Highway 4 is the only road in and out of SpaceX’s Starship manufacturing and launch facility in Starbase, TX. Everyone from SpaceX employees to industrial truckers to Elon Musk uses the road. As a result, the road is riddled with potholes from the overuse.
The city could easily repair the pavement, but that would require throttling road access for weeks. In the eyes of SpaceX, that’s an unacceptable amount of time to halt the Starship program and delay Mars. So, potholes it is.
SpaceX was founded in 2002 with one overarching goal: colonizing Mars. 23 years later, the company’s sense of urgency is stronger than ever.
Mars is the ultimate motivator. Most engineers you will come across are dreamers and sci-fi junkies. The opportunity to work long days on something as humanity-altering as settling Mars is an intoxicating proposition for many of them.
Why Mars? Mars has always been steeped in dramatic human lore. Ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, Chinese, and Roman civilizations saw the large red celestial body in the sky and told stories of fire and blood. The Romans named the planet Mars after their god of war.
What our ancestors didn’t know is that Mars is the least frightening of our seven neighboring planets.
The Red Planet was once dynamic, hosting a strong atmosphere and flowing rivers—a potentially life-supporting environment. What remains today is a cold and largely barren planet. But one with a thin carbon dioxide-based atmosphere, and water ice, both of which can be tapped into for rocket fuel and life support.
It’s a fixer-upper, but it represents humanity’s best destination for multi-planetary expansion.
Mars dollars: Of course, that is if SpaceX can figure out a way to pay for what would be human’s most expensive infrastructure project. Musk estimates that building a self-sustaining colony on Mars would require 1M tons of supply (the weight of 650,000 cars) and cost $1T. It’s a price tag far too large for any government to bear but perhaps doable if the costs are largely shouldered by the man vying to become the world’s first trillionaire.
Sending 1M tons of cargo would require 10,000 Starship flights, necessitating a mass mobilization effort with thousands of highly skilled welders, technicians, fabricators, and machinists. Getting to even a fraction of that flight cadence will require a hard-nosed and obsessive workforce experienced in building large infrastructure projects. To build ships capable of transporting people to Mars, SpaceX needs a place like Brownsville.
“For people that have felt like they had to leave, we now say you don’t have to leave your beautiful area…and you get to help us get to Mars,” Starbase general manager and former NASA associate administrator Kathy Lueders said at a local town hall last year. 80% of SpaceX’s Starbase employees are hired locally. As a result, the city’s 94% Hispanic population is reflected heavily in the employee demographics.
“We do not work short hours. They are not getting a lot of sleep time at home,” Lueders said.
Brownsville is a city of commercial fishermen, construction workers, and families of recent immigrants who know a thing or two about working long hours and building on the frontier. Layer on a dream as large as Mars, and productivity will increase further.
Never underestimate the power of a story. Shoot for Mars, and along the way, you may end up with a $350B business.
Stop 3: Massey’s Gun Range
After leaving the Port of Brownsville turnoff, I drove another few minutes down the road until I reached the only non-SpaceX-related commercial business on Highway 4, Massey’s Gun Range. This is Texas, after all. The state’s love for guns is rooted in the state’s deep history of cowboys, ranching, and off-the-grid living. While homesteading has largely come and gone, the firearm carries on the symbol of independence, self-reliance, and establishment skepticism.
The road to the gun range took me through wild, bumpy, and sandy terrain, requiring a degree of off-roading that my no-frills Toyota Rav 4 was ill-suited for.
The road’s condition was so dreadful that I began to believe the mangled Massey’s Gun Range sign was a trap. An ambush in the Texas wilderness. I was momentarily reassured when I saw a billboard on the side of the road that read Red Assassin Rifle came into view—relieved to be heading in the right direction but then uneasy about the promised assassin.
After a final bumpy bend, I came across a clearing with a tiny house on a hill. The house was a cartoonish-looking structure. Too small, too rickety, and too out of place for the setting. Something that belonged in a Courage the Cowardly Dog Cartoon Network episode, not on the road to Mars.
I entered the shop and was met with guns of every type: handguns, rifles, shotguns, and automatic firearms. A man with a dark jean jacket, rimless glasses, a smiley face-imprinted hat, and thin stubble introduced himself as JJ Velarde from behind the counter.
As I was about to return the greeting, I was halted mid-thought by the sound of gunfire outside. Velarde smiled at my jitters and said, “We have shotgun, rifle, and pistol ranges down there.” Born in Mexico City, Velarde first came to the US for military boarding school before settling in Brownsville and taking a job at the community staple gunshop.
When SpaceX moved to Texas ten years ago, Massey’s Gun Range was an instant hit among the newly arrived engineers who had traded LA bars for the Boca Chica sandbar, where entertainment options were scarce. “We love the SpaceX people. They have a big budget,” Velarde said.
Elon Musk enjoyed Massey’s as well. He supported the business through the ultimate Texas currency: guns. “He kept buying new guns for us to rent out,” Velarde said.
At that time, the business was located on Massey’s Lane, further down Highway 4, closer to Starbase. When SpaceX expanded operations in 2021, the rocket giant approached Massey’s manager, Gilbert Garza, about relocating to its current location so that they could use Massey’s Lane for rocket testing operations.
Gilbert happily agreed. In return, Musk allowed the company to keep the guns, which Velarde estimates was worth over $100,000. “Massey’s gun range is being turned into a rocket test facility. Perfect match,” Musk said at the time.
Massey’s has benefited from the throngs of tourists from all around the world to see Starship up close and personal. The rocket chasers will stop by to get a taste of the Texas gun-toting, rah, rah, rah culture. The store proudly shows off a map with pins representing the hometowns of visitors. “We’ve had people from New Zealand, Japan, and China,” said Velarde.
A couple more gunshots rang out. Time was up for me. I was ready to get out of there.
Stop 4: Elon Musk Art Wall
Driving further east along the road, I came across something entirely unexpected and very peculiar: a large painting of Elon Musk nestled in the brush on the side of the road.
The poorly sketched portrait was an internet meme that a few entrepreneurs decided to turn into a larger-than-life installation, drawing attention to a cryptocurrency project.
The portrait is both funny—a nod to unserious internet culture—and also odd—an almost religious ode to the wealthiest man in the world who has set up his Mars workshop at the very end of the Lone Star state.
The second wealthiest man in Brownsville: Musk was not the first ultra-wealthy transportation entrepreneur to call Brownsville home. The city was founded in 1848 by Charles Stillman, a steamboat pioneer whose business successes made him one of the richest men in the country at the time.
Originally hailing from Connecticut, Stillman settled in Matamoros, Mexico, in 1828 with dreams of the West’s riches. When he arrived, he invested heavily in steam-powered transportation up and down the Rio Grande. At the time, the steamboat was novel tech, but by the 1840s, engine advancements made it possible to efficiently haul industrial goods. Stillman’s business took off.
In 1846, the Mexican-American war broke out in the region. Stillman saw war as opportunity, teaming up with fellow entrepreneurs Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy to shuttle US troops and supplies along the Rio Grande.
When the war ended in 1848, King and Kenedy moved just north of Rio Grande Valley and founded King Ranch, which remains the largest ranch in the US today, while Stillman founded Brownsville, selling plots of land for $1,500 a pop.
Strategically located next to the Rio Grande, the Gulf, and the Mexican border, Brownsville grew into a bustling port and commerce town. Entrepreneurs from Matamoros settled the land in droves, and forty-niners used the city as a pit stop on their way to the California gold rush along the Gila Route.
As the 1840s turned into the 1850s, Stillman expanded his industrial empire into Confederate cotton, leveraging his steam-powered transportation monopoly to buy, sell, and transform the material into textiles.
Stop 5: Last Battle in the Civil War
Brownsville is a town of rocket scientists dreaming of space, immigrants in search of a new start, and commercial fishermen venturing out to sea in the hopes of a fish jackpot. But it also offers something for war history buffs too.
While the American Civil War officially ended on April 9, 1865—when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant—the last battle wasn’t fought until 34 days later in a field next to Highway 4. The site of the fight, known as the Battle of Palmito Ranch, is marked with a historical marker on the side of the road, about a mile and a half away from the Elon Musk mural.
On May 12, despite having received word that the war had ended, Union Col. Theodore H. Barrett led a rogue attack on a Confederate camp at Palmito Ranch. The attack was an act of defiance and a blatant disregard for the lives of his all-black soldier unit.
I pulled my car to the side of the road and walked to the clearing. Days of torrential downpour drowned the field. It was in no condition for battle. I let my imagination transport me back to 1865, picturing hundreds of soldiers exhausted from years of fighting, excited to get home to their families after news of the surrender circulated through camp days before. Barrett’s villainous orders to attack were surely received by his men’s sucked teeth and curse words.
In the end, the Union assault failed miserably, giving the Confederacy the final victory of the Civil War.
“I’ve heard ghost stories about those fields,” Maria from the Texas Shrimp Association told me during our meeting at the Shrimp Basin. “When you’re parked out there late at night, ghosts pass by. They’re just walking through.”
First guns, now ghosts. I got back in my car and continued my journey down Highway 4 to Starbase.
The road followed flat lands. No treelines, just bushes and miles of wide-open Texas expanse. On the horizon, I could see a giant, 400-foot-tall pencil-shaped structure growing out of the thick Texas sand. Starship was finally coming into view.
