Games and the White House’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, a federal initiative established under President Trump’s “Unleashing Drone Dominance” executive order.
“I’ve talked a lot about the ‘Waymo Moment for air taxis,’ the chance for us to get communities more comfortable with this tech. This is the beginning of that story and our biggest step yet toward making air taxis an everyday reality in cities across America,” said Goldstein.
An illustration of Archer Aviation’s Midnight air taxi, as the company kicks off a multi-state “No Roads” flight tour ahead of the LA28 Games. Image courtesy of Archer Aviation.
Northrop Corporation originally developed the land at 1 Rocket Road, building a sprawling manufacturing complex there to produce aircraft for the U.S. military. Boeing later used the same site to build fuselage sections for its commercial jetliners. For much of the 20th century, Hawthorne’s identity was tied to that legacy industrial base — steady blue-collar jobs tied to defense contracts that rose and fell with the Cold War and the broader fortunes of Southern California’s aerospace sector. When Northrop and Boeing scaled back, Hawthorne, like much of the South Bay, absorbed the loss.
SpaceX’s arrival in 2008 didn’t just fill empty buildings — it revived an entire identity for the city. Now, nearly two decades later, a second company is making a similar bet on Hawthorne’s future.
A drive past the campus last week made the scale of that legacy hard to miss: a full Falcon 9 first-stage booster stands on display outside SpaceX’s Hawthorne headquarters, the company’s name mounted in silver letters across the building’s facade, visible from blocks away.
In November 2025, Archer agreed to pay $126 million to take over the master ground lease at Hawthorne Municipal Airport, assuming a 75% interest in non-runway operations through 2055. Despite headlines describing the deal as a “purchase,” the City of Hawthorne retains ownership of the airport, and the FAA retains full regulatory authority over flight operations.
In response to questions from LACP earlier this year, an Archer spokesperson said the company sees Hawthorne as its planned “central hub” for the LA network, calling the airport “our operational testing and iteration base.”
The spokesperson also confirmed Archer’s Midnight aircraft will use Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network for in-flight connectivity, since standard cell networks don’t reliably cover the altitudes, 1,500 to 4,000 feet, at which the aircraft operates. Hawthorne’s “extraordinary concentration of innovative aerospace firms” was one reason Archer chose the city for its LA hub, the spokesperson said.
SpaceX’s Hawthorne campus, built into the former Northrop/Boeing complex, is where the company designs and manufactures its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets and Dragon spacecraft, and where mission control operates for Falcon launches.
Sept. 10’s State of the City will run in three parts: a 5:30 p.m. cocktail hour with live music and a facility tour, the address at 6:30 p.m., and a closing tour and social hour at 7:30 p.m. The event is at Hawthorne City Services, 12613 Doty Ave., at the cross streets of El Segundo and Doty Avenue. More information is available at (310) 349-2910, with RSVP via Eventbrite.
