How Elon Musk Plans to Build Starbase

Elon Musk is building the city of the future, and he’s doing it in one of the least likely places. In the middle of nowhere Texas, far away from the big city lights and out of sight from all but the most dedicated SpaceX fans, the seeds for the city of Starbase are being planted. Elon is one of the richest, most motivated, most innovative human beings alive on the planet right now, so what could he be capable of if given the chance to build his own city from the ground up? Today, we’re talking about Starbase Texas, and what Elon might be up to down there.

So for right now at least, Starbase is not an actual thing yet, it lives only in Elon’s mind. But SpaceX do own most of the land in a village called Boca Chica Texas, that’s where they have been conducting the Starship launch tests that usually end in huge explosions. The location is at the Southernmost point on the Texas Gulf coast, it’s basically a triangular shaped point that is surrounded by ocean water on two sides and the Mexico border through the Rio Grande River on the third side. As for the village itself, we’re talking about one dirt road, about a quarter of a mile long and lined with single storey houses on either side, about 30 homes in all. The village began construction in the late 1960’s but was almost immediately wrecked by a hurricane that caused massive flooding in the area and destroyed the sewage system and water treatment facility. The village hung on, but it never made any progress over the decades, they basically just gave up on developing the place after the hurricane. There is no grocery store, no restaurant, no gas station, they still don’t even have water pipes - the county has to deliver fresh water to holding tanks that sit next to the houses. Aside from the neighbourhood and the SpaceX facility, there is no sign of civilization for miles around. It really is the perfect location to launch spaceships from so I can see why Elon is so excited about it. In 2018, Elon was quoted saying “We’ve got a lot of land with nobody around, so if it blows up, it’s cool,” 

You can check the place out of Google Street view, the most recent scans they have are from 2019, it’s a very strange little village. You can even see the SpaceX crew building a Starship prototype from the highway that runs past the launch pad.

Like we said, SpaceX owns most of the property in Boca Chica right now, they started buying out land owners a couple of years back. The vast majority of people who owned houses in the village were not full-time residents, they basically just used the area as a winter time getaway for people to escape the cold weather and get some quiet solitude. Of course with constant new construction in the area and the occasional rocket launch and crash landing, there isn’t a whole lot of quiet time in Boca Chica these days. So when SpaceX offered 3 times market value to buy out the homes, most people took the deal. There are a couple of hold outs, of course, not everyone is going to be chill with a bunch of rocket scientists rolling into town and taking over. I’m sure that never in their wildest dreams did those people expect that one day they would have to be dealing with actual spaceships crashing and exploding just down the street from their house on a regular basis. Such is life.

Most of the people living in the area now are SpaceX employees who have either taken up residence in the existing houses or settled into life in a little camp of airstream trailers near the launch site. Elon Musk himself even spends a good deal of time in the village, he reportedly lives in a very modest little ranch house, one of the original homes that was renovated on the inside and equipped with a solar roof. And Elon is already petitioning for even more people to join SpaceX in South Texas. He expects the population around the Boca Chica facility to grow by several thousand people over the next year or two. Obviously that’s not going to be possible with just 30 houses with no water connections. So what we really need here is a fresh start and a new build up. That’s where the Starbase city is truly born.

Now things get really fun to think about. If Elon Musk were to build a city from the ground up, how would he do it? Elon is a huge fan of science fiction and comic books, we know he loves the CyberPunk 2077 video game. Will Starbase come out looking like Night City? Probably not, but that would be cool. We know with Elon that efficiency is going to be priority number one, so I wouldn’t expect to see anything flashy or fancy. Everything that does get built is going to be done with purpose. I think the two main themes we’ll see emerge at Starbase in the early years are going to be solar power and tunneling. We know that these are two things that Elon is passionate about, he’s sunk a ton of money into Tesla’s energy division and The Boring Company, this is his chance to show the world how it’s done. Elon has floated the idea that we could power the entire USA with just 10,000 square miles of solar panels, so we wouldn’t need much to power one small city. The solar farm would be connected into a field full of Tesla Megapack batteries to regulate the power supply. Every building is equipped with a Tesla solar roof and Powerwall. An entirely energy independent city with no connection to the state power grid. It’s a beautiful thought, and Elon already owns all of the technology needed to make it happen right now. 

Then imagine a city without streets and traffic. I can’t see any reason that Starbase would ever be built with roads in the first place, that’s the whole point of the Boring Company, right? Elon has committed to tunnels as the best method for people moving, so an underground network of autonomous, electric vehicles would ferry everyone around the city. And Boring Company tunnels could be more than just a way to get around Starbase from home to work, tunnels could be way in and out of the city as well. So, the closest population centre to Boca Chica is the city of Brownsville Texas, it’s about 20 miles away. There is only one way in and out of Boca Chica right now, the highway number 4 that comes out of Brownsville. It’s an advantage for SpaceX at the moment, as it makes it really easy for them to control who can enter the area during Starship testing operations, which helps keep people out of the danger zone. The downside is that the highway can get really clogged up with traffic when large groups of people are trying to get into the area. There have also been weather events that have caused the highway to flood and block all traffic from coming and going. So an underground, hyperloop system from Starbase to Brownsville would be a no-brainer. There’s an international airport in Brownsville, so visitors could go straight from their plane into the loop and rocket towards Starbase at over 100 miles per hour. The Boring Company have estimated that once they get fully autonomous vehicles operating in their loop system, that travel speed should get up to around 150 miles per hour at the maximum, so that would be about 8 to 10 minutes travel time between the two cities.

Unfortunately though, Elon can’t just stick a flag in the ground and declare himself the Techno King of Starbase. There are a lot of politics involved in incorporating a new town and Elon has already started playing the game. Elon already scored one major win with the Texas government early on, they actually changed a law to allow the SpaceX launches to be possible - it doesn’t have anything to do with launching and crashing rockets, it actually has to do with road closures. See, it’s written into the Texas constitution that all Texans must have unimpeded access to all of the state’s coastal beaches. The problem for SpaceX is that their launch facility is located on the only road leading to Boca Chica Beach, but for obvious safety reasons, they have to close that road during rocket launch windows. Texas lawmakers actually created a special amendment to the law that allowed them to close the road when needed; they are allowed up to 300 hours of road closure per year to conduct their launches right now, and that’s expected to triple over the next year. So that’s a great sign that the state government is willing to make accommodations for the company. 

Then there are the municipal governments of the greater Brownsville area, if Starbase is going to succeed, then Elon needs to stay in their good books as well, and luckily he’s already found the way to their hearts. Money. And lots of it. In April, Elon announced that he would be donating 30 million dollars to the city of Brownsville, 20 million to improve their school system and 10 million dollars for downtown revitalization. This is a lot of money for anyone, but particularly for the city of Brownsville this is a really big deal. This city is one of the poorest in the state of Texas, their economy is pretty much non-existent, it’s the kind of town that smart, young people get far away from as fast as they can, they go to Austin and they don’t look back. County officials say that SpaceX have already created over 1,400 jobs in the area that have been filled by local residents. But the promise of SpaceX coming to town has already started a boom town effect to take hold. Commercial properties in Brownsville that have sat vacant for years are being bought up out of town investors. Real estate agents in the city are seeing their business double or even quadruple as people are looking to secure their spot in what could be the next up and coming city. The greater Brownsville area could be on track to become the silicon valley of the aerospace industry.

So through a little bit of politics and democracy, Elon could fairly easily incorporate his own city of Starbase. The only real hurdle that he needs to clear is first establishing that 200 people live in the area that he wants to incorporate, and then he needs the majority of those people to vote in favour of the plan. Seeing as how the majority of people living in the area are going to be SpaceX employees, getting those votes should be no problem at all. If they’re able to include the SpaceX staff living in the airstream trailer camp right now as residents, then, in theory, this process could be started right now. If SpaceX were to incorporate the city, they could then have a mayor, a police force, they could take control of taxes and infrastructure themselves. SpaceX would also gain the power of eminent domain to forcibly remove the remaining, non company residents from the area, which is probably what they will end up doing. That part doesn’t sit real well with me, I wish that weren’t the case, but that’s where we’re at and I do imagine these people will be more than fairly compensated.

But looking towards the future, over the next decade, the possibilities for Starbase are incredible. This city would basically become our staging ground for life on Mars. SpaceX is going to reach a point in the next 10 years where they will have a whole fleet of Starship vehicles, hundreds of them if Elon’s master plan comes true. Starbase is where they will be built and stored. There could be a near daily schedule of Starship launches and landings from multiple pads. Super Heavy boosters would be dropping from the sky and being caught by massive launch towers. All of the technology and infrastructure going to build the Mars colony would be developed and manufactured here at Starbase. There would be jobs for much more than just rocket scientists, they’ll need thousands of tradespeople, labourers and administrative staff to keep this machine running.

It’s a crazy idea to think about. Honestly, we could be in the very early days of the greatest economic revolution in modern times. There’s a reason that influential people like Elon are flocking to Texas right, there’s a change coming soon.