“It’s just—it makes people stutter, like I’m doing now,” Andy said. “These
guys come out in the middle of the desert with some plumbers and weld-
ers, and they just start building something. Started welding it together out
here, in the open.”
Mk1 was omnipresent, impossible to avoid unless you never looked south-
ward. Still, Mary, Gene, and Andy—and the rocket’s other local fans—couldn’t
get enough of it. Seven years after SpaceX began buying up their backyard,
there was finally something to see. Since Musk founded SpaceX, in 2002, the
company has relied on government-owned sites, Cape Canaveral in Florida
and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, to launch its rockets. But do-
ing so chafes against Musk’s desire to get things done his own way, at his own
pace. In 2005, SpaceX was temporarily booted from its launchpad at Vanden-
berg at the request of Lockheed Martin, which had raised concerns that the
newcomer’s rocket would explode and damage nearby infrastructure. Musk
was outraged. “Somebody else builds a house next to you and tells you to get
out of your house,” he said at the time. “Like, what the hell?... We’re going to
fight that issue, because it is just fundamentally unfair.”
Building its very own commercial orbital launch site—the world’s first—would
free SpaceX from such hassles. In 2011, the company began scouting. The lo-
cation would need to be close to the equator—better for the launch trajecto-
ry—with a low population and a welcoming local government. SpaceX quick-
ly narrowed down its options to three: Florida, Puerto Rico, and Boca Chica.
Musk, it turned out, had a knack for Texas politics. That year, he invited
Cameron County officials to SpaceX headquarters, in Hawthorne, Califor-
nia. The following year, the company upped its force of Texas lobbyists from
one to five, and Rick Perry, then the governor of Texas, wrote in a letter to the
Federal Aviation Administration, “Please know that I strongly support the ef-
forts of SpaceX and the Brownsville community to bring this business to Tex-
as. I ask you to favorably approve their application.” SpaceX formed a shell
company, Dogleg Park LLC, named for the path its rockets would zag to avoid
passing over populated areas, and later another called the Flats at Mars Cross-
ing LLC, and began scooping up properties at the local sheriff ’s sale. The land
was cheap, in part because it was difficult. Roads washed out all the time; in
the spring, sand swirled in the fifty-mile-per-hour gusts.
Even so, in 2013, at a hearing before the appropriations committee of the
Texas state legislature, Musk laid out his vision for “the commercial version
of Cape Canaveral.” He was there to support two bills intended to lure SpaceX
to the state. One would reduce a private space company’s liability in the case
of a nuisance complaint; the other, written by the congressman from Browns-
ville, would empower county officials to deny access to public beaches when
“spaceflight activities” were on the calendar. In his speech, Musk was by turns
encouraging and coy. “Texas is our leading candidate right now,” he told the
room. But also, “any support Texas can offer will be helpful.” Perry signed
both bills into law.
SpaceX spoke loftily of up to twelve launches each year. Each month, one
of the company’s rockets—a Falcon 9, its workhorse, or a Falcon Heavy, the
most powerful rocket in operation—would shoot into the sky, destined for the
International Space Station, or perhaps beyond. According to Brownsville’s
then mayor, Tony Martinez, Musk told him, “One day, you are going to read
that a man left Brownsville and went to Mars.”
Local officials were flattered by the attention, but they also saw an opportu-
nity. Brownsville is the country’s poorest metropolitan area; in recent years,
if it makes national news at all, the stories pertain to the crisis at the south-
ern border. “Anything positive, people are hungry for it,” Juan Montoya,
a local political blogger and lifelong Brownsville resident, told me. SpaceX
was promising nothing short of an economic transformation, estimating
it would create five hundred local jobs at an average salary of $55,000.
The Brownsville Economic Development Council claimed the economic
impact would be a “game changer for the region” in a PowerPoint presen-
tation used to sell the community on the idea. Sure, the launches might
occasionally shut down Boca Chica Beach, one of the state’s few remain-
ing stretches of undeveloped coastline—a place Montoya described to
me as “the poor people’s beach” for the role it serves for the residents of
Brownsville—but the trade-offs would make the sacrifices worthwhile. The BEDC97 MARCH 2020