It would be misleading to say that Firefly Space Systems is relocating to Texas because most of the small rocket manufacturer operations are already there.

Of the company’s 42 employees, less than half a dozen work out of the Hawthorne office. The rest are working in a temporary office near Austin, Texas.

News broke last week that the company had purchased 200 acres of land near Briggs, Texas, about 50 miles north of Austin, on which it plans to build a manufacturing facility and test site for its rockets.

“It’s not like we had jobs here that we’re off-loading. We’re just growing our facility in Texas,” said Maureen Gannon, Firefly’s vice president of business development. “We needed to get a couple hundred acres of open land to test our rocket engines. That’s a challenging task in the Hawthorne area.”

Founded last fall, Firefly is still very much in the startup phase of its development. With a test site secured and grant money from a NASA Space Act Agreement headed their way, the company plans to hire 200 engineers from around the country. Almost all of those hires will live and work in Texas.

To streamline the development process and keep production costs low, the company wanted to build its rockets within driving distance of the test site. Proximity to a major metropolitan area with a large university was also a must.

Firefly has already partnered with the University of Texas at Austin, where the company recruits interns and runs simulations on the school’s “Stampede” supercomputer.

Texas’ tax incentives were one factor in the “basket of considerations” weighed by the company, Gannon said.

Firefly’s founders looked at several locations for their rocket test site, including the Mojave Desert, but ultimately they decided not to subject their employees to Los Angeles’ traffic, said P.J. King, Firefly’s chief operating officer and co-founder.

“It’s becoming a major lifestyle issue,” King said of employee commutes. “People under 28 have zero tolerance for driving.”

Like their Hawthorne neighbor SpaceX, which sits on the opposite end of the Hawthorne Municipal Airport, Firefly is angling to disrupt the staid aerospace industry by building rockets on a shoestring budget. (Firefly CEO Thomas Markusic used to be SpaceX’s principal propulsion engineer and the director of its Texas test site.)

Firefly has developed a rocket that is about one-third the height of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and, with an $8 million to $9 million price tag, about one-sixth the cost.

The 72-foot rocket is small enough for it to be taken apart and transported in a standard shipping container. Building the rockets next to the test site will also reduce costs.

Firefly is going after the growing small satellite market, which the company feels is under-served.

As technology shrinks in size, the same instruments can be packed into smaller satellites. Smaller satellites are cheaper to build and launch into space, which allows more companies to gain access to space.

Firefly’s “alpha” rocket can launch a satellite as heavy as 900 pounds, or it can carry more than a hundred nanosatellites at once. SpaceX Falcon 9 can handle low-Earth orbit payloads of more than 14 tons.

Currently, the only way to launch small satellites is by piggybacking on larger launch vehicles that carry military and commercial telecommunications satellites, which can weigh several tons.

Standardized design formats like CubeSats have helped bring down the cost of nanosatellites, but launching small satellites as secondary payloads is still expensive — about $250,000 to $350,000 to launch a CubeSat the size of a Pringles can.

Scheduling is also an issue, as these satellites are at the mercy of larger satellites’ launch schedules, which are often delayed because they are so complicated and expensive to replace.

The company hopes to eventually launch every month, possibly from multiple sites around the world.

Launch prices have not been finalized, but King said that he was “very confident that it will be the cheapest on the market.”

While the company says it will “always have a presence in Hawthorne,” where some management and back-office engineering operations will remain, the company’s orbit is rapidly shifting east.

“With our center of gravity moving to Texas, it is highly likely that our headquarters will move to Texas,” King said. “But we’re keeping an open mind.”