Per-MW pricing, regional variance, and cost drivers for owners scoping hyperscale & AI builds.
Salary benchmarks across the 14 mission-critical disciplines.
PROJECTS
24 named reindustrialization factory, launch-site, and shipyard construction programs across the U.S. — new-space and defense-tech builds by region, status, owner, and size — with the construction and operations hiring behind each one.
Jump to a regional section. Each program card carries owner, location, scope, status, and the construction and production leadership roles a build of that type needs.
Five programs whose scale and pace define the 2024–2027 factory-building wave — each one hiring twice: the construction team that delivers the building and the operations team that stands up the line inside it.
The defining build of the reindustrialization cycle: a $910M-committed, 5M sq ft autonomous-weapons campus with 4,008 jobs planned. Phase 1 (775,000 sq ft) is producing Fury while the second building and the balance of the campus are still in construction — so the site is hiring a construction team and a production team at the same time.
The highest-cadence rocket factory in the country is still expanding: Starfactory builds ships and boosters while the ~380 ft Gigabay goes up beside it to integrate and refurbish them. Four tower cranes, a $250M registered build value and a one-ship-per-day ambition put this among the most demanding structural and commissioning scopes in the tracker.
The largest single factory program in the tracker by dollar value: a $16.8B initial phase toward a fab campus that filings size at up to 100M sq ft. Fab construction is the most facilities-intensive scope in manufacturing — cleanrooms, ultrapure water, gas and chemical systems — which makes it the deepest MEP and commissioning hiring well on this page.
A $200M, 290,000 sq ft software-defined machine shop that went from announcement to production in about six months — and the template Hadrian says it will repeat, with additional factories funded by a $1.37B Series D and a $360M credit facility. F3 is the clearest example of factory-as-product in the tracker.
The first greenfield shipyard of its kind in decades: a $3B-plus yard on 835 acres with room to grow to about 4,400, built to turn out autonomous vessels the way a factory turns out vehicles. Up to 10,000 direct jobs and a ~$750M annual payroll are planned, and the waterfront civil scope alone is a multi-year hiring program.
Organized by region. Every program is compiled from public sources; the role lines on each card describe the leadership a build of that type typically requires, not an engagement with the owner.
Six-building campus at Douglas Park — about 750,000 sq ft of office and 435,000 sq ft of R&D — for engineering, software, flight test and program support behind Fury and other systems. Developed by Sare Regis Group, which also delivered Rocket Lab's nearby headquarters. Construction is slated to start with the first building targeted about two years out; construction cost described as in the hundreds of millions. General contractor not disclosed.
A 400,000 sq ft manufacturing hall plus 30,000 sq ft of office housing 64 Monolith One 12-laser metal printers, commissioned over 24 months. Planned output is 3D-printed metal structures at munitions scale — 30,000-plus 500-lb-class missile airframes or 60,000-plus warhead casings a year, including Tomahawk components — alongside automotive subframes. Staff are already moving in ahead of opening. Investment not disclosed. General contractor not disclosed.
Headquarters and production campus near Long Beach Airport where Vast builds Haven-1 and Haven-2 commercial space-station modules with about 90 percent of parts made in-house; Haven-1's primary structure was welded on site. Investment not disclosed. No additional Long Beach building has been announced. General contractor not disclosed.
Product development and production plant near Long Beach Airport — 70,000 sq ft of design and production space plus 20,000 sq ft of office — for Jackal-class spacecraft hardware, software and payloads, sited for proximity to Space Systems Command and Vandenberg. Investment and headcount not disclosed. General contractor not disclosed.
Lease of the nine-acre former Mattel R&D campus on East Mariposa Avenue to expand headquarters and add capacity to build spacecraft and reentry capsules at scale for orbital pharmaceutical processing and hypersonic reentry testing, plus a separate 50,000 sq ft biopharma space nearby. Build-out cost, occupancy date and job count not disclosed. General contractor not disclosed.
Headquarters and manufacturing plant producing Viper VTOL aircraft, Glide air-to-ground weapons and Dart counter-UAS, with propulsion, energetics and production infrastructure spread across California following the Exquadrum acquisition. A $300M Series C and a $600M extension are earmarked to expand manufacturing infrastructure; no new building size has been disclosed. General contractor not disclosed.
The Scaling Nova plan expands the Moses Lake Test Site from 75 to 550 acres with purpose-built stands for engine components through full Nova stages, designed to limit noise and community impact, while Kent remains headquarters and manufacturing for the fully reusable Nova vehicle and its Andromeda and Zenith engines. Kent square footage, new-building and job figures not disclosed. General contractor not disclosed.
Starfactory, roughly 1M sq ft, has been producing Starship ships and Super Heavy boosters since its latest phase came online. Next to it, the ~700,000 sq ft, ~380 ft tall Gigabay integration building — about 815,000 sq ft of workspace across levels, 24 work cells and 400-ton cranes — is rising on the footprint of the demolished High Bay, with a registered value of about $250M and a target of up to one ship per day. General contractor not disclosed.
Full-scale fab site near Gibbons Creek Reservoir east of College Station, with a small prototype line broken ground at Giga Texas in Austin. The state announced a $16.8B initial phase alongside a $30M Texas Enterprise Fund grant; county filings cite $55B and Comptroller applications up to $119B across four phases. Land clearing is underway. Planned output: AI inference and training chips, memory and multi-chip modules for Tesla vehicles, Optimus robots and SpaceX space computing. General contractor not disclosed.
Next-generation shipyard for autonomous and uncrewed naval vessels, sited at the Port of Brownsville after a multi-state competition. Initial capability targets ships up to 850 ft, later beyond 1,200 ft. Incentives include an $80M Texas Enterprise Fund grant and a roughly $211M county tax abatement contingent on 35 percent local hiring. Pre-construction, with groundbreaking slated and operations targeted roughly two years later. General contractor not disclosed.
Doubled Cedar Park spacecraft campus with a cleanroom four times the prior size and the Gloworks innovation lab (titanium printing, composites, welding, automated milling), plus 30,000 sq ft of new mezzanines at the 200-acre Rocket Ranch in Briggs, which was itself doubled for the Eclipse medium launch vehicle. Output spans Blue Ghost landers, Elytra orbital vehicles, Alpha rockets and Eclipse engines. Investment and headcount not disclosed. General contractor not disclosed.
Expansion of the former Gulf Craft yard, which already produces the 180-ft Marauder autonomous vessel, adding three construction slips, an expanded warehouse and a dedicated autonomous-vessel production line. A JE Dunn Construction and Alberici Constructors joint venture placed the final structural beam after roughly ten months of work, with completion targeted early next year and a peak construction workforce of about 200.
Announced by the state as the largest capital investment in Louisiana history: five launch complexes with ten pads, propellant production, power generation, vehicle processing facilities and worker housing on former Exxon coastal property. Incentives include a roughly $820M PILOT arrangement, aerospace facility rebates and LED FastStart. Construction start is planned for next year with first launches targeted two years after that. General contractor not disclosed.
Rebuild of the historic Friendship 7 pad as the launch, landing and horizontal-integration site for the fully reusable Nova rocket. Earthwork, a 9.5-mile utility network, the launch mount, umbilical tower and horizontal integration facility steel were completed first; the pad, oxygen, fuel and water farms and HIF are now reported complete ahead of Nova Pathfinder's first orbital launch. Total pad cost not disclosed; a $260M Series C was earmarked in part to finish construction. General contractor not disclosed.
Centerpiece of SpaceX's roughly $1.8B Florida Starship expansion: a 380-ft integration building on Roberts Road with 815,000-plus sq ft of workspace across levels, 24 work cells and cranes rated to 400 tons for processing and refurbishing Starship vehicles and Super Heavy boosters. The structure has topped out with roof closure and door installation underway; a co-located Starship production factory about 50 percent larger than the Texas plant is also planned. General contractor not disclosed.
Expansion that opened for full-rate production of tactical and mid-size solid rocket motors, making Anduril the third U.S. supplier. Two Defense Production Act Title III awards — $14.3M and a further $43.7M — fund test-fire infrastructure, storage and manufacturing tooling toward a stated goal of 6,000 motors a year. Square footage and headcount not disclosed. General contractor not disclosed.
Build-to-suit campus near Rickenbacker International Airport developed with CT Realty. The first 775,000 sq ft production building is running — the first Ohio-built Fury collaborative combat aircraft has rolled off the line, with a capacity target of up to 150 aircraft a year — while a second building stands as a shell and follow-on buildings continue toward a 5M sq ft, roughly 12-building master plan. General contractor not disclosed.
Purpose-built facility at the Novaparke Innovation and Technology Campus, opened roughly two years after groundbreaking, housing expanded life-sciences labs, the 3D BioFabrication technology behind the first 3D-printed human meniscus in space, and a Payload Operations Control Center for ISS communications. Investment not disclosed. General contractor not disclosed.
Purpose-built production facility for Dive-LD and Dive-XL autonomous underwater vehicles for the U.S. Navy, with capacity for more than 200 large-diameter hulls and dozens of Dive-XLs a year and in-water testing in Narragansett Bay from a new Port of Davisville dock. Full-rate large-diameter production and a separate Dive-XL line are ramping. Investment not disclosed. General contractor not disclosed.
New 255,000 sq ft plant for the all-electric 12-passenger Viceroy seaglider, backed by up to about $17M in state incentives and a $240M Series B. The first human-crewed Viceroy has flown in Narragansett Bay, but the factory's opening has not been confirmed in an opened source, so status should be re-verified at the next refresh. Investment not disclosed. General contractor not disclosed.
Neutron assembly, integration, test, launch and landing site at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport. Launch Complex 3 has been declared complete and has hosted launch simulations; the adjacent 250,000 sq ft production complex received the captive fairing and is working through Stage 1 qualification ahead of the medium-lift rocket's first flight. Investment and headcount not disclosed. General contractor not disclosed.
Renovation of the former Lockheed Martin Vertical Launch Building — a century-old aerospace manufacturing site — into a carbon-composites complex for spacecraft buses, structural panels, satellite dispensers, heat shields, pressure vessels and launch-vehicle structures including Neutron. Not a greenfield build; local coverage reported the facility taking shape, but an operating confirmation could not be opened, so status should be re-verified at the next refresh. Investment not disclosed. General contractor not disclosed.
Automated precision-machining factory for aerospace and defense components, opened with production already underway at the ribbon cutting and paired with a software hub. Hadrian has since raised a $1.37B Series D, added a Navy-partnered submarine-parts facility in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and says its footprint is just under 3M sq ft across four sites, with additional factories and munitions and autonomous-systems lines planned. General contractor not disclosed.
Twenty-one-building campus for solid rocket motor production, static test and final assembly of the Blackbeard hypersonic strike weapon, broken ground with the governor and Army and Navy officials present. The first building is targeted for completion this summer with all 21 buildings operational by year-end and preliminary production early next year; the company has since cited $250M-plus of committed infrastructure, a $1B Series C and a Navy production order of up to $200M. General contractor not disclosed.
Every program shown is compiled from company announcements, state and local economic-development records, permit and planning filings, and established trade publications. Last refreshed: September 2026 · refreshed monthly.
To appear, a program must meet at least three of the following criteria:
The tracker is maintained by iRecruit.co’s research team. Figures marked not disclosed are exactly that — we do not estimate them. Verify all data before referencing in formal documents. Square footage, investment totals, and timelines shift as programs are re-baselined; each card links only to what was public at the last refresh. iRecruit is assembling candidate density across these segments — Advanced manufacturing, Autonomous maritime, Defense tech, Launch infrastructure, New space, Propulsion, Semiconductor — ahead of the demand; listing a program here does not indicate any engagement with its owner.
If you are researching these builds, you are likely also sizing the construction workforce that delivers them and the operations team that runs them.
The prime-contractor side of the same wave — munitions, propulsion, hypersonics, and missile campuses.
Humanoid, warehouse, and factory-automation programs — the equipment going inside many of these buildings.
What a defense or aerospace plant costs per square foot, and where the schedule risk sits.
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