section_path: Facilities/Hawthorne, CA: Falcon and Dragon manufacturing, mission control
section_name: Hawthorne, CA: Falcon and Dragon manufacturing, mission control
paragraph_text: Hawthorne, CA: Falcon and Dragon manufacturing, mission control
  
  SpaceX operates a large facility in the Los Angeles suburb of Hawthorne, California. The three-story building, originally built by Northrop Corporation to build Boeing 747 fuselages, houses SpaceX's office space, mission control, and Falcon 9 manufacturing facilities.
  
  The area has one of the largest concentrations of space sector headquarters, facilities, and subsidiaries in the U.S., including Boeing / McDonnell Douglas main satellite building campuses, The Aerospace Corporation, Raytheon, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, United States Space Force 's Space Systems Command at Los Angeles Air Force Base, Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, and AECOM, etc., with a large pool of aerospace engineers and recent college engineering graduates.
  
  SpaceX uses a high degree of vertical integration in the production of its rockets and rocket engines. SpaceX builds its rocket engines, rocket stages, spacecraft, principal avionics and all software in-house in their Hawthorne facility, which is unusual for the space industry.
  
  The Hawthorne facility was SpaceX's headquarters until August 2024. However, the move to relocate SpaceX's headquarters was seen as largely symbolic, at least in the short term, as the facility will remain to the company's operations.