95 MARCH 2020“We are working with the residents of Boca Chica Village because we think
over time it’s going to be quite disruptive,” Musk was telling the crowd. “The
actual danger is low to Boca Chica Village, but it’s not tiny. So therefore, we
want super-tiny risk. So probably over time it’s better to buy out the villagers.”
An hour passed, then another. One by one, the Boca Chicans began giv-
ing up: Bonnie went home to take her medication; Ellie Garcia just got fed up
and left. It was after 11:00 P.M. when Musk finally walked into the room. Here
was the man they’d all been talking about for years, sometimes with excite-
ment (Elon retweeted my picture of the rocket!), sometimes with bitterness
(Elon thinks he can just have my house?). He wasn’t charismatic, but his pow-
er felt palpable in the room. Andy Goetsch, who’d moved to Boca Chica to be
close to SpaceX, was giddy. But most of the other residents wanted to vent.
Musk crossed his arms, assumed a stiff, wide stance, and listened as they un-
loaded their grievances and disputed their appraisals. Their houses weren’t
just brick-and-mortar structures—you had to take into account the wildlife, the
proximity to the beach, how special Boca Chica was. He did a lot of nodding.
Before the meeting ended, Cheryl took a selfie with Musk, then handed him
a sort of peace offering: a Mars-themed issue of National Geographic from 1977,
which she’d found in a library’s giveaway pile that morning. He seemed tak-
en aback. He reacted that way, she reasoned, because he wasn’t used to be-
ing given things; usually Musk was the one doing the giving.
The next day, Cheryl received a text from someone she’d just met—a SpaceX
superfan who’d flown in from California to attend the event, only to find that
he couldn’t secure a ticket. So in the morning, he’d hiked over some sand
dunes, passed the NO TRESPASSING signs he’d claim not to have seen, sidled
up to the rocket, took a selfie, and posted it on Facebook. The company had
seen his photo and considered it proof of trespass. “I’m in handcuffs, please
call my mom,” the superfan wrote to Cheryl. SpaceX was pressing charges.
WHEN I FIRST VISITED BOCA CHICA, IN OCTOBER, I WAS STARTLED TO SEE
the rocket sitting out in the open, by the side of a public highway. When Jeff
Bezos decided he wanted to venture into space and founded Blue Origin to
do so, he quietly bought up three hundred thousand acres of remote west
Texas ranchland so he could experiment in seclusion. Richard Branson opt-
ed to base his private space company, Virgin Galactic, at Spaceport Ameri-
ca, a facility owned and operated by the state of New Mexico. But Musk has
always done things differently. “Head down, plow through the line. That’s
very SpaceX,” the company’s president, Gwynne Shotwell, has said. And in
this case, the line ran right through Boca Chica. (Neither Musk nor SpaceX
would comment for this story.)
The area isn’t the most obvious place to build a home base for space ex-
ploration. Cell service is spotty. The nearest grocery store is a half-hour
drive away. Freshwater is nonexistent; it must be trucked in each month.
“Everything out here rusts, rots, and mildews,” a former resident told Tex-
as Parks & Wildlife magazine in 1992. “And the dust off the flats can blow
something awful!”
That hasn’t stopped developers from targeting the area over the years. Musk
is only the latest outsider to arrive here with big ambitions. But nothing be-
fore has stuck, mostly due to the hurricanes. In 1867, a hospital and barracks
built down the road from the site of the Battle of Palmito Ranch, arguably the
Civil War’s last land skirmish—which the Confederates won—were washed out
to sea. Between the world wars, tourists frolicked at a seaside resort—the au-
thor Sherwood Anderson caught several “gorgeous redfish” there, accord-
ing to his wife’s diary—until, in 1933, another hurricane, with a thirteen-foot
storm surge and 124-mile-an-hour winds, wiped it away, too. A Moon Mo-
tor Car flipped over on the beach and in time became nearly buried in sand,
where it remained for three decades, until Hurricane Beulah (twenty-foot
surge, 136-mile-an-hour winds) uncovered it.
In the sixties, a schemer named John Caputa began pitching Polish commu-
nities in the greater Chicago area on a beautiful retirement village in Boca Chi-
ca. He called it Kennedy Shores, in homage to the president, and he promised
investors an improbable 12 percent return. Few bought into the dream, and
Caputa completed only a fraction of the planned development. A few years
later, he died, penniless, of a heart attack. In time, the community changed
its name first to Kopernik Shores, in homage to Copernicus, then to Boca Chi-
ca Village. But most of the houses that now stand are Caputa’s.
The Heatons bought one of them in 2001. Fed up with Minnesota winters,
they’d decided to retire somewhere warm and quiet and affordable. They’d
planned to go to South Padre Island, but a barge accident destroyed a portion
of the bridge, rendering it inaccessible. Someone suggested they check out
Boca Chica, a dozen miles down the coast, and they never left.
Many residents arrived here like the Heatons: accidentally, while trying to
get someplace else. They felt as though they’d stumbled on a secret shared
only with their neighbors, and with the day-trippers from nearby Brownsville.
The community marks the eastern edge of the Lower Rio Grande Valley Na-
tional Wildlife Refuge, a two-hundred-mile stretch of federally protected land
along the southern border, intended to allow safe passage for animals such
as the ocelot, whose U. S. population has dwindled to fewer than one hun-
dred. For a certain kind of person—one who prizes independence over con-
venience and who doesn’t mind living among more pelicans than humans—
there was no better place on earth.
Sitting in their living room, Bonnie told me how the seclusion suited her and2 SSRVLWH &KHU\O6WHYHQVJUHZXSLQVRXWK7H[DVWKHIRXUWKJHQHUDWLRQRIKHUIDPLO\WRSOD\RQ%RFD&KLFD%HDFK,IDQ\ZKHUHZDVVDIHIURPJHQWULƓFDWLRQVKHƓJXUHGWKLVZDVLW/HIW 6SDFH;LQVWDOOHGDVHFXULW\
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