How Will California’s “Big One” Impact the Space Industry

The Inevitable Shock: California’s Seismic Reality

California’s position as a global leader in technology and innovation is inextricably linked to its geology. The state sits at the active boundary between two of Earth’s major tectonic plates, the Pacific and North American plates. For millions of years, these plates have been grinding past each other, fracturing the crust into a complex network of faults that store and release immense energy. The most famous of these, the San Andreas Fault, is an 800-mile-long scar that runs much of the length of the state. It is not a single, clean fracture but a complex zone of crushed and broken rock, in some places a mile wide, that serves as the “master” fault for an intricate web of smaller, interconnected faults.

The seismic threat arises from a process described by the elastic rebound theory. Over long periods—decades or even centuries—the steady movement of the tectonic plates builds immense strain within the rock along these faults, which remain locked. When the accumulated strain finally overcomes the friction holding the rock in place, the fault ruptures in a sudden, violent lurch, releasing the stored energy as seismic waves. This is an earthquake.

While the San Andreas captures the public imagination, it represents only one component of a much broader and more pervasive risk. California is home to over 15,000 known faults, with more than 500 classified as active. A critical reality for risk assessment is that the vast majority of California’s population and its industrial base, including the core of its space economy, is located within 30 miles of one of these active faults. This geographic fact fundamentally changes the nature of the threat. The “Big One” may not be a singular, massive event on a remote section of the San Andreas. A moderate but more proximate earthquake on a fault system like the Hayward in Northern California or the Newport-Inglewood, which slices directly through the Los Angeles basin’s industrial heartland, could prove far more destructive to urban centers and the high-tech industries located there. The risk is not a single event, but a fundamental condition of operating in the state.

Scientific forecasts quantify this risk with sobering clarity. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that within the next 30 years, the probability of a major earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or greater is 60% for the Los Angeles region and 72% for the San Francisco Bay Area. The likelihood of an even more powerful magnitude 7.5 event is 31% for Los Angeles and 20% for the Bay Area over the same period. Statewide, the probability of at least one earthquake of M6.7 or greater striking in the next three decades is over 99%. From a long-term strategic planning perspective, a major damaging earthquake is a near-certainty.

To analyze the potential consequences of such an event, this report will use the USGS “ShakeOut Scenario” as a plausible, scientifically vetted model. Developed by a consortium of over 300 experts, the ShakeOut is not a prediction but a detailed simulation of a magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the southern San Andreas Fault, designed to inform emergency preparedness and response planning. In this scenario, the fault ruptures for nearly two minutes along a 186-mile segment, causing the ground on either side to shift by an average of 6 to 23 feet. The projected statewide consequences are catastrophic, including over 1,800 fatalities, 50,000 injuries, and economic losses estimated at $213 billion.

A key finding from this and other seismic studies is that the intensity of ground shaking is not uniform. Local geologic conditions, such as soft ground or deep sedimentary basins, can trap and amplify seismic waves, creating pockets of violent shaking far from the fault’s rupture zone. This is particularly relevant for the Los Angeles area, much of which is built on such basins. Furthermore, the duration of the shaking—nearly two minutes in the ShakeOut model—presents a distinct and critical threat vector separate from the earthquake’s peak magnitude. While building codes are designed to handle the peak forces of an earthquake, the prolonged duration introduces different failure mechanisms, including cumulative stress and material fatigue. Structures that might withstand a short, sharp jolt can fail progressively under sustained shaking. This extended duration also dramatically increases the risk of secondary ground failures like soil liquefaction, where water-saturated soil loses its strength and behaves like a liquid.

Ground Zero: California’s Space Industry Hub

California is the undisputed center of the American space economy, a hub of manufacturing, innovation, and strategic national assets whose value is measured in tens of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs. The state’s aerospace and defense sector contributes an estimated $35 billion to its annual gross domestic product. The total economic footprint is even larger, supporting approximately 511,000 direct, indirect, and induced jobs across the state. NASA‘s activities alone accounted for over 66,000 jobs and generated $18.5 billion in economic output in fiscal year 2023.

Beyond its established industrial base, California is the primary engine of the industry’s future. It attracts a staggering 70% of all U.S. space technology venture capital funding and is home to one-third of all American space tech companies. This concentration of capital and talent has created a self-reinforcing ecosystem of innovation that is difficult to replicate elsewhere.

This economic and innovative strength, however, is geographically concentrated in a way that creates a systemic vulnerability. The heart of California’s space industry lies in the dense urban and industrial corridors of Southern California, a region often dubbed “Space Beach”. This area is home to a dense cluster of the industry’s most important players, placing them in close proximity to each other and to some of the state’s most hazardous fault systems.

• SpaceX designs and builds its workhorse Falcon rockets and Dragon spacecraft at its headquarters in Hawthorne, with additional facilities in Long Beach and Irvine.
• Rocket Lab operates its U.S. headquarters, payload processing facilities, and engine development complex in Long Beach and nearby Huntington Beach.
• Northrop Grumman‘s historic “Space Park” campus in Redondo Beach has been a center of spacecraft design for decades, complemented by a major presence in El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, and Azusa.
• This core is surrounded by an ecosystem of other industry giants like Boeing and The Aerospace Corporation, alongside a new generation of innovators such as Relativity Space and Anduril, all located within the same seismically active Los Angeles basin.

This dense clustering of talent, capital, and infrastructure is the engine of the industry’s success, fostering rapid innovation and collaboration. At the same time, it represents an immense systemic risk. A single, large seismic event in the Los Angeles region would not cause a series of isolated corporate incidents; it would trigger a sector-wide catastrophic failure, simultaneously crippling multiple industry leaders and their shared, highly specialized supply chains.

The concentration of risk extends to irreplaceable national strategic assets. Vandenberg Space Force Base, located on California’s Central Coast, is one of only two primary spaceports in the United States and is the nation’s principal site for launching satellites into polar orbit. This unique capability is indispensable for a wide range of national security missions, including intelligence gathering and missile defense, as well as for commercial Earth observation and certain communications constellations. NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena is a world-leading center for robotic space exploration and Earth science, operating many of the nation’s most critical deep space missions. These facilities, along with the U.S. Space Systems Command at Los Angeles Air Force Base and NASA‘s Ames and Armstrong research centers, form the backbone of America’s space enterprise, and all are located within regions of significant seismic hazard.

Beyond the physical infrastructure, the industry’s reliance on a highly specialized and geographically rooted workforce creates a “human capital” vulnerability. California is home to over 11,000 aerospace engineers, more than any other state. This talent pool is not easily or quickly replaceable. A major earthquake would cause widespread housing destruction, disrupt commutes for months or years, and create unlivable conditions due to the loss of basic utilities. This could force a significant portion of this critical workforce to relocate. Unlike financial capital, which is fluid, human capital with decades of specialized experience is not. The long-term risk is not just a temporary disruption but a permanent “brain drain” from California to competing aerospace hubs, fundamentally undermining the state’s long-term leadership in the sector.

Direct Impacts: When the Shaking Starts

The initial moments of a major earthquake would unleash a wave of direct physical destruction across California’s space industry infrastructure, followed by a disruption to its essential workforce. These first-order effects would immediately halt operations and set the stage for a long and difficult recovery.

Manufacturing and R&D Facilities at Risk

A significant portion of Southern California’s aerospace infrastructure consists of older buildings constructed before the adoption of modern seismic codes in the 1980s. Structures like Northrop Grumman’s historic Space Park in Redondo Beach, largely built in the 1960s, predate these critical safety standards. These older facilities, particularly those with “soft-story” designs (characterized by large, open ground floors for manufacturing or parking) and those made of non-ductile concrete, are exceptionally vulnerable to collapse during intense, prolonged shaking.

While cities like Los Angeles have implemented mandatory seismic retrofitting programs for these building types, the effectiveness of these upgrades against an event on the scale of the M7.8 ShakeOut Scenario is uncertain. The ground shaking from such a massive earthquake could exceed the design parameters of even strengthened structures. The ShakeOut study itself projects that some seismically retrofitted facilities could still be destroyed.

For the space industry, however, the standard for resilience is far higher than mere structural survival. The true measure is operational continuity. A manufacturing plant might remain standing, but the intense shaking could knock multi-million-dollar precision machinery out of alignment by fractions of a millimeter, rendering it useless. The world’s largest metal 3D printers at Relativity Space, the environmentally controlled cleanrooms essential for satellite assembly, and the delicate equipment for manufacturing optics and electronics are all highly susceptible to damage from shaking. The contamination of a sterile cleanroom with dust and debris or the misalignment of a critical piece of test equipment could halt production for months, even if the building itself suffers only minor damage. This distinction is fundamental: the economic viability of these facilities depends on a level of precision that is easily destroyed by seismic forces.

Launch Infrastructure: Vandenberg’s Critical Vulnerability

Vandenberg Space Force Base represents a strategic single point of failure for a critical U.S. space capability. A major earthquake on a nearby fault could inflict severe damage on its launch pads, vehicle assembly buildings, fuel storage depots, and mission control centers. While the base regularly conducts emergency readiness exercises to ensure it can perform its duties in the face of a natural disaster, the scale of a “Big One” would test its capabilities beyond any planned scenario.

The most significant national consequence of catastrophic damage to Vandenberg would be the loss of the country’s primary access to polar orbits. This specific trajectory, which takes satellites over the Earth’s poles, is essential for many national security missions, including intelligence, surveillance, and missile defense, as well as for commercial applications like Earth observation and weather forecasting. While the U.S. operates other world-class launch sites in Florida, their geographic location makes them unable to efficiently serve polar trajectories. A prolonged outage at Vandenberg would create a massive backlog of critical national security and commercial payloads with no viable launch alternative, potentially leaving the nation with significant gaps in its space-based capabilities. This transforms a regional disaster in California into a pressing national security issue.

The Human Element: A Displaced and Disrupted Workforce

The immediate human toll of the earthquake would translate directly into a crisis for the space industry’s most valuable asset: its workforce. The event would cause widespread damage to homes and apartments, leaving tens of thousands of people, including highly skilled engineers and technicians, homeless or in unlivable conditions.

In the longer term, the post-disaster environment could trigger a significant and potentially permanent migration of this talent. The aerospace workforce is highly mobile and globally in-demand. Faced with destroyed homes, closed schools, and a slow, arduous recovery process, many may choose to relocate to other aerospace hubs in states like Texas, Florida, or Alabama, which actively court such talent. Studies of post-disaster migration show that such events can permanently alter settlement and labor patterns, as economic necessity and a loss of confidence in a region’s stability drive people away. For California’s space economy, this represents the risk of a permanent “brain drain,” a loss of intellectual capital that would be far more damaging and difficult to recover from than the physical destruction of buildings and equipment.

Cascading Failures: The Ripple Effect on Operations

Even if a space company’s facilities were engineered to withstand the direct physical impact of a major earthquake, their operations would be paralyzed by the collapse of the regional public infrastructure on which they depend. The resilience of a sophisticated, high-tech facility is ultimately constrained by the resilience of the basic public utilities it plugs into. A major earthquake would trigger a series of cascading failures in these systems, creating a ripple effect that would bring the space economy to a standstill for weeks or months.

The Power Grid Goes Dark

California’s electrical grid is a complex system already facing challenges from extreme weather events like wildfires. A massive earthquake would inflict widespread, systemic damage. While some high-voltage substations have undergone seismic upgrades, the vast distribution network—comprising millions of power poles and hundreds of thousands of kilometers of overhead wires—is extremely vulnerable. Intense ground shaking, soil liquefaction, and landslides would topple poles, snap wires, and destroy transformers across the region.

The space industry is an immense consumer of stable, high-quality electricity. Advanced manufacturing, data-intensive R&D, and mission control centers cannot function without it. The ShakeOut Scenario projects that power could be out for weeks in many areas. This would bring all production, testing, and analysis to a halt. The conventional solution of on-site backup generators is fundamentally inadequate in a regional catastrophe. These generators typically hold enough fuel for only a few days and depend on regular refueling—a logistical impossibility when roads are destroyed and fuel supply chains are broken.

A Region-Wide Communications Blackout

The earthquake is projected to cause a region-wide communications blackout. The vast majority of cellular service and internet connectivity would be knocked out for days or even weeks. Cell towers are vulnerable to both direct physical damage and, more critically, the loss of power from the electrical grid. A USGS analysis of a hypothetical M7.0 earthquake on the Bay Area’s Hayward fault projected that the hardest-hit county would be left with only 7% of its required voice and data service capacity.

Modern aerospace development is a deeply collaborative and data-driven enterprise. It relies on the constant, high-bandwidth flow of information for everything from computer-aided design and global supply chain management to the command and control of satellites in orbit. A communications blackout would sever these vital links, isolating facilities, halting collaborative engineering work, and potentially jeopardizing on-orbit assets if both primary and backup ground communication links are disrupted.

The Transportation Network Paralyzed

The earthquake would paralyze the region’s transportation network. The ShakeOut Scenario predicts major damage to roads, bridges, and rail lines, with disruptions expected to last for months or even years. The cost of repairs would be immense, running into the tens of millions of dollars for even localized damage.

The ports and airports that serve as the logistical arteries for the industry would also be crippled. Key facilities like San Francisco International Airport are built on land highly susceptible to liquefaction and are located just miles from the San Andreas Fault. While its newest terminals have been engineered for seismic resilience, runways and surrounding infrastructure remain vulnerable. The paralysis of this network would instantly sever the physical supply chain. Raw materials and components could not be delivered to factories, and massive finished products, like rocket stages and satellites, could not be transported to launch sites. Employee commutes would become impossible, compounding the workforce crisis and rendering even undamaged facilities unusable.

The Fragile Chain: Supply Network Disruption

The aerospace supply chain is a complex, global network, but its foundation is uniquely brittle due to a combination of extreme technical specialization and acute geographic concentration. A major California earthquake would not just disrupt this fragile chain; it would shatter it, with consequences reaching far beyond the state’s borders.

The industry relies on a vast network of suppliers providing everything from raw materials to custom-built, flight-critical subsystems. A significant number of these are small and medium-sized firms with highly specialized capabilities, many of which are clustered in Southern California to serve prime contractors like SpaceX and Northrop Grumman. This intense geographic concentration means a single regional disaster could simultaneously incapacitate not only the final assembly plants but also dozens of their essential, and often sole-source, suppliers.

Even without a disaster, the space industry’s supply chain faces significant choke points. Critical components like on-orbit propulsion systems, radiation-hardened electronics, and optical communication terminals for satellites are already in short supply and are produced by a very small number of specialized firms. An earthquake would exacerbate these existing fragilities to a breaking point. The disruption would be absolute. Unlike in other industries where alternative suppliers might be found, for many of these components, there are no alternatives. Recovery would not be a matter of finding a new supplier but of waiting for the original, unique one to rebuild its entire capability from scratch—a process that could take years.

The industry’s two dominant production models, vertical integration and distributed networks, both reveal vulnerabilities in a seismic context.

• SpaceX‘s Vertical Integration: SpaceX is famous for its high degree of vertical integration, producing an estimated 85% of its own components in-house at its Hawthorne facility. This strategy provides immense control and insulates the company from external supplier failures in a normal operating environment. In a seismic context, however, this model becomes a double-edged sword. It concentrates an extraordinary level of production capability and institutional knowledge into a single geographic point of failure. The Hawthorne plant is located in a seismically active area near major faults like Newport-Inglewood and Palos Verdes. A catastrophic event that disables this facility would halt the production of the company’s core Falcon and Dragon vehicles, representing an existential threat to its primary revenue streams.
• Traditional Distributed Networks: In contrast, companies like Northrop Grumman utilize a more traditional, distributed network of external suppliers managed through dedicated portals. While this model theoretically distributes risk, the geographic reality of the industry undermines its effectiveness. A significant percentage of these specialized suppliers are also located in Southern California, drawn by the need for close collaboration with the prime contractors they serve. When the earthquake strikes, both the prime contractor and its key local suppliers would be impacted simultaneously.

Finally, the earthquake would trigger an immediate and total breakdown of physical logistics. Modern manufacturing relies on predictable transportation and “just-in-time” inventory models, both of which would fail instantly. With roads, ports, and airports unusable for an extended period, the movement of all goods—from raw aluminum to finished rocket engines—would cease. The intricate dance of the aerospace supply chain would come to an abrupt and complete stop.

The Economic Aftermath

The long-term economic consequences of a major California earthquake would extend far beyond the immediate costs of repair and reconstruction. For the space industry, the event would trigger fundamental shifts in investment, innovation, and the national competitive landscape, with the potential to permanently alter California’s standing as the sector’s global leader.

The Great Capital Diversion

In the aftermath of a disaster on the scale of the ShakeOut Scenario, with projected economic losses exceeding $200 billion, both public and private capital would be overwhelmingly diverted toward fundamental recovery efforts. For the space industry, which is fueled by high-risk, long-term investment, this would create a sudden and severe capital drought. The flow of venture capital, which has been a lifeblood for California’s innovative space startups, would likely slow to a trickle as investors become ly risk-averse. The earthquake’s greatest long-term economic impact may not be the physical destruction of assets, but the psychological destruction of investment confidence. Global investors may conclude that the geological risk of operating in California is simply too high, triggering a “capital flight” that would starve the next generation of companies and halt ambitious R&D projects long after the physical rubble has been cleared.

Innovation: Chill vs. Creative Destruction

The disaster would almost certainly have a chilling effect on technological innovation. It would directly disrupt R&D activities by displacing essential human capital—the engineers and scientists—and by destroying the physical capital, such as laboratories and specialized equipment, required for their work. Some economic theories propose a “creative destruction” model, where disasters can ultimately spur growth by forcing the replacement of old capital with new, more efficient technology. This model is a poor fit for the highly advanced space industry. It is improbable that a destroyed, state-of-the-art semiconductor fabrication lab or satellite assembly cleanroom could be quickly replaced with something “better.” The immediate focus would be on the monumental and costly task of simply replicating what was lost, representing a net loss of innovative capacity, not a gain.

The Emergence of New, Disaster-Driven Opportunities

Paradoxically, the earthquake could become the most powerful catalyst for the widespread adoption of the very space technologies developed in California. The catastrophic failure of terrestrial systems would serve as a massive, real-world demonstration of the value of space-based solutions.

• Earth Observation: Demand would surge for high-resolution satellite imagery to assess damage, monitor infrastructure, and coordinate emergency response.
• Resilient Communications: The collapse of cellular and internet networks would highlight the indispensability of resilient, satellite-based communication systems for first responders, government agencies, and business continuity.
• Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT): Space-based PNT (GPS) would become the essential backbone for all logistics, search and rescue, and recovery management when ground-based navigation aids fail.This surge in demand could create powerful new revenue streams for the space companies able to survive the initial shock and maintain or restore operations.

A Permanent Shift in the Competitive Landscape

A catastrophic earthquake in California could permanently redraw the map of the U.S. space industry. States like Texas and Florida, which are already investing hundreds of millions of dollars to build their own space ecosystems and attract aerospace companies, would aggressively court displaced talent and businesses looking to rebuild in a more stable environment. A slow or poorly managed recovery in California could cement a permanent relocation of a significant portion of the industry, ending California’s era of undisputed leadership. The recent trend of companies like SpaceX moving corporate headquarters to Texas while maintaining a large manufacturing footprint in California already highlights this underlying geographic tension and the strategic calculus that companies are constantly evaluating.

Summary

California’s space economy, a vital national strategic asset and a global center of innovation, is uniquely and dangerously concentrated in one of the world’s most seismically active regions. The threat of a major earthquake is not a matter of if, but when, with scientific models like the M7.8 ShakeOut Scenario providing a plausible and sobering blueprint of the potential consequences.

An earthquake of this magnitude would inflict damage that extends far beyond the direct physical destruction of facilities. While irreplaceable manufacturing, R&D, and launch infrastructure would be severely impacted, the more systemic threat comes from the cascading collapse of the public infrastructure upon which the entire industry depends. Widespread and prolonged failures of the power grid, communications networks, and transportation systems would paralyze the sector, rendering even undamaged facilities inoperable.

The industry’s supply chain, characterized by extreme technical specialization and an acute geographic concentration in Southern California, represents another critical point of failure. The simultaneous incapacitation of prime contractors and their often sole-source suppliers could halt production not just in California, but across the entire U.S. space sector.

The long-term consequences are perhaps the most severe. They include the potential for a mass exodus of the nation’s most skilled aerospace workforce, a chilling effect on the venture capital that fuels innovation, and a permanent and unfavorable shift in the national aerospace competitive landscape away from California. The deeply interconnected nature of these risks means that the resilience of individual companies is ultimately insufficient. The threat is not one of isolated corporate emergencies but of a system-level failure, demanding a coordinated approach to resilience that fully integrates public infrastructure planning with private sector continuity efforts.