QuinStar Technology’s #24 ranking on Business by LA Times Studios’ 2026 list of Southern California’s Top Aerospace & Defense Companies.
The ranking is based on local employee count. The story behind it is the engineering, manufacturing, and trust that built a 100-person aerospace and defense team in Torrance.
TORRANCE, Calif. – June 22, 2026 – On June 13, 2024, shortly after launch, the European Space Agency’s EarthCARE satellite returned its first image from orbit. It came from a cloud-profiling radar operating at 94 GHz, deep in the W-band, one of the most demanding corners of the millimeter-wave spectrum. Part of the hardware behind that measurement was built in Torrance, California.
In this work, the margin for error is zero. A radar in orbit cannot be repaired. An amplifier that drifts does not just create a returned part. It can cost the mission. So every engineer who specifies these parts carries the same question: Will it still be working a decade from now?
QuinStar Technology answers that question for a living. Business by LA Times Studios just placed the company at #24 on its 2026 ranking of Southern California’s top aerospace and defense companies. The list covers the 50 largest aerospace and defense employers in the region, a group of more than 67,000 people that includes Northrop Grumman, SpaceX, and Rocket Lab.
A specialized RF, microwave, millimeter-wave, and cryogenic technology company does not grow into a 100-person Southern California team unless customers keep trusting it with difficult work.
That is the story behind the ranking.
What earns a place on a list like this: proof that keeps running
QuinStar has built its name since 1993, one part at a time. The evidence is still operating:
- On the Alphasat satellite, QuinStar solid-state power amplifiers have run for more than a decade in orbit.
- A radar customer swapped kilowatt-level klystron amplifiers for 100-watt QuinStar SSPAs, gaining lower cost and higher reliability with no tube degradation.
- Another customer has run QuinStar amplifiers, multipliers, and converters since 2015 without a single failure.
The aim from day one was to build hardware good enough that the customer stops thinking about it.
Built for people who can’t afford surprises
RF and millimeter-wave engineers are climbing into higher bands while the spec sheet demands lower noise, more power, and better SWaP-C in the same breath. A catalog part rarely fits. The supplier-partner worth keeping is the one who surfaces the hard tradeoff early, before it reaches your bench, rather than shipping a part and letting you discover the compromise later. That is the standard QuinStar works to, with a range from low-noise amplifiers and SSPAs to waveguide assemblies and fully integrated mmWave subsystems, engineered to the requirement instead of pulled from a shelf.
Procurement and supplier-quality teams are managing risk, not parts. The best way to judge that risk is to look past the data sheet at the company behind it. Three signals matter most: real quality certification such as AS9100D, a capability that is hard to source anywhere else, and enough history to trust the supplier will still be there at the end of a multi-year program. QuinStar carries all three. It is AS9100D and ISO 9001:2015 certified, U.S.-based, and three decades deep. It won a 2026 Northrop Grumman Supplier Strategic Excellence Award.
Space, science, and quantum teams are reaching for capabilities that barely existed a few years ago: cryogenic isolators for quantum readout, W-band radar for Earth observation, and low-noise front ends for instruments no one can touch once they launch. At this edge, general capability is not the thing to test for. What matters is heritage. A supplier who has already flown space hardware or built working cryogenic components has paid for the lessons you cannot afford to learn in the field. QuinStar’s cryogenic line and space-flight heritage put it in that small group, the one that delivers when physics, thermal behavior, and reliability all have to be right at once.
Behind every one of those results is a part that someone tuned, tested, and signed off at a bench in Torrance.
What comes next
Frequencies keep climbing. Constellations keep growing. Quantum keeps moving toward the field. Each frontier needs RF and millimeter-wave hardware that performs outside the lab. The spec says what that hardware must do. The mission says why it has to survive. The partners worth trusting are the ones who plan for both.
That is the work QuinStar has done for more than thirty years. The ranking marks the ground already covered. The hardware is the proof of what comes next.
If your program lives at the high-frequency edge, talk to a QuinStar engineer about the hard part. When you are ready for numbers, you can start an RFQ online in minutes.