94 MARCH 2020“The schemes and dreams of developers to build on this beautiful and desolate
area die hard, but die they always have.” —Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine, 1992
“We’ve got a lot of land with nobody around, and so if it blows up, it’s cool.”
—Elon Musk, 2018
AT THE END OF SEPTEMBER, WHEN TENSIONS WERE AT THEIR PEAK, THE
residents of Boca Chica Village received a message from SpaceX. The private
space company was publicly unveiling its new spacecraft here, at the south-
eastern tip of Texas, and they were invited.
The gesture came as a surprise. Earlier that month, homeowners in this tiny
community of independent-minded retirees had received another letter from
SpaceX, via FedEx. “Expansion of spaceflight activities,” it read, “will make
it increasingly more challenging to minimize disruption.” Given the compa-
ny’s ambitions—massive and, as the residents had come to learn, always shift-
ing—SpaceX wanted to buy their homes. As an incentive, it had offered three
times the properties’ assessed values. As an incentive of a different kind, the
letter had declared that the offer, which was final, would expire in two weeks.
That deadline passed three days before the rocket unveiling. Of the residents
who planned to attend, not one had accepted SpaceX’s offer.
The afternoon of the event, Mary, sixty-one, a wiry, practical woman who
was arguably the rocket’s biggest fan in Boca Chica, painted her fingernails a
sparkling silver and put on star-shaped earrings. Cheryl Stevens, fifty-nine,
a former legal secretary with expressive hands and frizzled, graying hair, al-
most turned down the invitation—she’d been battling SpaceX for years—un-
til she heard her neighbors were going. She borrowed a friend’s elegant teal
dress—then, after spotting a neighbor in shorts, changed into something more
casual. About a dozen people gathered at the cozy, cluttered home of Terry
and Bonnie Heaton, seventy and seventy-one, the community’s longest-ten-
ured residents. Cars were already streaming in from the west, through the Bor-
der Patrol checkpoint, past the wildlife preserve and its nesting shorebirds.
At dusk, two SpaceX employees wearing effortful smiles herded the Boca
Chicans into a van and drove them to the launch site. It was surreal to see
Boca Chica so busy. A few years earlier, it had been a sleepy neighborhood
of a few dozen houses on just two streets, the perfect counterpoint to the
spring-break madness of South Padre Island, a few miles up the coast. Some-
times during the slow summer season, the Heatons were the only people around.
In the winter, the main source of excitement was the weekly game night over
at the Averys’ house. Then SpaceX chief Elon Musk took an interest in the ar-
ea and began building his new rocket prototype here. Now the mile-and-a-half
drive to the launch site was lined with SpaceX enthusiasts and Musk hangers-on.
The 164-foot-tall spaceship, named Starship Mk1, loomed above the site, its
stainless-steel hull gleaming in the floodlights. Mary asked if she could hug it.
Her friend Gene Gore, a sunbaked surfboard builder from South Padre Island
who was invited as a local SpaceX supporter, peeked inside the bulkhead and
felt as though he’d entered the future. Gene and the other SpaceX fans min-
gled with company executives and local politicians as the Boca Chicans were
ushered over to a private, cordoned-off area. Their minders didn’t let the res-
idents out of their sight.
Musk took the stage to detail his big plans: how Starship Mk1 was the first
full-scale prototype of what would eventually be the biggest, cheapest space-
craft ever built, the rocket that would make humans a multiplanetary species.
“This thing is going to take off, fly to sixty-five thousand feet, about twenty
kilometers, and come back and land, in about one or two months,” he as-
sured the crowd. He talked about moon bases, asteroid mining, and how
fuel could be produced on Mars. It was an expansive, optimistic vision of the
future, and, according to Musk, much of it was centered here, in Boca Chica.
As Musk took questions from the audience, the Boca Chicans were hustled
back into the van. They assumed they were heading home, but instead their
minders said that a “special guest” wanted to meet with them. Musk, they pre-
sumed. They were escorted to a nearby building, where they grazed on plat-
ters of fudge and fancy chips and mingled uneasily. Another resident, Maria
Pointer, received a text from a reporter she’d grown friendly with over the
past several months: “Elon is talking about you guys!”