Five years ago, Adalberto Roca drove down the barren stretch of Texas highway from downtown Brownsville to Boca Chica Beach to start his first day of work at SpaceX building Starship rockets bound for orbit—and, one day, Mars.
Once a shrimp boat builder launching vessels into the Gulf, he is now assembling ships for a very different frontier.
“I’ve always been in construction, but never thought I’d be building rockets,” Adalberto, 54, told me this past fall.
Born in Brownsville, Adalberto moved across the border at a young age to his mother’s ranch in Matamoros, Mexico, where he spent his carefree years. Separated by a thin stretch of the Rio Grande, Brownsville and Matamoros spill into each other as much as any international divide will allow.
When Adalberto moved back to Brownsville for grade school, he did what all kids in the city are taught to do from an early age: work hard and build. In his free time, he made his way to the shipyards to help his father build commercial shrimp boats for the growing family business. “Helping Dad out was great. What kid doesn’t want to be outside working with his dad?” On weekends, long before SpaceX transformed the area, he would grab his friends and drive down to the remote Boca Chica Beach for an afternoon hang.
Adalberto turned his childhood pastime into a long career building boats for Brownsville’s commercial shrimping industry. When the market for domestic shrimp took a dive over a decade ago, he pivoted to other construction jobs in the region—jumping from oil rig jobs to roadwork to fiber optic cables—until he landed a job at SpaceX building rocket boosters as a Fabrication Lead.
“I remember seeing the shuttle when it first launched,” Adalberto said. “We all want to be astronauts when we are kids, just like we want to be policemen and firemen. I believe in the plan for Mars. As Elon says, we’ve got to start this now—why wait until later?”
Beyond the horizon’s edge: Humans have always been explorers, drawn to unknown frontiers by the hope for a better future and an insatiable curiosity to know what lies around the river bend. Getting our start as a nomadic species migrating out of Africa to the rest of the world, exploration is hardcoded in our collective DNA. In the US, as a collection of risk-taking immigrants, it is embedded in our American culture.
But the American West was settled long ago. Fortunes made and lost during the gold rush, Alaskan backwaters traversed, air travel mastered, the world mapped, and NASA astronaut bootprints stamped on the surface of the Moon. Great risks, great discoveries, and great feats of geographic exploration are now tales of a past generation, imagined in grainy visuals fading with the passage of time.
It’s not that the Wild Wild West disappeared; it just miniaturized. Ones and zeros, bits, transistors, enterprise software, and artificial intelligence became the big unknown.
In the eyes of most, the oft-romanticized real American adventures are a thing of the past.
But, tucked away in the southernmost corner of Texas, where the US, Mexico, and Gulf waters shake hands, lies the city of Brownsville. And in this small community—an unknown commodity to the broader population—the light of the frontier burns stronger than ever.
The Frontier Starts in Brownsville
No one stumbles upon Brownsville. The city sits at the very southern end of the Texas horseshoe coast. It’s a multi-flight trip from outside the state or a multi-hour drive from any major city in Texas.
When you finally arrive, there is no oasis to reward you. The city is torturously hot, and the streets are lined with fast-food restaurants. The skyline is shrouded by a grayed-out malaise, worsened by a severe lack of investment in green spaces. Brownsville is a city that needs to be discovered even after being found, more of a Wakanda than Shangri-La.
But this city of just 200,000 residents harbors the gateway to three distinct American frontiers: Mars for SpaceX, the Gulf for commercial shrimpers, and the US for immigrants.
With the Gulf at its east, Brownsville is home to one of the largest commercial shrimp ports in the US. With Mexico on its hip, Brownsville has a 94% Hispanic population—the third highest in the nation. As one of the southernmost cities in the US, the region is ideally positioned for orbital launch trajectories, providing a nice home for SpaceX’s new Starship rocket.
Fishermen making a living at sea, immigrants starting anew in America, and space dreamers reaching for Mars all intermingle amid the oppressive heat, taking big risks to explore and build in unknown territories.
The Seven Stops on the Highway to Mars
After a long day of work at SpaceX’s Starbase rocket manufacturing facility, Adalberto goes home to his acre of land in Rio Hondo, a quiet neighborhood just outside of Brownsville perfect for raising his daughter. “You can come home from work, chill out, go outside, drink an Irish coffee, and just count the stars,” he said.
But when the sun comes up again, it’s back to work. He gets back in his car and drives the 30 minutes through Brownsville city center to Highway 4, the road that will take him to SpaceX’s Starbase facility to start a long day’s work.
Highway 4 to Mars: Highway 4 from downtown Brownsville to Starbase is a two-lane road just 16 miles long. There are no outlets, no shops, no restaurants, and no gas stations. The drive takes you through undeveloped, sandy, and jungled Texas terrain—snaking alongside the Mexican border—and spits you out at Starship’s launch pad, which sits just a few hundred yards from the Gulf waters.
On this road to Starbase, there are just seven stops along the way. Each stop plays a unique role in making Brownsville America’s last frontier.
On a windy week this past fall, I made the six-hour drive down from Austin to Brownsville to learn more about the city that feels like a world of its own. It’s a drive through endless plains dotted with ranches, wind turbines, and oil fields, a trip I’ve made half a dozen times before. When I arrived, I beelined to Highway 4, where a sign reading “Starbase” and an arrow pointing ahead signaled the beginning of my 20-minute drive to SpaceX.
I first came to Brownsville in 2022, not as a space journalist but as an ex-banker searching for work as a commercial shrimp fisherman. My stepfather and brother had both worked on salmon fishing boats up in Alaska during their early twenties. They told tales of their adventures over countless childhood dinners, etching deep in my mind. After six years of working in finance out of college, I was eager to see the frontier for myself.
That summer, starting in Brownsville, I walked docks along the Gulf until I landed a job as a deckhand on a local shrimp boat. Trawling the ocean floor. Pulling up the nets. Culling bycatch. Processing shrimp. Rinse and repeat from sun up to sun down, seven days a week. After a season of aching muscles, bleeding hands, and thousands of pounds of Gulf shrimp caught, I finally understood the stories of working the water.
When that summer ended, I traded my fishing boots for pen and paper, returning to Brownsville regularly to report for Payload on the rapid development of SpaceX’s Starbase facility.
For a road that leads to nowhere but SpaceX and a sparsely populated beach, congestion was unexpectedly heavy. Ahead of me were vehicles of every variety: trucks, sedans (often a Tesla), buses, 18-wheelers, and massive propellant tankers. Commercial vehicles respected the speed limit, while passenger cars jockeyed for a chance to pass.
A lot has changed since SpaceX arrived in Brownsville in 2014.
SpaceX arrives: Jessica Tetreau, a Brownsville native turned city commissioner, came into leadership in 2011 as the city was recovering from the recession. To boost the job market, officials rolled out the red carpet to any business looking for a new home.
“We made a lot of pitches to companies, but it never worked out,” Tetreau told me one afternoon at Starbase. “And then one day, I got to work, and there was a company waiting for us with the idea of launching satellites from Boca Chica Beach. I was so excited, not only because I grew up believing in technology and science, but also because they would bring jobs.”
Ten years later, SpaceX is now the largest employer in the city, with over 3,400 employees.
SpaceX and Brownsville made for an unexpected fit. SpaceX is new and sleek with young engineers. Brownsville is old and gritty, filled with shrimpers, manufacturing laborers, and off-shore oil rig folks. Spend a week in Brownsville, and I guarantee you won’t find anyone walking around in a suit or high heels.
But the city’s tradition of hard work, problem-solving, and out-of-the-box thinking aligned well with SpaceX’s approach to innovation. The company was founded on doing things differently and avoiding the same traps that stagnated rocket innovation during the post-Apollo era.
Starship: SpaceX is developing the mega Starship rocket at Starbase. Starship is designed to be fully reusable—in contrast to other rocket companies that expend their entire rocket during launch. SpaceX believes full reusability will bring the cost of launch down below $10M (a 90%+ cost per kg decline) and dramatically increase flight cadence into something more akin to planes.
In addition to reusability, Starship is the most powerful rocket ever built. Towering over 40 stories high, Starship is designed to carry a staggering 100 metric tons+ to orbit—five times the capacity of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 workhorse rocket.
The combination of a mega rocket and reusability could enable SpaceX’s ultimate goal of establishing a base on Mars. I know what you’re thinking: setting up a city on Mars comes across as unserious—an inside joke that fools the world; unrealistic dreams of a billionaire; an internet meme just because.
But the goal is not just a serious one, it’s the company’s entire identity. Elon Musk founded SpaceX with the singular goal of setting up a sustainable colony on Mars and making humanity a multi-planetary civilization. For a goal as crazy as Mars, geographic isolation, free from all outside distractions and mainstream thinking, feels necessary.
Stop 1: On the Border
After passing the Starbase this way sign, the first stop I encountered on Highway 4 was a US Border Patrol checkpoint. Officers in green uniforms inspected cars heading back up the highway to downtown Brownsville.
It was an unusual spot for border checks, I thought, given that the road dead-ends at the beach. The highway, however, is just 500 feet along the Rio Grande, the US and Mexican border, resulting in heightened security.
Over the past century, close proximity to the border has made Brownsville a key entry point for immigrants seeking work and new life. The steady inflow has formed a city home to hardworking first- and second-generation immigrants.
Matamoros: Just across the border is the Mexican city of Matamoros. Brownsville and Matamoros are sister cities, blending centuries of culture, history, economies, and family ties. Built so close together, one wrong turn in your car and you can end up in a different country.
It took me just three minutes to drive from downtown Brownsville to Matamoros. The Mexican city is quaint, with restaurants, art, street fairs, and large parks. I stopped for lunch at a well-known spot called Mi Pueblito, filling up on tacos. But it wasn’t until I got back into my car to return to Texas—only to be met with three-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic—that I realized it’s far easier leaving the US in a car than coming back. In Matamoros, it’s mostly tourists who drive across; daily and weekly commuters walk, breezing through security and walking right over the bridge.
“We used to say that we are on the border, by the sea, but when SpaceX came to town, we changed it to on the border, by the sea, and beyond,” Adalberto’s sister Prisci Tipton told me at Dirty Al’s Seafood Market & Cajun Kitchen in Brownsville. The restaurant had the Giants vs. Cowboys football game playing on the dozens of mounted TVs. It was a festive environment with a Mariachi band playing in the back, competing for attention with Al Michaels’ call of the game and table conversations.
Prisci, the daughter of a shrimp boat builder, ordered the shrimp cocktail. I got the blackened snapper.
Like her brother, Prisci spent her childhood and early career working in the shipyards for her father’s boat-building business, Roca Construction. By the age of 8, she was helping with the paperwork. By 18, she was named company president.
“All of us siblings worked under our father. We were so proud,” Prisci said. “When we grew up and heard about work-life balance, we didn’t know what it was. The company would write ‘we work 365 days a year’ on its business cards. Adalberto and Prisci grew up in a family of immigrants, eager to build a big life in a new country.
A dad, a boat builder, a local legend: Adalberto and Prisci’s father was Ricardo Roca. Hailing from Ecuador, Ricardo first arrived in Brownsville in 1958 at the age of 30, working as a lowly deckhand aboard a trawler named Orion. What happened next was covered by every major news outlet, briefed at the highest levels of government, and immortalized in local legend.
At 5 am on March 27, 1958, just off the coast of Brownsville, the Orion was stopped by two Coast Guard boats. Refusing to heed orders, the vessels rammed the Orion on her port side. When the officers mounted the boat, they found 35 battle-dressed Cuban rebels with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of weapons to support the Cuban revolution.
The boat, the arsenal, and the revolutionaries were seized. The boat’s crew was also arrested—including Ricardo.
“The captain and three crewmen, also arrested, were believed to be Ecuadorean (sic) nationals,” The New York Times wrote the next day. Protesting the apprehension, the jailed rebels and crewmen commenced a multi-week hunger strike, further stoking national attention.
Viewed as an unaffiliated worker naive of the overall operation, officials dropped charges against Ricardo and the other two deckhands a month and a half after the ordeal started. Authorities released Ricardo into Brownsville, where he quickly fell in love with the city and decided to stay. He secured work as a welder at the Marine Mart Shipyard and met Adalberto and Prisci’s mother in Matamoros.
It was the late 1950s, and Brownsville was filled with pioneering individuals building on the fringe of society. The shrimping industry, in particular, sat at the forefront of the city’s personality.
Over the years, Ricardo’s reputation as a master shipbuilder grew, and he eventually decided to open his business, Roca Construction. The business took off. By 1990, Ricardo was averaging 10-15 shrimp boat launches annually, and Brownsville named him Businessman of the Year.
Captains from shrimping towns all across the Gulf would come to get their boats serviced by Ricardo. “It was boom time,” Prisci said.
Stop 2: Brownsville Shrimpers
A few minutes past border patrol, I reached the first side road on Highway 4—a signless turnoff that led to the Port of Brownsville. The path took me all the way down to the banks of the Brownsville ship channel, where large liquified natural gas tankers, cargo ships, and shrimping boats pass by every day.
On the other side of the channel is the Brownsville Shrimp Basin, home to the city’s 150 commercial trawlers. It was there that I met Amauri Bandera. Amauri, 54, was a Cuban temporary worker serving as a deckhand and vessel painter for a local boat owner. His clothes were wet and oil-stained from a long day of work; his face calloused from a long life of hard jobs.
Amauri spoke only Spanish. At the Brownsville Shrimp Basin, Spanish is the language of the docks. Google Translate worked well enough for us.
Homesick and lonely, with his wife and daughter thousands of miles away in Cuba, he was eager to welcome my companionship for the afternoon. We traded pictures of shrimp we had caught and spoke of his time in the city. I told him I got married a few months back. He asked if my wife was pregnant. I said no. Unbeknownst to us at the time, she was.
Amauri showed me the boat he was working on. It was a rusted-out vessel, paint-chipped, reeking of gasoline and salt water. Streaks of rust made their way down its yellow sides. Almost every ship in the basin looked as beaten down as this one—a consequence of a once lucrative industry, now in decline.
Amauri lived in a small room connected to a workshop 50 feet from the water. A bed propped up by cinder blocks, a torn-up couch, carpet stained from fishing boots, a tiny window, paint-chipped walls, and $10 Walmart sheets. “I’m here because I still don’t have money for rent,” he said. “Everything is in Cuba, all my family. I go to work for my family, who are going through a lot back home.” The little money he makes in Brownsville, he sends back to Cuba.
Jackpots get smaller: Shrimping used to be an industry where huge fortunes could be made. But no longer. Shrimpers now barely make enough to squeak out a living. Yet, year after year, they return to the sea, drawn by a deep connection to a profession that goes back generations.
Most Brownsville boats are led by captains hailing from storied Hispanic shrimping families whose secrets of the water have been passed down over time. The freedom and independence of exploring unchartered shrimping sites have become a way of life. It is ingrained in their identity, despite the size of the jackpot decreasing each year,
Existing largely outside the bounds of society, the profession requires a brave and frontiering spirit. There are no safety nets aboard a trawler. You are alone to solve the problem. And if danger strikes while on the Gulf, you may as well be on a different planet.
A shrimp deluge: In addition to serving as a home to commercial shrimp boats, the Brownsville Shrimp Basin has a local fishing supplies store, a seafood market, and a modest one-room brick office building with an “I love Texas Gulf Shrimp” poster hanging from its front window.
Inside the office, Maria Barrera-Jaross wore a blue blouse, white shoes, stylish leopard sunglasses, and dark red lipstick—a far cry from the rugged fisherman who worked on the boats behind her office. Across the room, I saw shrimp paraphernalia of every variety: old boat paintings, maps, magnets, calendars, and “Nice Catch! Get Hooked on Texas Gulf Shrimp” bags.
“Back in the late 80s, shrimping was booming,” Maria said. “Shrimpers were the wealthy people. They were the ones making money. A lot of money.” Americans couldn’t get enough of their prawns, and captains were turning all that frozen hard shrimp into cold hard cash.
The music stopped when imports began to flood the market. Countries like India, Ecuador, Indonesia, and Vietnam began heavily subsidizing shrimp farming, dumping the product on US consumers. Prices collapsed.
“In the 1990s, we had 50% of the US market. Today, we have 4% in the market because the price of shrimp has really gone down. It’s had a devastating effect on the local shrimping industry,” Maria said. In the 1980s, the number of shrimp boats in Brownsville reached upwards of 500; today, that number has shrunk to 150.
Prisci Tipton remembers the US shrimp market collapse well.
The year was 2002, and demand for Roca Construction-built boats hit a wall “almost overnight.” That year, the family business went from launching 10+ ships a year to zero.
SpaceX was born: 2002 was also the year Elon Musk founded SpaceX. The oldest form of long-range transportation giving way to the newest.
“We hope SpaceX makes a good economic impact,” Prisci said. “We’re a very hard working community not afraid to roll up our sleeves. People need a job today, and they can go there. But we also hope they take into consideration the environmental piece. There’s a good balance. Other than that, we support SpaceX.”
Prisci’s SpaceX-er brother Adalberto sees a lot of similarities between building boats and building rockets. “Rocket building and boat building are both very demanding work,” Adalberto said. “We always have to remember that these vehicles will carry humans. It’s all about achieving the goals, getting it done, and figuring it out. There are no problems. Only solutions.”
The two industries also similarly push the boundaries of human exploration. The ocean is the last unexplored frontier on Earth, while Mars is the newest frontier up above. “The ocean is another space,” he said. “It’s unexplored. What we know about the ocean is like what we know about the universe.”
Come back next Friday for Part Two of our tour down the Highway to Mars.