SpaceX has been an anchor of the Los Angeles space community for 20 years. The city has long been one of the country’s top aerospace hubs. Offering high-paying jobs, nightlife, and sunny days, LA is an easy sell to top graduates from aerospace engineering universities nationwide. It is an excellent place to play hard in your twenties, find a spouse in your thirties, and retire early in Malibu with an oceanfront view.
In comparison, Brownsville is a dreary place for SpaceX to decide to build company headquarters.
The city is hot, muggy, and gray. The closest thing to a nightclub is the Margaritaville hotel bar on South Padre Island, a 40-minute drive from downtown. The high-end eatery is the local Chili’s. Its most notable pop culture moment came in 1986, with Bob Dylan’s release of his 11-minute love ballad, Brownsville Girl. The song includes just about every Texas motif one could imagine: gunslinging outlaws, old westerns, a backcountry love story, and long iconic car rides passing from Amarillo to the Alamo.
Brownsville is a place where people work on their feet, blow off steam by cracking open a beer in their backyard, and don’t bother scraping the dirt from under their fingernails at the end of the day. It’s a city where paramount describes the importance of family, not a Hollywood film studio.
For SpaceX, Brownsville was the perfect place to attract the kind of engineer who cares more about building ships for Mars than keeping up with the Joneses.
Apollo Take Over
Starship isn’t the first ambitious space program to set up shop on a secluded beach.
In the 1950s, Merritt Island, FL, was a farming peninsula where oranges and grapefruit outnumbered its 20,000 people.
Then JFK delivered his lunar rallying cry in 1962, changing the Florida coast forever.
“There was a technology transition from citrus to launching rockets,” NASA’s chief historian Brian Odom told me in his thick southern drawl. “People were moving from all over the country to this area to support the effort.”
Engineers, technicians, construction workers, cooks, and families picked up their lives and moved to a sparsely inhabited area inspired by the dream of the Apollo program. The work and social lives of the newly settled community revolved around NASA and the shared goal of reaching the lunar frontier.
“They were working for something bigger than themselves. A lot of them took the risk and felt it was really worth it because it was a one-of-a-kind opportunity,” said Odom.
Seven years after setting up shop, NASA launched the Apollo 11 mission out of Merritt Island, landing humans on the Moon for the first time.
A paycheck will motivate people to show up to work, often offering no more, no less. Only a shared goal that is wholeheartedly believed in can unlock the level of focus, problem-solving, and efficiency needed for true innovation breakthroughs.
Sixty years later and a thousand miles away on a similarly remote sandbar, SpaceX has found success in the Apollo playbook. This time in Texas. This time with the goal of Mars.
Stop 6: Dredging for Liquid Gold
I had already passed a Border Patrol checkpoint, the Port of Brownsville, Massey’s Gun Range, an Elon Musk art wall, and the last battle of the Civil War on the road from Brownsville to Starbase. The next stop I encountered was a dredging project marked by a sign that read Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Company.
The road led to the Brownsville Ship Channel but was closed off by a gate with ominous signs of “No Trespassing,” “Authorized Personnel Only,” and “No Hunting Allowed.” A man in a white hat, black pants, and a neon safety vest noticed me and asked me to stop taking pictures. The dredging project was shrouded in more secrecy and security than SpaceX.
Down the road and across the channel, a sprawling liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facility was under construction. The project will be able to support up to 27M metric tons of LNG per year, boosting total US exports of the fuel by 30%. Officials say the project will increase the city’s GDP by $6B and the country’s by $35B. Coincidently, LNG is a methane-based gas, the same propellant SpaceX used for Starship.
The big issue with the facility’s build-out plan is that the Brownsville Ship Channel is too shallow for large tankers. But, with LNG being so lucrative, the government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to deepen the channel by removing sediment through the painstaking process known as dredging. The dredging project is reshaping the very waterway where shrimpers cast their nets.
Fishing the channel: Two days before, I met Gary Williams, a lifelong shrimper who makes his living in the channel. Gary runs the Gordon’s Bait Shop, a family-run convenience store that sells bait shrimp to recreational fishermen. We met in his spacious office at the back of the store. He was a large but quiet man with glasses, a short-sleeved button-down, and white hair unfurling from his chin, chest, and arms.
Gary’s family settled in Brownsville nearly a century ago. His grandfather, AB “Red” Walker Sr., a heavyweight boxer from Groesbeck, Texas, would travel down to Brownsville to battle fighters from Mexico in the 1930s. His grandmother, Alita Adams, moved to the area from Sayre, Oklahoma, during the Great Depression in search of opportunity. “On one of my grandfather’s boxing trips, he met my grandmother here, and they fell in love,” Gary said.
Halfway through Gary’s story, his cousin, Bill Walker—who captains one of the shop’s two shrimp boats—barged into the office. He wore shorts, white boots, and a cutoff red tank top draped over his barrelling torso. “Boat’s broken,” he said, skipping the pleasantries. “The oil leak fully manifested itself. The mechanic is coming out later today to fix it.”
Bill’s personality was the opposite of Gary’s. He was highly opinionated, deeply conspiratorial, and will talk your ear off for 15 minutes about the coming armageddon unless you rudely cut him off.
Bill belonged to a church that emphasized the rapture and the second coming of Christ. SpaceX’s move to Brownsville and Elon Musk’s goal of settling Mars fit neatly into his ministry’s teaching. “They know what time it is,” Bill told me. “They’re looking to get off the Earth.”
Instead of God instructing Noah to build a 400-foot ship to save life on Earth, it’s the wealthiest man in the world building a 400-foot rocketship to move life off of it.
This wasn’t the first time I came across the wild theory that SpaceX’s work in Brownsville was somehow connected to the apocalypse. The idea ranked up there with complaints about high property taxes and environmental concerns with Starbase.
Down here, everything is questioned. Shrimpers, immigrants, cowboys, and rocket builders all have this skeptical personality. It seems to be a necessary outlook for work on the frontier.
After telling Bill I used to work on shrimp boats, he offered to take me on his trawler to tell me more about the end of times.
Trawling the Brownsville Ship Channel
I woke up at 4am and drove 15 minutes to a small dock in Port Isabel. Bill and his deckhand, Nate Smith, 51, arrived 20 minutes after me. Barely acknowledging each other’s presence, the three of us boarded the vessel, and minutes later we were off.
Gasoline wafted through the air as the motor roared, and seawater splashed on my face. In front of us: Gulf waters, rich with shrimp.
After a short drive to the Brownsville Ship Channel, we dropped our first net as the sun began to rise. Large dredging vessels were already hard at work at the edge of the water, scooping up sediments from the floor.
In the distance, I could see Starship’s launch tower.
“Everything over there is supposed to be protected land,” Nate, a fifth-generation shrimper, told me as we gazed out at the rocket facility. “Since Elon has so much money, he was able to throw some money at our politicians down here to use it.”
Nate and Bill have caught a number of the Starship launches while working on the boat. They are hard to miss. A thunderous rumble echoes across the city when SpaceX ignites Starship’s 33 Raptor engines. The sound from Starship’s maiden launch frightened one of the deckhands so badly he dove for cover behind the cockpit, thinking that the city was under attack.
Nate looks out at the HOS Ridgewind ship, which had returned from the Gulf with a salvaged piece of a Starship rocket, scooped up off the ocean floor.
Ships in the night: Trawlers and rockets are like two ships passing in the night: They share similar orbits, but they prefer not to intersect.
“HUGE congratulations to the entire team for this incredible day: clean count (glad the shrimpers could get out in the nick of time!),” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell wrote on X after the company’s third Starship flight last March. Shrimpers have work to do, and sometimes, the Notice to Mariners memos that direct boats to get out of the area for safety during launches go accidentally unread.
It’s a running joke in the space community that wayward boats are rocket’s arch nemesis. SpaceX hopes shrimpers don’t ruin launch day, and fishermen hope shrimp don’t get startled by vibrations from the largest rocket ever launched.
“SpaceX has some environmental issues, but I mean, as long as we can drag the canal. That’s where our money’s at,” Nate said.
A Beloved Beach
“Nothing against Elon Musk, I could care less. I just don’t think it’s the right thing for this area,” said Johnny Barrera, 71, a waiter at the White Sands Bar and Grill in Port Isabel. “We’ve got a lot of hardworking people here who mind their own business, but then people come down here and screw it up.”
A Native American from the Mescalero tribe, Johnny can trace his family’s roots in the region back over 200 years—long before Charles Stillman established the city of Brownsville. Johnny grew up on a ranch with nine houses, three shrimp boats, and 350 cattle. He helped raise the cows, mostly Texas Longhorn, to sell down the road at the market. “It was a different life,” he said.
A lot has changed in Brownsville over the past 50 years. There are fewer ranching and shrimping jobs. But as the rest of the country transitioned to work-from-home, Brownsville’s tradition of working outdoors has remained steadfast. There aren’t too many office jobs in this city.
Perhaps because of this emphasis on outdoor work, the city has a deep—almost spiritual—connection to the land, water, and animals. Some in the community feel SpaceX’s presence on Boca Chica Beach threatens its balance.
“We all breathe the same air. If you keep trashing Earth up, she’s going to blow up on us,” Johnny said. “Quite simply, without the clean ocean, you wouldn’t have fish. Without grass for the cattle, you wouldn’t have nothing to eat.”
Over the past few years, SpaceX has faced intense regulatory scrutiny over environmental concerns at Starbase, including investigations into the disruption of bird migration patterns and water discharged by its flame deflector during launch. The inquiries have led to meaningful delays in the Starship program.
Musk calls these types of regulations an existential threat to humanity’s chances of reaching Mars. SpaceX’s culture of risk-taking, rapid iteration, and learning fast is often incompatible with a slow-moving government. His frustrations with government oversight drove his support of Trump’s presidential campaign.
Stop 7: Ad Astra, Starbase, and Starship
Past the dredging road, the next stop on the highway to Mars is Ad Astra school, marking the beginning of Starbase. Ad Astra, founded by Elon Musk, operates in multiple locations and embraces a hands-on, learning-by-doing philosophy with a strong emphasis on STEM education. The school says its model is “to foster curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking in the next generation of problem solvers and builders.”
Musk has long had an issue with the American school system. His vendetta boiled over last year when California passed a new law banning school districts from notifying parents if a child changes their identifying gender, prompting him to move SpaceX’s headquarters out of the Golden State to Texas.
Starbase: A few miles past Ad Astra, I reached the Starbase rocket facility, where SpaceX builds its Starships out of its new Starfactory. (Yes, I agree—the star nomenclature is getting a little out of hand.)
In addition to a giant rocket factory, the company town has hundreds of dwellings, a doctor’s office, restaurants, and entertainment joints. Employees lucky enough to get off SpaceX’s housing waitlist can live on-site and avoid the 20-minute drive up and down Highway 4. The company has successfully petitioned the county to hold elections to recognize Starbase as its own city.
The town is populated largely by those who left their home city to build Mars rockets on a sandbar. In this seclusion, at the end of a long road in an obscure city in southernmost Texas, their lives revolve around SpaceX and the dream of Mars. The opportunity to build on the frontier far outweighed a more leisurely life back home.
I felt a buzz in my pocket. I took out my phone and saw a text message from Verizon: “Welcome to Mexico,” it said. I made a mental note to call back later to get my $10 back.
Starbase investment: SpaceX launched its first subscale Starship prototype in 2019. After initial successes, the company began investing heavily in building out Starbase. The facility includes high bays for rocket stacking, rocket factories, and two launch pads. It is all built just feet from Highway 4, out in the open for all to see.
The company recently opened its 1M square foot Starfactory, with a stretch goal of eventually pumping out 1,000 second-stage Starships per year. To date, the company has invested $7.5B in Starbase and Starship, spending $4M per day to maintain the program. At face value, it’s a huge investment. But when you compare that to other rocket programs of similar scale, the relative figures are low. For example, NASA has sunk $26B into developing its 95T-to-LEO SLS, a fully expendable rocket that costs $2B (not a typo) per launch. SpaceX aims to fly its fully reusable Starship for less than $10M per launch.
The company has launched Starship on eight flights. SpaceX made history on its fifth flight by catching the returning first-stage booster back at the rocket’s launch tower. No landing legs, just metal arms grabbing a metal rocket. A rocket hug that brought Starship halfway to its goal of full reusability.
Later this year, SpaceX aims to catch its second stage Starship. The company said it plans to launch hundreds of times over the next four years. After that, it’s all eyes on landing humans on Mars.
Starship launch pad: When I arrived at SpaceX’s launch pad, I got out of the car and walked off the road onto the sand and through thick beach shrubbery to get a 360-degree view of the largest rocket ever built. There are no fences, just periodically placed stick markers asking people not to cross a certain point. For one of the most important national security assets, there is surprisingly little security at the launch pad.
Starship’s launch pad sits just a stone’s throw from Boca Chica Beach, creating a pleasant view of technology meeting nature. I camped out there for a few hours until the cotton candy pinks and blues of after sunset told me it was time to go.
The Gulf
The last leg of my journey down Highway 4 was a 100-meter walk from Starship to Boca Chica Beach, where the Gulf stretched out before me. A man and his black dog sat on the beach, peacefully looking out at the water. Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Up Around The Bend played on his speakers.
Hitch a ride to the end of the highway
Where the neons turn to wood
Come on the risin’ wind
We’re goin’ up around the bend
The man introduced himself as Alfonso Juarez, a machine shop supervisor at SpaceX and a first-generation immigrant who grew up in the region. After work, he comes out to the beach to find quiet time to relax by the water. Alfonso used to work at General Electric Aviation but chose to come work at SpaceX because of its Mars mission.
“Space is the big unknown; who doesn’t want to go up there and find out?” said Alfonso. We both looked out at the Gulf in front of us, with Starship behind, Mexico to our right, and millions of miles of space ready to be explored above us.