Residents of Elon Musk’s “space city” in southeast Texas allegedly complained about the way the SpaceX CEO addressed them as he changed their quiet coastal town into his enormous Starbase plan.
Before SpaceX stepped in, Boca Chica was a little beachside area at the tip of the Rio Grande on the border with Mexico with only a few roadways. The company guarantees to convert the area into a domestic endpoint for space passengers.
Building of the firm’s launch site began in 2014, and rocket testing there commenced in 2019. A few individuals reportedly held out as SpaceX eventually acquired the rest of the thirty-two residences in Boca Chica as development on the project advanced.
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“Creating the city of Starbase, Texas,” Musk tweeted in March 2021. “From thence to Mars. And hence, the stars.” Starbase, he added, “would encompass an “area much larger than Boca Chica.”
“It was a little neighborhood, and Elon Musk came and took it over,” Mary Helen Flores, a teacher from nearby Brownsville, told The Sunday Times. “He renamed it Starbase without asking anyone. He just announced it on Twitter.”
The “last house in Texas” before the boundary, as per Maria Pointer, is now being utilized by SpaceX to keep medical resources, she told the publication.
She still could point out her former residence as it was, situated next to the enormous rocket manufacturing towers of Starbase.
According to The Sunday Times, Musk received applications from states and territories in 2012 that desired to host a new SpaceX facility, with Florida and Puerto Rico appearing as the two front-runners before deciding on Boca Chica.
“He picked Texas because it’s a dirty red state where no one’s going to care what he does in a poor border town,” Flores told the paper.
Flores said she “knew when I saw them putting the launchpad right behind the dune line that it was going to be a disaster for our beach.”
“He has destroyed a pristine paradise in the name of saving animals? Come on,” she said, dismissing the world’s richest man as “just a delusional billionaire.”
“They are destroying an ecosystem that has been there for hundreds of years,” Flores added.
After numerous launches and explosions at the location, she reported having observed numerous flames and “a lot of sea turtle deaths.”
The world’s largest rocket, ever constructed at Starbase, saw 31 of its 33 hefty booster engines powered up earlier this month.
Musk has maintained the location as essential for the existence of humans, despite claims that his plans to construct Starbase had been abandoned.
“Something could go wrong on Earth,” he said at an event on the Starbase launchpad last year, according to The Sunday Times.
“We are life’s guardians,” he said. “The creatures that we love, they can’t build spaceships but we can bring them with us.”
The population of Starbase, which has its headquarters in Hawthorne, California, would “grow by several thousand people over the next year or two,” according to Musk’s estimate in March 2021.
Musk agreed to contribute $20 million to schools in Cameron County, which is where the Boca Chica is situated, to improve the deal for potential residents and local officials.
Furthermore, he pledged to contribute $10 million to Brownsville’s “downtown revitalization,” where approximately 29 per cent of people are living in poverty.
