The Brief

SAN JOSE, Calif. — One morning late last year, an RV pulled into a parking lot on the outskirts of Silicon Valley. Inside it was a blue Ikea bag with huge balloons, and metal tanks full of helium and sulfur dioxide gas.

The mission was led by Luke Iseman, a 41-year-old serial entrepreneur with a mohawk hairstyle and an orange t-shirt that read "Cool Earth." Inspired by a science fiction novel, Iseman had founded a company in 2022 called Make Sunsets. In the novel, a billionaire undertakes a type of "solar geoengineering": shooting vast amounts of reflective particles high into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight off Earth and counter global warming. Now, Iseman was trying to do it in the real world.

Iseman took a wrench and opened the tanks, releasing the sulfur dioxide first and then the helium. He siphoned the gasses into a long tube while his business partner, Andrew Song, stood just outside the RV using the tube to inflate a weather balloon. As the balloon grew to about 6 feet wide, some sulfur dioxide – which can be hazardous to human health in high concentrations – started to leak. I began to cough, and my eyes watered.

"Don't take big whiffs of air," Song said.

"Just don't breathe," Iseman said with a laugh.

Iseman and Song prepare a balloon with sulfur dioxide and helium.

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The three balloons that Make Sunsets launched that day made it to the stratosphere – a layer of the atmosphere about six to 30 miles above Earth's surface. When the balloons popped, the sulfur dioxide gas turned to particles– reflecting enough sunlight, the company says, to offset the warming of 175 gas-powered cars for a year. But Make Sunsets and its balloons signal something bigger: a growing number of startups, research projects, and billionaire-backed nonprofits hoping to ready this tech to potentially cool the earth on a wider scale.

In the past year, the conversation around solar geoengineering as a climate solution has become more serious, says David Keith, geophysics professor and head of a new University of Chicago initiative to study a broad array of climate geoengineering ideas. "Suddenly we're getting conversations with senior political leaders and senior people in the environmental world who are starting to think about this and engage with it seriously in a way that just wasn't happening five years ago," Keith says.

But as money flows in – some from investors who hope to profit from this technology – regulations around outdoor experiments and possible broader deployments aren't keeping up, experts say. Because of the way the stratosphere works, a large-scale release of particles in one part of the world could impact a large part of the planet. Questions persist about possible risks of solar geoengineering for everything from global crops to droughts. And there are risks of unintended consequences that scientists and investors haven't yet imagined – the unknown unknowns of trying to engineer a cooler Earth.

Shuchi Talati, founder and executive director of the nonprofit The Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, says Make Sunsets' actions crystallize the need for urgent regulation of this tech.

"At some point down the road, they're going to do this at a big enough scale to trigger some sort of climate impact," Talati says. "It can be done in an effective, globally governed way, or it can be done by two crazy people in California, and it can look horrible for a lot of people."

Song holds a balloon while Iseman watches from the RV. "I think regulations have to be holistic to be meaningful, or people, including me, will just game them," Iseman says.

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"The allure of the techno fix"

Iseman, a former director at a tech incubator who used to build large art projects at Burning Man festival, acknowledges there's a performative aspect to his work. For his company to have a measurable cooling impact, researchers say it would need to release significantly more material, probably require equipping special planes, and is likely years away.

But Make Sunsets is attracting significant Silicon Valley investment, and is hoping to have that bigger impact. The company has raised more than $1.2 million from venture capital firms like Boost VC, Pioneer Fund, and Draper Associates.

It's unclear how many entities are exploring solar geoengineering, because some projects keep their work under wraps. But Make Sunsets isn't alone.

A U.S.-Israeli startup called Stardust Solutions that plans to someday launch reflective particles into the stratosphere has raised $15 million, according to its chief executive officer and co-founder, Yanai Yedvab. Stardust's investors include SolarEdge, an Israeli green energy company, and Awz Ventures, an Israeli-Canadian venture capital fund that highlights on its website a partnership with Israel's Ministry of Defense.

From sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky to giant sun-reflecting space mirrors, geoengineering the planet to avoid the worst impacts of global warming is capturing the imagination of greater numbers of people. Coming out of the hottest year on record, with governments and industries failing to adequately transition away from fossil fuels, some people are looking for silver bullets. This attraction is especially felt in Silicon Valley, says Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School.

"Climate tech is sexy," Wagner says, "because it's the allure of the techno fix. Look to D.C., and things are messy. Politics is messy. Wouldn't it be nice if we could cut through all of this with the ultimate techno fix that will solve this thing once and for all?"

Iseman says he's motivated by an urgency to act on climate change. World governments agreed to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100. But temperatures have already risen about 1.2 degrees Celsius, and many scientists think the world will blow past 1.5 Celsius. Passing it would mean more catastrophic impacts like lethal heat waves and flooding, coral die-offs and melting ice.

"What we have done has not worked," Iseman says about current efforts to address global warming. "And we need to try many more broad approaches."

Iseman and other solar geoengineering advocates reject the idea of a so-called "moral hazard" with this technology. That's the idea that solar geoengineering will distract from the difficult - and scientifically necessary - work of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and will give fossil fuel polluters continued license to pollute.

"I think we need to do solar geoengineering – hard stop – because the world is too hot. We need to cool it off," Iseman says. "I wouldn't say we should only do that after we start dropping global greenhouse [gas] emissions. 'Cause, frankly, I don't know when we're gonna do that."

Make Sunsets does not employ any scientists. The employees are just Iseman and Song, who met while Iseman worked at a tech incubator and Song worked as an outreach manager at a crowdfunding website. Iseman says if they scale up the company, they'll hire scientists.

Stardust's team includes 20 scientists and engineers, including chemists, aviation experts, and physicists, like the company's CEO, Yedvab. Yedvab wrote in an email that he started looking into the tech two and a half years ago and found that it "is the sole viable option humanity has to stop global warming in the coming decades."

Stardust notes their focus is research in anticipation of future government contracts for deployment.

But there is still a lot of uncertainty surrounding the science, and experts worry it's too dangerous for companies to have a financial motive to develop and deploy this tech on a larger scale, when there still isn't clear regulation.

"We do know it will reduce global temperatures. That is the one thing we know," Talati says. "We don't know almost everything else."

Make Sunsets puts trackers on the balloons. Iseman tracks a balloon on a computer.

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From droughts to "termination shock," the technology poses risks

The type of solar geoengineering Make Sunsets works on is often called "stratospheric aerosol injection," and much of what's known about how it could work comes from volcanoes. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, sulfur dioxide from the eruption spread across the global stratosphere. The particles ended up cooling the world about half a degree Celsius the following year.

Scientists predict the world would, on average, get cooler with this type of solar geoengineering. Compared to other climate tech, it's also very cheap, and – once operational – could have a rapid cooling impact.

But there are lots of unpredictable risks. Computer modeling has limits, says Jonas Jägermeyr, who models impacts of solar geoengineering on global crops at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "It is difficult to know what we are getting ourselves into unless we actually did the experiment on the whole planet," he wrote in an email.

If the world engages in stratospheric aerosol injection, it wouldn't go back to some pre-global warming climate, says Alan Robock, climate scientist at Rutgers University. This type of solar geoengineering could weaken the summer monsoon, meaning some regions – where billions of people live – would see less rain. And it could end up changing the ozone layer and ultraviolet radiation, which could affect crop growth and global food supplies, Jägermeyr says.

Changing temperatures and rainfall patterns could mean new risks for infectious diseases, says Christopher Trisos, chief research officer in the Climate Risk Lab at the University of Cape Town. ​​"Solar geoengineering could shift the population at risk by nearly a billion people for malaria across developing countries," Trisos says.

Then there's "termination shock," which is what it sounds like: the shock of suddenly halting a huge experiment. After injecting particles into the stratosphere, the particles only stay there for a year or two and then fall back to earth. Depending on the material, those falling particles can sometimes create their own environmental and health risks.

Because the particles don't stay up forever, if the world doesn't simultaneously reduce the amount of planet-heating gasses in the atmosphere while doing large-scale solar geoengineering, suddenly stopping the experiment poses a big risk.

"You get a whole rush of global warming and climate change in a very short period of time," Trisos says. "That would be very dangerous for ecosystems, for biodiversity, in many cases, very dangerous for crops and food supplies as well."

Shuchi Talati, founder and executive director of the nonprofit The Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, worries about the lack of regulations for solar geoengineering, also called solar radiation management.

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New companies raise fears of regulatory gaps

A growing number of legal scholars say national and international regulations are inadequate to cover potential large-scale deployments of solar geoengineering. As global warming gets worse, "there's going to be a strong desire by someone somewhere to do something," says Tracy Hester, a law professor at University of Houston who studies climate geoengineering. "There will be a temptation to grab the throttle and push ahead."

Hester worries that right now there's no regulatory strategy if that happens: "We need to know what we're doing. The consequences here are pretty massive."

In the U.S., the interactions Make Sunsets has with U.S. government agencies are minimal. Before each balloon launch, Iseman calls up the Federal Aviation Administration and alerts them that he'll be launching weather balloons. Iseman also files a yearly report with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) listing all of the company's "weather modification activities". In one NOAA report in the box marked "project or activity designation," Iseman wrote: "Cooling Earth."

While Make Sunsets was launching balloons in the parking lot, on the edge of a county park, a park ranger drove up to us, got out of the car, asked Iseman and Song a few questions about the balloons, and drove away after less than three minutes.

Iseman spends much of his time in Baja California, and the company has done a number of experiments in Mexico. Last year the Mexican government released a statement saying that they would ban solar geoengineering in their national territory, referencing the activities of Make Sunsets.

But outside of Mexico, things are unclear. There are no international conventions that specifically deal with this type of technology, Hester says. The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity – a treaty that protects wildlife – has a moratorium on geoengineering that affects living species. But the moratorium is guidance, and non-binding. And "the U.S. is actually not a party" to the treaty, says Daniel Bodansky, a climate legal expert and law professor at Arizona State University.

The Montreal Protocol, a treaty to address ozone depletion, could potentially cover the ways that stratospheric aerosol injection affects ozone. But that treaty does not currently address all the impacts of the tech, nor does it cover all types of solar geoengineering, Bodansky says.

One of the Make Sunsets balloons.

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Last month Hester, Talati and others filed a petition to NOAA. They asked the federal agency to consider making a rule requiring solar geoengineering companies like Make Sunsets to file more information about what they're doing, and consider regulating American citizens when they do solar geoengineering internationally.

A NOAA spokesperson wrote in an email, "We are currently reviewing the request for rulemaking and will provide a response to the petitioners."

Stardust is doing outdoor small-scale testing "only to the extent required ... and in full compliance with all relevant regulations," Yedvab wrote.

Yedvab, who used to work for Israel's atomic energy commission, adds: "Decision making regarding whether to deploy [stratospheric aerosol injection], when and to what extent should only be taken by governments."

A White House official wrote in an email that solar geoengineering activities in the U.S. must comply with applicable local, state, and federal laws. The email notes that new tech "may present unforeseen circumstances that require new guidance and/or governance mechanisms."

The official did not clarify what that new guidance or governance might look like.

Iseman of Make Sunsets says, "I think regulations have to be holistic to be meaningful, or people, including me, will just game them."

Aboard a decommissioned World War II aircraft carrier in Alameda on San Francisco Bay, a very different type of solar geoengineering study took place in April 2024.

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A test on San Francisco Bay

As the private sector grows, not-for-profit entities are speeding up their research.

Earlier this month, a handful of scientists and engineers gathered on deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier on the San Francisco Bay to test a large machine. After about a decade of work, the researchers were readying the machine for one of its first tests outdoors, creating tiny salt water particles that could – someday – reflect sunlight and cool earth.

An engineer scooped salt into a large plastic container, mixing it with water. Then he turned the machine on, letting forth a giant hissing spray of salt water particles down the aircraft runway.

The test represents a different type of solar geoengineering than Make Sunsets' balloons. "Marine cloud brightening" involves brightening ocean clouds to reflect more planet-heating sunlight.

This technology could someday significantly reduce many of the impacts of global warming, says Sarah Doherty, a University of Washington professor who manages this program. But it also has risks. If the particles are too big, they can make the clouds less reflective, and actually warm the planet. An imbalance of cloud brightening off West Africa could cause a drought in the Amazon. For Doherty, these unknowns are a big reason for this research.

"You could see in 20 years from now, people saying, 'Oh my God, we're really in trouble. We've got major climate disruption. Let's do this thing that we know exists.' Well, if we haven't done the research to look at the ways to not do it properly, to not do it in a way that's going to cause more damage, then we're really in trouble," she says.

Jessica Medrado, a research scientist for SRI International, on a walkie-talkie, coordinates the test for solar geoengineering research. Behind her are (center) Kelly Wanser of SilverLining, the nonprofit that led fundraising for the program, and (right) Sarah Doherty, scientist at University of Washington and the program's director.

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The risks are why university researchers, not for-profit companies, should guide studies of this tech, argues Kelly Wanser, executive director of SilverLining, the nonprofit that led fundraising for Doherty's program. The University of Washington program – which also aims to improve current climate modeling – has raised $16 million, mostly from philanthropic climate funds and Silicon Valley scientists. Doherty says there's no strings attached. "They're not gonna ever get anything back out of it other than more science," she says.

Wanser contrasts this with what she calls the "misaligned incentives" of private companies entering the space. In addition to its venture capital fundraising, Make Sunsets sells "cooling credits" – a single $10 credit offsets the warming of 1 metric ton of carbon dioxide, the company says. For Wanser, for-profit companies like Make Sunsets have a monetary incentive to keep releasing balloons, even if the effects could be harmful.

Iseman responds in an email that, "All change is scary, and we can't use 'someday maybe' as an excuse to avoid the bold actions that the climate crisis demands."

But even with university-based solar geoengineering research, there's a need for regulation, says Imran Khalid, a climate policy researcher based in Islamabad. While the aircraft carrier is a museum open to the public – a group of elementary school children came aboard a little while after the test – there are no rules requiring future research projects to be so transparent. And while this study released a small amount of particles, there are no specific regulations to limit a future study from making a larger release.

Given the stakes, Khalid says there should be global input into research frameworks. "Research leads to deployment at some time," he says. "There needs to be a global discussion around this issue."

The machine sprays tiny salt water particles. It's a test for "marine cloud brightening" research, a type of solar geoengineering that involves brightening ocean clouds to reflect more planet-heating sunlight.

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"I have an obligation to do what I can"

Right now, most solar geoengineering research is funded and carried out by people in the Global North, in places like Silicon Valley. That worries Khalid.

"When we're talking about solar geoengineering, it's important to contextualize it from this perspective," he says, "of somebody who's sitting here in Pakistan, who's recently seen the 2022 floods."

Those floods, which scientists found were made worse because of global warming, left almost a third of the country underwater at their peak, and left hundreds of thousands of displaced people in camps. Just as global warming's impacts are often felt more in developing countries, some scientists fear developing countries could also be particularly vulnerable to solar geoengineering's risks.

"You can get some strong kinds of winners and losers," Trisos says. "And that's especially concerning because a lot of these developing countries in the tropics, such as in Africa, Asia, and parts of Latin America, right now don't have a strong voice in the solar geoengineering conversation."

Some nonprofits are trying to change that. In the past year The Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering has started consultations and workshops in South Africa, India and Pakistan to educate local scientists and civil society groups about solar geoengineering. The U.K.-based Degrees Initiative has awarded $900,000 to scientists from Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria and other countries to study solar geoengineering.

During the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi this past February, Switzerland put forth a proposal for more global research on solar geoengineering. While it didn't pass, Talati, who was at the talks, says they left her encouraged. "That was a glimmer of hope for me," she says. "To see so many new countries offering their comments and wanting to engage in this conversation."

From his vantage point on a Zoom call in Silicon Valley, Iseman says it's unfair that he has privileges to act on solar geoengineering while others don't. "I think that it is unfair that I was born as a lower middle class, white-ish American male," he says.

But he says that isn't stopping him from scaling his company: "I have an obligation to do what I can to cool the planet, as does anyone else who actually reads the science."

"We're two guys playing with balloons," Iseman says. "In an ideal world, this shouldn't be something left to dudes with a startup to be doing. But that's the world we're in, for now."

"We're two guys playing with balloons," Luke Iseman says. "In an ideal world, this shouldn't be something left to dudes with a startup to be doing. But that's the world we're in, for now."

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During a summer in which West Nile virus has jumped to record levels statewide, 17 Long Beach residents have contracted the mosquito-borne illness — far surpassing this time last year and the highest in more than a decade, according to the city’s health department.

Cases have been unusually severe: 69% involved neuroinvasive West Nile, the form that attacks the brain or nervous system, and 81% of those infected required hospitalization.

The first cases surfaced in late June, but officials detected mosquitoes carrying the disease as early as May, a sign the season — which typically runs July to October — may be stretching longer than usual. Health officials expect infections to continue through early fall, typically peaking in September.

This comes after repeated years of virtually no infections seen in the city. Last year there was one human case of West Nile citywide, with zero cases in 2024, one in 2023 and four in 2022.

Since the disease was first detected here in 2003, the number of cases has reached double digits in 2015, 2017 and a high of 56 cases in 2014.

Dr. Cliff Okada, Long Beach’s city health officer, said the virus tends to fluctuate unpredictably from year to year. “I can’t really give you a straight answer as to why this number is so high this year,” he said, but cited climate change and rising temperatures as potential factors, as well as improved surveillance locally.

With the exception of a high concentration of cases in the 90803 ZIP code, Dr. Okada said infections are dispersed fairly evenly citywide. He didn’t want to reveal locations as it would create the impression that some parts of the city “are more dangerous than others.”

Three agencies share responsibility for mosquito control in the city: the Los Angeles County Vector Control District covers the northern and eastern areas, and Long Beach’s own district manages the remainder.

Suzanne Kluh of the Greater Los Angeles County Vector Control District, which handles parts of North Long Beach as well as some of the city’s eastern neighborhoods, attributed much of the surge to the “warmest winter on record,” followed by a punishing summer heat wave.

It’s really just a numbers game. Those conditions, paired with unusually high humidity, have made it ripe for mosquitoes to multiply. A decline in bird immunity over the past five or six years has compounded the problem, since the virus circulates primarily between birds and mosquitoes before spreading to people.

In response, workers have intensified efforts to kill down the number of Culex mosquitoes — the species responsible for local transmission — by targeting the larvae that fester in storm drains, street gutters and smaller estuaries like marshes and ponds.

They’ve also tried to disperse or move crow roosts, such as one at El Dorado Park, so as to limit the spread among birds that later forage in nearby neighborhoods. Even so, mosquitoes are resourceful.

“They’ll breed in a bucket if it has enough water in somebody’s backyard,” Kluh said

The outbreak in Long Beach mirrors a broader spike across Los Angeles County and California. The county, whose case count excludes Long Beach and Pasadena, reported 15 cases and its first death of the year on Aug. 20.

“This tragic loss is a reminder of the serious threat posed by mosquito-borne diseases, including West Nile virus and dengue,” said Dr. Muntu Davis, the county’s health officer. He urged residents to take basic precautions.

Statewide, West Nile activity has reached a five-year high, with 65 human cases and five deaths confirmed across 16 counties as of Aug. 28, according to the California Department of Public Health. Since 2003, the state has recorded more than 8,000 cases and over 400 deaths, making it California’s most common and serious vector-borne disease.

How to recognize West Nile symptoms

West Nile is transmitted to humans by infected mosquitoes; symptoms typically include fevers, headaches or stomach pain, which generally pass after a few days. The virus can be fatal for those with weaker immune systems, particularly the elderly.

Most infections go unnoticed — about 80% of people show no symptoms — but in about one in 150 cases, the virus turns serious, causing brain inflammation, meningitis, encephalitis or paralysis. There is no vaccine or specific treatment.

Those over 55 and people with diabetes, high blood pressure, chronic kidney disease or weakened immune systems face the highest risk, and officials urge anyone with a high fever, stiff neck, confusion or muscle weakness to seek care immediately.

The business of military contracting is booming in Southern California.

The total value of defense contracts won by companies in Los Angeles County more than doubled in the last 10 years after adjusting for inflation, according to an analysis by CalMatters and The Markup. In the same period, the defense budget rose by about 19% in adjusted dollars.

The $15 billion in contracts won in L.A. County last year went largely to old-school defense contractors with headquarters elsewhere, like Boeing. But startups claimed a growing share of the pie, selling defense systems like low-cost missiles, drones, surveillance satellites, AI tools and much more. In 2025, 10 startups in the L.A. area were crowned “unicorns,” becoming companies valued by investments at more than $1 billion, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal. Most of those 10 companies were aerospace or defense businesses.

In 2015, 14 of the top 100 defense contracts won in California went to businesses focused on drones or space, according to the CalMatters and Markup analysis. By 2025, that share was up to 21. The shift is similar if measured by dollars, from 13%to 18%.

Details like whether you count obligations for where businesses are based or where the projects are launched all affect those numbers. By some counts the increases in contract dollars could be larger.

The contracts have been kindled by a surge of venture capital. Private investment in aerospace and defense since 2008 has fueled massive gains, according to a report from The Aerospace Corporation, a federally-funded nonprofit.

But all the new money is now causing awkward political tensions.

The war in Iran, which has depleted American munitions, is poised to drive demand even higher. The Trump administration’s latest budget proposal includes a record-setting $1.5 trillion for the military. Meanwhile, the Defense Department has signed off on the earliest contracts for the “Golden Dome,” a proposal to build a missile-defense system above the United States that may eventually cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

Most of the Golden Dome winners are based in or have ties to the Southern California area.

“You saw this huge rise in capital and now you're seeing just much, much bigger government budgets for space,” said Sam Wilson, a researcher at the Aerospace Corporation.

The collision of venture capital and military spending has alarmed some advocates, who see a frightening trend toward privatization and the risk of a space arms race. Even Congressional Democrats are pushing back against the spending.

That’s noteworthy because it has tended “to be a bipartisan, equal effort to increase the budget” of the military, said Lindsay Koshgarian, director of the National Priorities Project, which tracks defense spending. “I think we are maybe seeing the limits of that now.”

Despite the pushback, some of the congressional districts that saw the largest defense contract increases in recent years are beneficiaries of signature Trump-era projects. Many are in solidly blue Los Angeles County, and among the most Democrat-leaning districts in the country.

California’s 36th Congressional District includes El Segundo, a high-tech defense hub outside Los Angeles. In the district’s 2024 House race, incumbent Democrat Ted Lieu took nearly 70 percent of the vote over a Republican challenger. The increase in defense contracts between 2015 and 2025 in that district alone was more than $3.3 billion.

Another district, California’s 43rd, is represented by Maxine Waters, who in 2021 signed on to the proposed No Militarization of Space Act, which described the Space Force as an unnecessary waste of resources and sought to abolish it.

Trump recently proposed to double the budget of the Space Force, another potential boon to the area. Meanwhile, Waters’ district has seen its share of obligated defense department spending grow over the last decade by more than $1.6 billion, or more than 500%, adjusted for inflation. Waters’ office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Seamus Daniels, who studies the defense budget at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the proposed $1.5 trillion dollar defense budget for fiscal year 2027 “would surpass the peak of defense spending during World War II.”

The administration is seeking that money in place of traditional Democratic priorities, like healthcare funding, he points out. “The budget requests of the second Trump administration have been contentious because, while they have sought to increase defense spending dramatically, they're also aiming to cut non-defense spending,” Daniels said.

Koshgarian said Democrats have largely been open to an increased defense budget, especially if it brings money to their congressional districts. But that may be changing.

“That tension is definitely real, even in left districts,” she said. “But I think we're reaching a level of extremity now that that might be starting to flip.”

A new chapter

There’s no question California has become a major player in defense technology.

Every year, the Silicon Valley Defense Group, an industry nonprofit promoting military technology, releases a list of the top 100 tech-forward national security companies. When they charted the companies’ headquarters by state for 2026, they found that 47 were based in California, more than five times those in the number two state, Colorado.

It wasn’t always that way for California.

The state became a hub of manufacturing during World War II, building the planes en route to the Pacific Theater. During the Cold War, it was home to pioneering aerospace firms like Lockheed, Northrop, and Convair. But by the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union gutted defense spending and consolidation stripped the region of its leadership, eventually sending Lockheed Martin’s headquarters to Maryland and Northrop Grumman’s to Virginia. Many were sounding the industry’s death knell. The nonprofit RAND Corporation noted that military aerospace sales peaked in 1987. They had declined by 32 percent just six years later.

The seeds of a comeback were sown when the Predator drone, built by General Atomics of San Diego, first took flight above the California desert in 1995. The craft, armed with Hellfire missiles, became the symbol of the War on Terror.

Then came the private investment surge, and an administration with new priorities.

As far back as the first months after Trump’s first inauguration, in 2017, aerospace industry

investors were celebrating massive stock gains. Government contracts have since turned defense companies like Costa Mesa-based Anduril into multi-billion-dollar operations.

Venture capital meets military dollars

Southern California likely benefits from the fact that the Space Force’s seed funding arm is based in El Segundo, where it decides where to send hundreds of millions of government dollars. The arm often chooses to fund companies in or around the small, seaside city, which has built buzz as ground zero for defense tech.

When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently went on tour to promote the "Arsenal of Freedom," a plan to massively increase munitions building, he told the workers at a Long Beach company, Rocket Lab, that “dominance of space” was key to the military’s future.

“This company, you right here, are front and center, as part of ensuring that we build an arsenal of freedom that America needs,” he said.

The partnership between private venture dollars and public defense contracts often unfolds like this: First, a startup comes up with a business plan for a product or service with military applications.

SpaceWERX, the El Segundo-based Space Force venture arm, selects some of these projects for early seed funding. Since 2021, SpaceWERX has awarded 380 contracts worth more than $461 million to businesses in California, more than any other state, SpaceWERX spokesperson Matthew Clouse said.

Private investors often follow on, seeing SpaceWERX money as a “demand signal,” said Arthur Grijalva, director of SpaceWERX. Billions have flowed into California-based companies in recent years this way.

Some local politicians have spent years pushing for similar investment in local military applications. El Segundo Mayor Chris Pimentel said he and his team traveled north in the state to personally court financiers while dealing with an enormous business dip early in the pandemic.

“It really paid off with large dividends,” he said. “We started showing up and being in the room with some of the larger venture funds and saying, ‘we can make these things happen down here. We can build stuff.’"

“Agnostic of politics and agnostic of individual ideologies, our core belief is that this is where the future has been made historically,” he said, pointing to Southern California’s long aviation history.

Some companies that take Defense Department contracts, like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which started in the Los Angeles area, are now valued at billions. SpaceX's recent initial public offering became, by far, the biggest IPO of all time in June.

Other small space companies are rapidly building with government contracts. True Anomaly, a space defense company, was founded in Colorado in 2022 but now has its largest office in Long Beach. “When you're building this type of company, it's frankly somewhat of a necessity to have a footprint here,” said Chief Financial Officer Mark Seidel.

The company has worked on Space Force missions and was recently announced as a contractor for the Golden Dome project. In April, a $650 million funding round put the company at a valuation of more than $2 billion.

The increasing spending, while bringing jobs to some parts of the country, continues to rile critics.

“We very much risk getting into a space arms race, where China invests more, so we invest more so China invests more and we invest more,” Koshgarian said. “Where does it stop?”

Data from usaspending.gov for Defense Department obligations to organizations listing a California address. Awards may be to California businesses for projects in another area. Download our data here. 

Mohamed Al Elew contributed data editing to this report.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

This story first appeared on Long Beach Post.

Long Beach may soon be leading the charge to regulate social media. A watershed bill proposed by the city’s state assemblymember is expected to soon become law in California, prohibiting social media platforms from providing addictive features to kids under age 16.

The California legislature on Monday unanimously passed the bill, which will now head to the desk of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has previously expressed support. “I’m very optimistic that this bill will get signed into law,” said Democratic Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal, the bill’s author.

If passed, the legislation would go into effect in January 2027 and prohibit young users from accessing social media platforms that include addictive features — including infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithms and notifications — and authorize the state attorney general to implement and enforce the restrictions. It represents a massive step for the nation’s most populous state, which has led the charge on tech policy, experts say, and where concerns about the harms of youth screen time have mounted.

The ban would apply to social platforms heavily used by young people, including Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube. Platforms can become “good actors” and continue offering services to young people if they remove addictive features, Lowenthal said.

Yet because these and other platforms continue to evolve, the bill establishes an independent advisory commission to continue monitoring platforms and the features they offer to children.

Age-gating has raised privacy concerns because it could require the collection of sensitive information that may lead to the loss of anonymity on the internet, yet Lowenthal said the bill would leverage existing law that allows for verification on the device level, meaning in most cases, users won’t have to present government-issued identification.

The bill has also elicited fears about infringement on First Amendment rights, given that young people are constitutionally entitled to speak and access speech on social media. But Lowenthal said “this is a public health crisis” that must take precedence. That priority is bolstered by the American Academy of Pediatrics’ support of the bill, he said.

“Young people are allowed to ride bicycles and skateboards just like adults, but they’re required to wear helmets because of the unique developmental concerns,” he said. “This is no different.”

Previous court rulings in New Mexico and Los Angeles, as well as a recent settlement that required Meta to pay $17.1 billion, were a start but don’t go far enough, Lowenthal said. State Attorney General Rob Bonta, who co-led the case against Meta, referred to the settlement as “a floor conceptually, not a ceiling,” CNBC reported.

Lowenthal aims to go further, and his bill has elicited widespread bipartisan support, which he attributed to leading as parents before policymakers.

Since the bill was first introduced, Lowenthal said he’s observed a sea change throughout California, the country and world. “Families want relief” from the platforms that many children report using for nearly five hours a day, he said. “They’re unwilling to tolerate the status quo, and AB 1709 gets to the heart of the matter.”

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

A recently expanded eligibility map determines who can get recovery assistance after the Lineage warehouse fire — from free air purifiers and masks to grocery vouchers and utility assistance. 

But not everyone qualifies for the same support, and help depends on where you live. 

The map is used by Lineage, as well as by some outside agencies, and was recently expanded to cover a larger part of unincorporated East L.A.

Here’s a breakdown of the boundaries and what is available in each zone. 

What are the boundaries? 

The map covers households located between Union Pacific Avenue and the 5 Freeway, Los Palos Street and Herbert Avenue; all less than one mile from the Lineage warehouse.

Lineage says there are 797 households located within this area. 

What support do people living within the boundary qualify for? 

Here’s a list of resources offered by Lineage, as well as what the city, county and other agencies are doing for residents living in these areas. 

Zone 1 (Between Los Palos and Indiana Streets):

• Housing vouchers for short-term hotel rentals through Airbnb
• Grocery vouchers redeemable at Food4Less and Kroger
• Air purifiers, air conditioning units and N95 masks
• Bottled water
• Fly traps
• $200 utility credit through the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power
• Cash assistance 

Zone 2 (Between Indiana Street and Hicks Avenue):

• Housing vouchers for short-term hotel rentals through Airbnb
• Grocery vouchers redeemable at Food4Less and Kroger
• Air purifiers, air conditioning units and N95 masks
• Bottled water
• Fly traps
• $200 utility credit through Southern California Edison (SCE)
• Cash assistance 

Zone 3 (Between Hicks and Herbert Avenues): 

• Housing vouchers for short-term hotel rentals through Airbnb
• Grocery vouchers redeemable at Food4Less and Kroger
• Air purifiers, air conditioning units and N95 masks
• Bottled water
• Fly traps
• $200 utility credit through SCE

Who created the map? 

The map with the outlined resources was presented by Lineage at an AQMD Hearing on Aug. 6.

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Courtesy of Lineage

)

The map’s origin dates back to the first few weeks of the fire. On July 9, Lineage announced a new wave of support at a community town hall held at Stevenson Middle School that included temporary housing, grocery vouchers and cash assistance. 

The next day, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass announced that 211LA and Airbnb had partnered up to provide temporary housing for residents and shared the map of qualifying households, which Lineage later designated Zone 1 and 2. 

The map was extended last month to cover a larger part of East L.A. after L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis pushed for more support, according to her office.

Solis advocated for more support for East L.A. after the unincorporated community was initially left out of utility assistance credits that were provided to Boyle Heights customers in July. 

Officials have given conflicting answers when asked by Boyle Heights Beat about who created the map and determined which households would receive assistance. 

According to Lineage, the area was designated by the city and county. However, supervisor Solis’ office told The Beat that they had no say in the original map but advocated for the area to be extended. 

Both 211LA and the city’s Community Investment Department said they did not create the map. Abigail Marquez, general manager of the Community Investment Department, said her office used existing maps developed by the city’s Emergency Management Department. The Emergency Management Department did not respond to an inquiry about the map’s origin. 

How has support been provided? 

Lineage says it has conducted five rounds of door-to-door outreach to the 797 households identified within the boundary since the fire began. As of Aug. 25, Lineage said it had successfully made contact with 718 households to provide the support outlined.

“For households where residents were not home, teams left information on how to access available assistance through Lineage’s community support line and made repeated attempts to reach them,” a Lineage spokesperson told The Beat. 

According to Lineage, community assistance provided as of last week includes 613 air purifiers, 669 portable air-conditioning units, 599 N95 masks, 638 cases of bottled water, 1,223 grocery vouchers and 1,989 fly traps.

Residents living near the warehouse can request direct support from Lineage using their online form. The form notes that Lineage support is only available for households located between Los Palos Street and South Herbert Avenue and between the I-5 and Union Pacific Avenue.  

Lineage can also be reached by emailing boyleheights@onelineage.com or calling (866) 317-1115 for bilingual assistance. 

I live outside of the boundary. Where can I get support?

While not all residents impacted by the fire qualify for direct support from Lineage, there are still opportunities to receive resources and information, including: 

Community Resource Center at Boyle Heights City Hall

Residents of Boyle Heights and nearby communities can access recovery resources and information on various city and county programs related to Lineage recovery.

Free Community Mobile Health Clinics

The free clinics offer respiratory health screenings, eye and skin irritation evaluations, health education on smoke exposure, mental-health support and more. No appointments are required. 

L.A. County Department of Health Services

St. John’s Mobile Clinic

For more information about available resources, mobile clinic schedules and announcements, visit emergency.lacity.gov/BoyleHeightsRecovery.