Eric Schmidt's Gulfstream lands in San Jose as his rocket company wins NASA Mars contract

Eric Schmidt's aircraft, the Gulfstream G650ER registered as N652WE, was tracked flying from KL62 (Elk Hills Buttonwillow Airport) to KSJC (Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport) on July 1, 2026, a brief 28-minute hop at 30,000 feet.

If Eric Schmidt was aboard, the timing aligns with major news regarding his own company. As reported by TechCrunch and Scientific American on June 17, NASA selected Schmidt-led Relativity Space to build and launch the Aeolus mission to Mars, a high-stakes public-private partnership targeting a 2028 launch. Schmidt took over as Relativity's CEO in March 2025 [techcrunch.com](https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/10/eric-schmidt-joins-relativity-space-as-ceo/), and the company is racing SpaceX to be the first private mission to the Red Planet [theverge.com](https://www.theverge.com/science/952988/nasa-relativity-space-eric-schmidt-mars). The return to San Jose, home to Silicon Valley and a convenient base for Schmidt's far-flung operations, suggests he may be pivoting from whatever brought him to Buttonwillow back to his business nexus.

Schmidt's aircraft logged heavy transcontinental use in the last week of June, including flights from Teterboro to Switzerland and back, as well as a trip to Idaho — Buttonwillow itself is an outlier, maybe a refueling or business stop. The jet, per AceJet data, remains among the most active for a tech billionaire, and this landing brings it back to its registered trustee's airport near Schmidt's historic base.