99 MARCH 2020across from the launch site, keeping guard. At SpaceX’s request, Boca Chi-
ca Beach was closed at least half a dozen times between June, when the tem-
perature in Brownsville was already hitting triple digits, and August, which
marked that month’s second-hottest average on record in Texas. Every time
the company was up to something big—which seemed to be every couple
weeks—the only road to Boca Chica was blocked off, essentially trapping the
residents in their homes.
The beach road was shut down again the October day I stood on the dunes
with Mary, Gene, and Andy, so Mk1 could be moved. We watched the Starship
prototype slowly roll down the road and inside the gate, where it came to
a stop. Up close, I could see dents in its silvery hull. They made the rocket
seem friendlier somehow, almost relatable. For a long while, nothing hap-
pened. A small crowd had gathered and was growing restive; due to the road-
block, no one could leave until SpaceX was finished, and it was already an
hour behind schedule.
A red SUV with a HOOKED ON JESUS bumper sticker pulled up to the sher-
iff ’s road barrier. It was Terry, back from his morning fishing expedition. He,
too, was told he could not pass. “This is a load of crap,” he said, brandishing a
printout from the county that said the road should’ve been reopened an hour
and a half ago. He said he was diabetic and needed to go home to get his in-
sulin. “My hand’s already shaking,” he said. His house was right there, just a
mile away. He started to slowly roll forward.
“You can’t,” the deputy said. “You’ll be arrested.” Terry’s face reddened,
but he stopped and waited for the rocket business to finish.
BY MID-FALL, BOCA CHICA VILLAGE BEGAN TO FRACTURE. THE HOMEOWN-
ers who had accepted the buyout offered in September felt judged by the hold-
outs; the holdouts felt betrayed by the sellers. Everyone wanted to know how
much money their neighbors ended up with. Mary was no longer speaking
to Maria, whose coverage of SpaceX’s snafus—like when Starhopper’s nose
cone blew off in a big gust of wind, and when it burst into flames after a static
fire test—she found distasteful. She also claimed that Maria tried to use the
@bocachicagal handle as her own. (Maria disputed the accusation.) Mary
changed her Twitter bio to read, “My name is NOT Maria.”
In October, SpaceX made some concessions to the holdouts, extending the
offer deadline by a few weeks and arranging for more-thorough appraisals.
The initial valuations had been based on drive-by assessments and hadn’t tak-
en into account many of the improvements the homeowners had made. But
the revised appraisals weren’t much better, and the company made it clear
they wouldn’t extend the deadline again. Once it expired, the three-times of-
fer would be off the table.
The Heatons hosted a meeting with a prominent eminent-domain lawyer
in their living room. The good news, the lawyer told the assembled residents,
was that they were sympathetic; any jury was likely to feel for them, and per-
haps rule in their favor. The bad news was that getting to that point meant en-
gaging in an ugly, expensive, protracted legal battle that they may well lose.
Take the money, he advised, unless you’re really in this for the long fight.
It was hard for residents to believe they’d be formidable opponents. Per-
haps the biggest threat to ever face SpaceX’s concern in south Texas was
Donald Trump’s “big beautiful” border wall, with a proposed pathway that
would have bisected the launch site. But members of Congress had success-
fully lobbied to adjust the wall’s path to protect five places: a state park, a
butterfly sanctuary, a wildlife refuge, a historic church, and SpaceX’s Bo-
ca Chica operation. (A lawyer from the Institute for Justice, a legal-aid non-
profit that specializes in eminent-domain cases, is in touch with several Bo-
ca Chica homeowners.)
In mid-November, as Mary and her camera watched from down the road,
Mk1’s bulkhead suddenly shot up into the sky; the rest of the rocket disap-
peared behind a billowing plume of nitrogen. The boom was so loud that
Gene heard it on South Padre Island, eight miles away. The rocket the Boca
Chicans had watched from infancy had just blown up during a pressuriza-
tion test; it wouldn’t be traveling to space after all. SpaceX spun the incident
as not “a serious setback,” since crews were already working on an updated
version, the Mk3.
After the accident, activity at the construction site got even more frantic,
as if the company was trying to make up for lost time. The Pointers covered
their windows with hurricane shutters to block out the noise and light from
the round-the-clock construction, but Ray still wasn’t sleeping well. Eventu-
ally they decided to make a deal with SpaceX, although Maria didn’t feel hap-
py about it. “This tiny little spit of land is so important,” she said. “And that I
got to live, breathe, and experience it? In the last house on Texas [Highway]
4 before you get to the ocean, in a beach villa with gorgeous views, and a fric-
kin’ rocket shipyard on both sides? You can’t pay a person enough for that.”
Even Cheryl, with her keen sense of justice, was considering selling to
SpaceX. Being in a constant state of outrage exhausted her, and she worried
about her Airbnb income drying up.
Then, one morning in November, the Heatons were gone. Word around town
was that they had sold to SpaceX. (After our initial conversation, the Heatons
didn’t reply to further interview requests.) The news stunned Cheryl. Not on-
ly had the Heatons been vehement opponents of SpaceX, “they’re really the
foundation of everything here,” Cheryl said. “Not just mowing everybody’s
lawn, but when things break.... They had everyone’s keys. And they’re like,
‘We’re out of here.’ You can’t blame them, but I wish they would’ve commu-
nicated with us.” Now who would you call if your pipe sprung a leak?
By then, the Averys had decided to rescind their acceptance of the buyout.
The offer had been framed to seem generous, but the appraisal had valued
their sunny three-bedroom, two-bathroom home, (continued on page 115)