96 MARCH 2020her husband, and the fishing was world-class. In the winters, Bonnie cut her
neighbors’ hair and Terry helped out with their home repairs. Most of their
neighbors were part-timers, returning to their homes in Alaska or Michigan or
Wisconsin during the hot months. I asked Bonnie if it got lonely during those
quiet summers, and the question seemed to make her feel sorry for me. “It
was wonderful,” she said. “It was wonderful.” But that was before SpaceX and
its intrusions. “They don’t want us here because it’s costing them money to
have us here. But we were here first,” she told me. “This is where we thought
we were going to live until we died.”
Cheryl, who lives a few doors down from the Heatons, decorated her house
with seashells and left out dishes of water for migratory birds. She paid her
mortgage by renting out her house on Airbnb. In the summer, sea turtles lay
their eggs on the beach; once, she helped a nest of hatchlings find their way to
the sea. Another time, in the eerie calm before a hurricane, she saw a jagua-
rundi—a rare wild cat that has since gone extinct in Texas. She befriended Wi-
ley, the half-tame coyote who skulked through the village at dusk.
Cheryl grew up in south Texas, the fourth generation of her family to play
on Boca Chica Beach. As an adult, she lived in Austin until it got too crowded
and expensive; then she moved to Portland and repeated the process. When
her grandmother got sick, she returned to Texas and, in 2005, bought one of
the Caputa houses; if anywhere was safe from the exhausting logic of gentrifi-
cation, she figured Boca Chica was it. So when Musk started sniffing around,
she told me, “those of us who lived here hoped [the project] would implode,
or he’d run out of money.”
Cheryl’s shell collection is rivaled by that of Rob Avery, sixty-six, a retired
pipe fitter with graying copper hair, and his wife, Sarah, sixty-three, who
used to work in insurance. On their daily walks along Boca Chica Beach,
the couple has found oyster beds, rare shells, bison teeth, and even a rem-
nant of a centuries-old shipwreck. They spend six months each year in Bo-
ca Chica and recently became Texas residents so they could relocate per-
manently. When the offer letter from SpaceX arrived at their other home,
in Connecticut, “we were floored,” Rob told me. “It made you feel that
if you didn’t accept this offer, eminent domain would be the next step,”
Sarah said. Rob added, “We felt under duress. We were caught off guard.”
He paused. “We’d had two deaths in the family,” he said. “It couldn’t have
been a worse time.”
Feeling that they had no choice, the Averys signed the paperwork and rushed
down to Texas six weeks earlier than usual, prepared to pack up their house
and say goodbye to Boca Chica. When they arrived, they saw the partially as-
sembled Starship Mk1 rocket for the first time. Some of their neighbors re-
fused to look at it. Others couldn’t look away.
ONE MORNING, BEFORE DAWN, I HEADED TOWARD THE LAUNCH SITE IN
search of the burgundy van that always seemed to be in its vicinity, as close
as you could get to the rocket without SpaceX security shooing you away. The
van belonged to Mary. She and her husband, Gale, seventy-eight, retired to
Boca Chica twelve years ago. They loved the community, with its neighborly
solicitude—one time, Mary helped Cheryl get TV reception by jerry-rigging an
antenna out of scrap lumber and coat hangers. But unlike her NIMBY-mind-
ed neighbors, Mary was intrigued by the community’s transformation into a
space corridor. Her interest spiked in November 2018, when SpaceX began
assembling Starhopper, the squat prototype built to test the company’s meth-
ane-fueled Raptor engine, which, if all goes to plan, will one day propel the
Starship fleet into space. “That’s when I fell in love with a rocket,” she sang,
to the tune of T-Pain’s “I’m in Love with a Stripper.”
Mary spent most days by the side of the road, observing the rocket and its
surroundings as if it were her full-time job—never mind the heavy heat of the
Texas summer or the dense swarms of mosquitoes that arrive after the rains.
She doesn’t have an engineering background, but she has a keen observer’s
eye, and she started posting pictures and videos of the project’s developments
on Twitter, as @bocachicagal. She averaged twenty tweets a day, and she had
a fondness for the star-eyed emoji. Space obsessives took notice. She’s now a
go-to source for on-the-ground updates out of Boca Chica. As of press time,
she’s amassed nearly seventeen thousand followers.
Mary was joined that morning by two other rocket enthusiasts, Gene, the
surfboard builder, and Andy, the Musk fan who moved here because SpaceX
did, too. Andy is a retired IT technician; when he learned that the houses in Boca
Chica were cheap, he bought one, rigged it to run on solar panels hooked up to
a Tesla battery, and waited for the launches to begin. That was four years ago.
We clambered up the beachfront dunes to get a better view of the rock-
et. The vibe was celebratory, even though today’s activities were relatively
low-stakes: SpaceX was transporting Mk1’s ninety-foot cylindrical propel-
lant tank over from the assembly site. The launch area, mostly unpaved and
at least one-quarter puddle, had an ad hoc feel, like a haphazard construc-
tion site. A stone’s throw away sat Starhopper on its three fat legs. A white
sign was posted on the chain-link fence: NOTICE: SEA TURTLE NESTING
SEASON IN PROGRE SS. There was something dizzyingly improbable about
this futuristic hardware plopped down amid the seagrass, beside the indif-
ferent storks wading carefully through the mudflats. “It’s not made out of
some super-high-tech carbon composite,” Gene was enthusing about Mk1’s
hull of stainless steel—a material vastly cheaper than carbon, with a higher
melting point. “It’s not some super-secretive thing. It’s like—you can buy this
crap at the hardware store.”Left: To observe SpaceX’s progress, Boca Chicans need only step outside. Right: After Mk1’s bulkhead shot into the sky during a pressure test in November, SpaceX began dismantling it, while speeding up production
of its next prototype. Opposite: Rob and Sarah Avery recently became Texas residents so they could relocate here permanently. When the offer letter from SpaceX arrived, “we were floored,” Rob said.