98 MARCH 2020conservatively estimated that fifteen thousand people would come watch
each launch. “Nobody really knows very much about Brownsville,” Mar-
tinez told me. “But if you talk about SpaceX and Brownsville, now you’ve
got a marketing tool. You want to go watch the launch? Well, you gotta
go to Brownsville.”
Riding high on his promise of economic expansion, Musk didn’t encounter
much resistance. The city, county, state, and University of Texas system put
together an incentive package worth nearly $40 million. “Elon says—‘Man,
you guys need a new airport.’ Even though he doesn’t fly commercial,” Mar-
tinez recalled. “And we’re building a new airport.”
Finally, the deal was done. In 2014, Musk and then-governor Rick Perry
posed together, their shovels stuck in a mound of sandy soil, at the ground-
breaking. The company renamed streets—Joanna Street was now Rocket Road.
THINGS GOT OFF TRACK ALMOST IMMEDIATELY. CREWS DRILLED IN SEARCH
of bedrock on which to build a launchpad but didn’t find any. Instead, they
learned that when you dig a hole on the mudflats, murky water soon seeps in.
If SpaceX needed solid ground in Boca Chica, it would have to create it. So the
company trucked in 310,000 cubic yards of earth, then waited three years for
the soil to settle. Musk had agreed to protect fifty acres of wetlands via land
transfer to the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. When the approval didn’t move
forward at the pace SpaceX expected, the company convinced the feds to al-
low the land to go to the state of Texas instead. Musk had claimed the proj-
ect would be an operational spaceport by 2016, but that year came and went,
with not much to show other than an expensive pile of dirt.
For years, the main sign to Boca Chicans of SpaceX’s presence was the
company’s steady accumulation of houses and vacant lots—as of press time,
it owns more than 150 properties in the area—as well as the procession of re-
porters who began knocking on their doors, seeking their take on living next to
a spaceport, albeit one that didn’t yet exist. In the press, residents opposed to
their new neighbor voiced their distaste. Terry and Bonnie Heaton appeared
most often, perhaps because they were the only year-round residents. With
a clear-spoken folksiness, the couple explained to one outlet after another—
The Brownsville Herald, the Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, the Los
Angeles Times, the New York Post, NPR—how SpaceX was intruding on the gold-
en years of retirement they’d looked forward to for so long.
Boca Chica homeowners were invited to meet with SpaceX in 2015. Musk
wasn’t there, but his representatives made several reassurances: They’d pro-
vide ample advance warning for all launches; they wouldn’t close the beach
on summer weekends. They wanted, the company told the Boca Chicans, to
be a good neighbor.
Meanwhile, SpaceX was struggling with more than just dirt. A Falcon 9 rock-
et disintegrated on a flight to the ISS in 2015, and another exploded the fol-
lowing year. Musk was also putting out fires of his own making: In 2018, NASA
rebuked him for getting stoned with Joe Rogan. This came after his tweets
drew the ire of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which fined him
$20 million and forced him off the board of his own electric-car company, Tes-
la. Then, in the midst of the drama, Musk made headlines when he called a
heroic cave diver in Thailand a “pedo guy.”
But SpaceX worked hard toward improvement, and it paid off. The compa-
ny was launching more mostly reusable rockets, sending more successful mis-
sions to the ISS. Its Falcon spacecraft were proving reliable enough to earn the
company billions of dollars in government contracts. And then Musk decided
he needed a new space vehicle—one theoretically capable of interplanetary
travel—to set in motion the next ambitious phase. At first, SpaceX referred to
this next-generation spacecraft as the BFR—the Big Fucking Rocket; eventu-
ally, it was rechristened Starship.
Last May, the company quietly filed paperwork with the FAA indicating that
its plans for Boca Chica had changed. Instead of being a commercial launch
site to send Falcon rockets into orbit, it was now home to SpaceX’s “experi-
mental test program,” through which the company would design and build
Starship. And because Starship was now central to SpaceX’s vision of its fu-
ture, Boca Chica was, too. The government required the company to up its li-
ability insurance from $3 million to $100 million, largely because of the resi-
dents’ proximity, but otherwise approved the pivot.
None of this was immediately apparent to the people of Boca Chica, how-
ever. All they knew was that since the fall of 2018, the area had been buzzing
with activity. White pickups and heavy machinery clogged the boulevard;
SpaceX workers scurried around “like a bunch of ants,” as Bonnie put it. The
company had opted to build its rockets outside—constructing a building would
take too long, Musk said, and floodlights illuminated the rocket-assembly ar-
ea throughout the night. The generators never stopped humming, and em-
ployees banged on the prototypes around the clock. Maria and her husband,
Ray, whose home is closest to the rocket-assembly site, could see the welders’
acetylene torches spark from their bedroom window long after midnight. The
couple put a webcam on their roof, which transmitted a round-the-clock You-
Tube stream of SpaceX activity. Some of Cheryl’s Airbnb renters requested re-
funds; they had expected Boca Chica to be a quiet retreat, and instead it was a
24/7 construction site. (In October, when I rented Cheryl’s place, I could hear
the rumblings of Starship’s construction from her backyard.)
This past summer, as Mary documented the construction of Starhopper,
activity continued to ramp up. In July, the prototype successfully completed
a “hop”—that is, it lifted sixty feet in the air, moved laterally, and landed back
down—then ignited a hundred-acre brush fire. The fire was frightening, but
what frustrated Cheryl the most was how the county seemed to bend over
backward to accommodate the company. A sheriff ’s deputy was stationed