Although they didn’t make the same headlines as President Obama, several members of California’s congressional delegation accompanied him on his historic visit to Cuba — underscoring the importance California officials and business put on the prospect of restored relations with the Communist country.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, was joined by House Democratic Caucus Chairman Xavier Becerra, D-Los Angeles, along with Reps. Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, Sam Farr, D-Carmel, Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, and Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach.

The president’s move to normalize relations has been controversial, especially among Republicans, who have counted Cubans among their reliable supporters after they began fleeing the Castro regime in large numbers and settling in the U.S. But Cuban-American opinion on mending relations has shifted over time, with a gap opening up between younger and older generations.

A new market

California businesses have set their sights on Cuba, which has been able to access goods and services from European firms, but has yet to be opened to American ones. In a sign of their influence on California officials, the state’s two U.S. senators have begun a push to ensure that Golden State airports receive priority as Cuban markets open up.

“Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein advocated establishing nonstop flights from California to Cuba in a letter to Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx,” the Sacramento Bee reported. “As part of the opening of diplomatic relations that has allowed Obama’s journey — the first by a sitting president in several decades — Cuba and the United States have agreed to begin allowing commercial air travel.”

In the letter, sent March 18, Feinstein and Boxer called it “crucial that all Americans have convenient access to Cuba, including the thousands of companies, businesses, and educational institutions that are clamoring for scheduled air service to Cuba. Direct service from California to Cuba will be an important step in ensuring this engagement.”

By Joseph Perkins

The dawning of the commercial space age begins Tuesday. That’s when SpaceX is expected to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida for a rendevous with the International Space Station — the first time a private spacecraft will do so. A Saturday launch was canceled due to technical problems.

SpaceX, the Hawthorne, Calif. space transport company, was co-founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, who currently serves as its CEO. He is one of the Golden State’s great entrepreneurs, having also co-founded PayPal and Tesla Motors.

Musk is persuaded that the commercial space industry is going to lift off.

“There are some similarities to the commercial awakening of the Internet in 1994,” he said, “when the Internet went from being almost an entirely government and academic institution to getting commercialized and accessible to the general public.”

California companies led the way in commercializing the Internet. It remains to be seen whether the Golden State will play a similar role in the growth of the commercial space industry.

As it is, the nascent industry already generates more than $200 billion a year in economic activity, according to the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Administration.

And with the federal government ending its half-century monopoly on space, Musk and others expect exponential growth in the commercial space business.

Florida wants to remain the center the space industry, which, during the Space Shuttle program, contributed $8 billion a year to the Sunshine State’s economy, while also accounting for more than 40,000 jobs.

But there’s no reason California can’t compete for the lion’s share of commercial space industry.

Indeed, while SpaceX will launch its Falcon 9 rocket with its Dragon capsule from Florida’s Cape Canaveral, Musk will monitor the launch from SpaceX mission control inH awthorne.

After docking with the space station, after delivering its payload of more than 1,000 pounds of food and supplies for the station’s crew, Falcon will return not to Florida, but to California. It will splash down two weeks from now in the Pacific Ocean, a safe distance off the San Diego coast.

Californi acould have been the site of tomorrow’s historic SpaceX launch, just as surely as it is the site of the spacecraft’s scheduled return to earth. In fact, a 235-foot Delta IV rocket was launched into space last year from Vandenburg Air Force Base.

A private launch facility here in California would make the state extremely competitive withFlorida. No longer would commercial space companies, most of which are based here in the West Coast, have to ship their spacecrafts all the way to Cape Canaveral, as SpaceX was forced to do. They can save time and money by launching right here in California.

Thanks to the federal government,Florida enjoyed a near monopoly on space-related activity from the Gemini program to the Space Shuttle program. But we have now entered the era of commercial space activity. And California should compete with Florida to be the industry’s hub.

By Joseph Perkins 

“California is the worst! They are doing everything possible to drive business out of their state. If it were not for the climate, they would have lost half their population.” 

That was the damning comment of one of the 650 business leaders surveyed by CEO Magazine for its annual ranking of the best and worst states for business. Such sentiment explains why, for the eighth straight year, California ranked dead last among the 50 states in business climate. 

In compiling its ranking, CEO Magazine asked chief execs to grade states in which their companies do business by various measures, including taxes and regulation, quality of workforce and living environment. 

“Once the most attractive business environment, the Golden State appears,” the magazine lamented, to have slipped “deeper into the ninth circle of business hell,” a reference to Dante’s Inferno. “The economy, which used to outperform the rest of the country, now substantially underperforms.” 

The evidence abounds. 

California’s economy, the world’s sixth largest a decade ago, has fallen back to ninth place. Even its standing as America’s biggest state economy is in jeopardy. 

Indeed, from 2000 to 2010, California’s share of the national economy shrank faster than all but three states, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. 

Lone Star shines

Over the same span, Texas became the nation’s second-largest state economy, supplanting New York. The Lone Star State’s growth in economic output was one of the biggest any state has enjoyed in the past half-century, according to BEA. 

It so happens that Texas ranked at the very top CEO magazine’s list of the best states for business. It was given very high marks by chief execs for its business-friendly tax and regulatory environment, not to mention its workforce quality. 

California likes to believe that it has much more to offer than Texas. But that’s not the way CEOs see it. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have seen major California-based companies expand their operations in the Lone Star State. 

Indeed, EBay/PayPal expanded its support facilities in Austin. They were joined by Facebook, which opened its first domestic operation outside of Californiain the Texas state capital. Then there was Petco, which opened its first customer support center outside of California in San Antonio. 

And Texa sis not the only state luring away California companies, as CEO magazine noted. 

A report by Spectrum Locations Solutions indicated that some 254 Californiacompanies moved some or all of their business work (and jobs) out of state in 2011. That was a 26 percent increase over 2010 and a whopping 500 percent increase over 2009. 

Spectrum’s Joseph Vranich attributed the exodus to California’s high taxes, costly regulations and general hostility toward business by state and local public agencies.  

Meanwhile, the solons in Sacramento continue to propose and enact legislation that further raises the cost of doing business in the GoldenState; that ignores the reality that Californiais losing business to other states that boast lower taxes, less onerous regulations, fewer lawsuits and lower costs of living. 

“California regulations, taxes and costs will leave only tech, life sciences and entertainment as viable,” said one exasperated CEO. “If you aren’t an elitist, no room here for the middle or working classes.”