Just before Starship’s Megafusée take -off, Dolphins Barbot near the coasts of southern Texas. Then the Mastodon is trembling, causing Starbase to tremble, the new city erected by Elon Musk.
The richest man in the world, who has just left the administration of Donald Trump, has not wasting time in his parallel projects to conquer the planet Mars thanks to his Spacex space company. If Elon Musk is not the “boss” of Starbase, the city was born from his will and revolves around his company Spacex.
Dozens of cars drive at full speed in the Strait Boulevard Boca Chica, towards the space base.
At the side of the road, an Elon Musk bust … whose cheek was apparently shattered, covered with a kind of patch.
The businessman has not saved his efforts to develop Starbase, a new city built around the Spacex facilities.
Located near Boca Chica Beach, a stone shooting of the Rio Grande and the Mexican border, officially became a municipality after a popular vote in early May.
The prefabricated houses painted in black, white and gray have a direct view of the imposing company building with emblem X. The models of two huge rockets and a spacecraft are also part of the landscape, visible for kilometers around.
A fungi city in sacred indigenous lands
The majority of the land belongs to the company. The houses of about 500 inhabitants have a patio where you can install room and barbecue chairs.
In this type of fungal city as the West well known in the nineteenth century at the time of gold fever, other homes are under construction and the inhabitants live while waiting in mobile homes.
The city, in full expansion, is surrounded by nature and fauna, especially birds.
But not all are of the same opinion: “The musk should not be here, it is a colonizer. The earth here is crowned for the aborigines. And Spacex contaminates and desecrating this land,” said Dr. Christopher Basaldu, a member of the aboriginal tribe Carrizo/Comecrudo.
And journalists are not necessarily welcome: a person interviewed for an interview warns that they will call security.
And the mayor of Starbase, Bobby Peden, did not follow up on maintenance requests. The same silence next to the county authorities, where the base is located.
A meeting is scheduled for the end of June to discuss the development of new spaces, and Spacex also has a project to build a sales complex, Riowest, valued at around $ 15 million.
A LNG factory to supply spacecraft rockets
A liquefied natural gas plant is also being built in the neighboring city of Brownsville, which can deal with methane, a fuel of the spacecraft rocket. For Bekah Hinojosa, co -founder of the Environmental Justice Network of Southern Texas, this factory could become the Elon Musk service station.
Bekah Hinojosa remembers that in the area where Spacex Opera there are two natural reserves, those of the Rio Grande Valley and the immense stars. In addition, Boca Chica beach, which has been very busy for decades by the locals, is now closed every time there are test flights.
In 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency sanctioned Spacex for downloads to wetlands linked to the Rio Grande.
And even if Kathryn Lueders, CEO of Spacex, assured local officials that the base worked to reduce their environmental footprint as much as possible, the concern remains animated. Especially because Spacex has just received authorization to go from five to 25 annual flights.
But Bekah Hinojosa sees him as a fight of “David against Goliath.” “We are one of the poorest communities in the country with low income and we are dealing with Elon Musk,” one of the most powerful men on the planet, he says. “We have brought evidence, but he has so much power that he found a way to escape from most of them.”
Source: BFM TV
