If the number of names a place is given is a measure of how contested it is, the southern tip of Texas would be particularly distinguished. The algal flats and windswept dunes that stretch out from the end of a potholed asphalt road are called, depending on who is speaking, “Boca Chica Beach,” “Starbase,” or “the place where all life began.” Less formally, it is “the poor man’s beach.” To the United States border agencies, it is the southernmost point of the Rio Grande Valley Sector. Some tracts of land are categorized into a jumble of designations by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and the federal Fish and Wildlife Service. To its struggling shrimpers, its waters are the Brownsville Shrimp Basin. In the language of the private aerospace corporation SpaceX, it is The Gateway to Mars.
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- Amy Cooter has been studying US militias since 2008 when, as a graduate student in Michigan, she attended a public meeting of a group that was thought to be a cover for an underground neo-Nazi movement. As it turned out, that assumption was wrong. It was then that Amy realized this militia movement she encountered[...]
Without a doubt, Boca Chica’s many names are an effect of its layered uses: as a natural resource; as a historic and sacred site to its indigenous inhabitants; as a nexus between Texas’ booming oil and gas fields and the transatlantic energy trade. For the moment, however, no single feature may shape Boca Chica’s fate more than the simple fact that it is very far south. Rockets launching into orbit are advantaged by being as close to the equator as possible, and with the exception of southern Florida, the tip of Texas is as close as you can get within the continental United States. In 2014, on a small strip of private land that bulges into the Boca Chica Refuge, SpaceX, the private aerospace company owned by Elon Musk, broke ground on a new facility to test its rocket systems. Today, it is the launch site of the Superheavy, the most powerful rocket of all time.
When coupled with the Starship shuttle it is designed to transport, the Superheavy looms nearly 400 feet over this flat strip of coastline, an obelisk of stainless steel. According to SpaceX, it will be able to transport 150 metric tons of cargo once fully operational. During its prototype stage, it was known as the Mars Colonial Transporter. The latest test of the reusable Starship’s landing technology was attended by Donald Trump.
“The Origin Point”
Dr. Christopher Basaldú is a member of the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, a group that works across the region to push back against its rapid industrialization, particularly in the Rio Grande Valley, where Boca Chica is located. Basaldú is a tribal member of the Estok G’na, the region’s original inhabitants. On the thirty-minute drive between Boca Chica and his apartment in Brownsville, he points out the new tanks of liquified natural gas in a wetland that is known to hold an old Estok G’na village. At a gas station at the edge of town, he mutters at a couple of Texas National Guard members, deployed to the border as part of “Operation Lone Star,” state governor Greg Abbott’s security program on the southern frontier. He says a brief prayer at the place where the Rio Grande meets the sea. “That’s our origin point, the place where the creator made first woman, the mother of all of our people.” Less than a hundred yards away sits a United States Border Patrol SUV, facing into the dunes. A short walk beyond is the first of the fences that mark the edge of SpaceX’s facilities. To return to Brownsville, visitors to the beach must pass a small Border Patrol checkpoint.
“I have a negative reflex towards anything that calls itself colonization, and it’s in the name: space colonization. It’s in all these names and concepts, like terraforming.”
Dr. Christopher Basaldú
Basaldú never comes across as resigned, but he does air his exhaustion. LNG, pipelines, gentrification, SpaceX: it can seem as though his people’s ancestral homeland is under a ceaseless onslaught. He describes the Superheavy launches as “traumatizing,” rattling his windows and cracking foundations across Brownsville. The rocket uses some 700 tons of liquid methane per launch and SpaceX releases thousands of gallons of wastewater from the facility into the surrounding wetlands and ocean. “I have a negative reflex towards anything that calls itself colonization,” he says. “And it’s in the name: space colonization. It’s in all these names and concepts, like terraforming.”
SpaceX’s Defense Contracts
Basaldú isn’t interested in Mars, and he is skeptical of SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s commitment to the red planet as well. He juxtaposes SpaceX’s announcements to lead its colonization efforts with the actual, day-to-day business of the company. “They are a government contractor, plain and simple.” SpaceX currently holds some 15.4 billion dollars in US government contracts, the bulk of which comprises launch agreements with NASA, according to a recent New York Times investigation. Some 3.6 billion of these dollars come from the Department of Defense, for contracts that involve military and intelligence assets that SpaceX deploys in the government’s name. Even an incomplete list of recent contracts speaks to the value of these agreements: In October of 2024, SpaceX was awarded a $733 million contract for seven launches for the Space Development Agency and two for the National Reconnaissance Office, which manages the nation’s spy satellites. In the spring of this year, another contract with the same office worth $1.8 billion was made public.
SpaceX’s value proposition to both civilian and military aerospace is readily apparent: The company’s reusable launchers and their optimization for the kinds of small, constellation-based satellites that make up the bulk of those in use today make launch contracts with the company attractive and affordable. NASA has ceded much of its launch operations to SpaceX, while the Space Force relies on the company’s services along with those of ULA, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. These agreements are not limited to the government of the United States; the European Space Agency (ESA) has also launched assets through SpaceX, owing to a delay in the development of its new Ariane rocket.
Like most companies with both civilian and military contracts, SpaceX emphasizes the former over the latter in its public relations efforts. However, the lines between these two worlds are blurry, perhaps especially when it comes to Starship. Despite Elon Musk’s highly optimistic timeline for the colonization of the red planet, the former Mars Colonial Transporter is not anywhere near reaching its objective. Nonetheless, it may soon be the fastest method of moving cargo or personnel from one place to another that has ever existed. With the proper launch and landing facilities in place, Starship could move 150 tons, anywhere on earth, in a little more than an hour. The military has taken notice. In early 2024, several sources reported that the Pentagon has requested “taking over” Starship entirely for missions it deems “sensitive,” effectively rendering the interplanetary vehicle into a terrestrial military asset. This blurring mirrors a similar pattern in SpaceX’s satellite business. While its civilian Starlink constellation makes up for the bulk of those launches, it also holds the immensely lucrative Starshield contract with the National Reconnaissance Office, and is tasked with creating a Starlink clone for military use under that name.
Some believe that the Starbase is not the Gateway to Mars, but a temporary proving ground for a technology that will be deployed elsewhere. “It’s just kind of a crummy launch site, and my suspicion is that a lot of people at SpaceX know this,” says Eric Roesch, a former ESG consultant and petrochemical regulator with a deep knowledge of the industrial Texas coastline. Roesch, under the Substack and X moniker “ESG Hound” is one of the launch site’s most vocal critics. He believes that SpaceX’s presence at Boca Chica will be fleeting. “It really is that they are just trying to get that first step so they can say, ‘Hey, we built this.’” Roesch believes that once SpaceX can prove Starship’s usability, it could petition NASA to let it use the launch facilities in Florida. Alternatively, it could be deployed from US military launch sites such as those at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. To Roesch, Boca Chica’s draw to SpaceX never lay in its long-term use, but in a friendly regulatory environment that would allow the company to develop its system as quickly as possible. He estimates that as lasting as the changes wrought by Starbase may be, the site itself will be ephemeral. “And that’s the real tragedy.”
SpaceX is notoriously averse to communicating with the media, and did not respond to Inkstick’s inquiries. The company has given no public indication that it is wavering from its stated objective of developing the Starship in order to colonize Mars, via South Texas. In the short term, its booster will go under contract for civilian and governmental flight missions, and is under contract with NASA to facilitate a moon landing.
The Days Ahead
With Elon Musk now a daily presence in President-elect Trump’s immediate orbit and set to lead a newly created office of accountability, the federal government may be about to undergo a process that is well underway in Texas, where both state law and regulatory processes have long seemed to follow the demands of the billionaire’s companies. While SpaceX had initially gotten approval to launch its much smaller Falcon 9 rockets from Boca Chica, it transitioned to testing the Superheavy booster after the fact. An ongoing controversy surrounds the launch site’s deluge system, which is responsible for dousing the launch platform with water. Currently, up to 190 pounds of heavy metals may be released into the sea and surrounding wetlands by a single operation of the deluge system, with SpaceX petitioning for the necessary permissions to launch over thirty times a year.
Despite the fact that it is in clear violation of numerous regulations, SpaceX continues to be issued permits by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. In January of 2024, over the vocal objections of residents, researchers and environmentalists, the commission of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department voted to swap 43 acres of its Boca Chica Statepark for 477 acres of land owned by SpaceX farther inland, only for SpaceX to walk back from the deal a few months after.
“We are staying watchful,” says Bekah Hinojosa, a long-time activist and member of South Texas Environmental Justice Network, who brought a busload of Rio Grande Valley residents to the state capital of Austin to protest the land swap. Their region, which has a population that is over 90% Latino and among the poorest in the United States, has to fight to make itself heard, she explains. Hinojosa, Basaldú, and the rest of the activists of the Rio Grande Valley will have their hands full over the next few years. In addition to the planned expansion of the Starbase and the adjoining facilities for liquified natural gas, the incoming Trump administration is expected to continue expanding the border wall that already cuts off some 100 square miles of the Rio Grande Valley from the rest of the United States. For a gateway to the stars, the region’s horizons feel exceedingly small.
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