Residents of Elon Musk’s “space city” in southeastern Texas blasted the SpaceX CEO’s treatment of them as he transformed their quiet beach town into his grand Starbase vision, a report said.
Boca Chica was a small, seaside village on the mouth of the Rio Grande on the Mexican border with just just a few streets before SpaceX moved in, promising to show the town right into a terrestrial terminus for space travelers.
The corporate broke ground on its launch facility in 2014 and began testing rockets there in 2019. As work on the project progressed, SpaceX step by step bought up most of Boca Chica’s three dozen homes, though just a few homeowners held out, based on reports.
“Creating the town of Starbase, Texas,” Musk tweeted in March 2021. “From thence to Mars. And hence, the celebs.” Starbase, he added, “would encompass an “area much larger than Boca Chica.”
“It was just a little neighborhood, and Elon Musk got here and took it over,” Mary Helen Flores, a teacher from nearby Brownsville, told The Sunday Times. “He renamed it Starbase without asking anyone. He just announced it on Twitter.”
Maria Pointer, who used to live in “the last house in Texas” before the border, told the paper that her house is now getting used by SpaceX to store medical supplies.
She could still indicate her old home, because it stands, juxtaposed to Starbase’s massive rocket assembly towers.
In 2012, Musk received bids from states and territories that desired to host a recent SpaceX base, with Florida and Puerto Rico being the 2 leading candidates before Musk settled on Boca Chica after meeting with Texas officials, based on The Sunday Times.
“He picked Texas since it’s a unclean red state where nobody’s going to care what he does in a poor border town,” Flores told the paper.
Flores said she “knew once I saw them putting the launchpad right behind the dune line that it was going to be a disaster for our beach.”
“He has destroyed a pristine paradise within the name of saving animals? Come on,” she said, dismissing the world’s richest man as “only a delusional billionaire.”
“They’re destroying an ecosystem that has been there for tons of of years,” Flores added.
She said she’s seen several fires and “a whole lot of sea turtle deaths,” following repeated launches and multiple explosions at the positioning.
Earlier this month, SpaceX fired up 31 of 33 heavy booster engines on the world’s largest rocket ever built at Starbase.
Musk, whose plans to expand Starbase have reportedly been placed on hold, has defended the positioning as obligatory for the survival of humankind.
“Something could go unsuitable on Earth,” he said at an event on the Starbase launchpad last yr, based on The Sunday Times.
“We’re life’s guardians,” he said. “The creatures that we love, they will’t construct spaceships but we are able to bring them with us.”
In March 2021, Musk claimed that Starbase’s population will “grow by several thousand people over the subsequent yr or two” as the corporate — headquartered in Hawthorne, California — expands its workforce.
To sweeten the deal for prospective residents and native officials, Musk pledged to donate $20 million to varsities in Cameron County, which is home to the Boca Chica.
He also said he’d give $10 million toward “downtown revitalization” in Brownsville, where about 29 percent of the population lives in poverty.