'A different breed': SpaceX's sprawling Starbase still rising from South Texas sand flats

BOCA CHICA, TEXAS — Mirages shimmered across the sand flats amid the 95-degree South Texas sun approaching SpaceX's sprawling Starbase, where a huge Starship rocket and two Super Heavy boosters loomed on the horizon like a setting from a "Dune" movie.

Vehicles jounce eastward toward Starbase along sparsely populated Boca Chica Boulevard, the lone two-lane road leading from "civilization" near Brownsville to SpaceX's isolated Starship operations nearly a half-hour away. Years of heavy construction-truck traffic headed to SpaceX's futuristic facilities battered this asphalt into long stretches of shock-absorber-pounding patched potholes.

Perhaps America's oddest drive to the beach, motorists navigate the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge's scenic scrubby flats, flocks of birds and patches of cacti before abruptly driving right up to the Starship-Super Heavy "rocket garden" staging area and production site.

Then the road winds past SpaceX's newly built black-glass-walled offices and Starfactory — which could fit 15 football fields inside — before ending at the dune line near Starship's soaring twin launch towers. One is the chopstick-equipped Mechazilla, which is designed to catch descending Super Heavy boosters in midair.

"Coming out here is a different breed. You've got to be tough to be here," said Jack Yuen, founder of the nonprofit Maker SpaceX Boca Chica and leader of the Mars Society's Brownsville/Starbase chapter.

"Hanging out in Florida: 'Oh, I feel like going to Disney, I feel like going to this bar, I feel like going here, this nightclub.' You can't do that here," Yuen said.

SpaceX's remote coastal launch site about 2.2 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border has hosted nine Starship test flights since April 2023, capturing worldwide media attention. Yuen said all Starship missions look different, a stark contrast to the practically routine rocket liftoffs from Florida's Space Coast. That's where 70 orbital launches have already occurred thus far this year.

The last three Starship rockets broke apart and exploded during test flights earlier this year, while another blew up during a June engine test at Starbase's Massey's site, a former gun range off Boca Chica Boulevard.

"After we waited for two years with no launch, it goes up. It's like a good-sized skyscraper — not a small skyscraper, but a good-sized skyscraper. It went up, and it was crooked," Yuen recalled of Starship's April 2023 maiden flight, holding out his cell phone pointed askew.

"And everybody was afraid that the darn thing was going to explode. So it didn't explode; it did knock out a lot of concrete that was underneath it. But it went up crooked, and it kept on going up," Yuen said.

That inaugural Starship-Super Heavy tandem did end up exploding nearly four minutes after liftoff during "a rapid unscheduled disassembly," SpaceX reported. Now on Sunday, SpaceX crews will target Starship's 10th flight test during an hourlong launch window extending from 7:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. EST.

During his State of the City Address in March, Brownsville Mayor John Cowen Jr. said SpaceX employed more than 2,100 local workers and invested more than $3 billion in Starbase. Next, the colossal Starship-Super Heavy rocket system is coming to NASA's Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

Florida officials project the Starship program will generate at least $1.8 billion in capital investment and 600 new full-time jobs on the Space Coast by 2030. Already under construction at the Cape: a Gigabay standing 380 feet tall and housing about 46.5 million cubic feet of interior processing space with 815,000 square feet of workspace.

But Yuen views today's flight-test days as merely "an emerging space thing" during SpaceX's march to the moon, Mars and a science fiction-like era of space travel. Under the direction of founding billionaire Elon Musk, SpaceX aims to someday build up to 1,000 Starships in Texas per year, with the rockets designed to transport up to 100 people on long-duration interplanetary treks.

"Thirty or 40 years from now, they're going to be having launches every day. All the buildings that are built will be tossed aside," Yuen said of Starbase.

"This is going to be like 'Star Wars' going on here. That's what I think's going to happen," Yuen said.

FAA to host Florida meetings on Starship environmental impacts

A seagull squawks atop a sign warning pedestrians and SpaceX fans of sensitive wildlife habitat at Boca Chica Beach, about one-fifth of a mile from Starbase's Starship launch pad and "Mechazilla" integration tower.

At KSC, SpaceX seeks Federal Aviation Administration licensing approval to soon launch up to 44 Starship-Super Heavy rocket-booster tandems per year from pad 39A.

And social media chatter continues growing in opposition to SpaceX's proposal to periodically close access to Playalinda Beach and Canaveral National Seashore for security purposes, starting about three hours prior to those Starship launches.

SpaceX's KSC proposal also includes up to 44 Super Heavy booster landings and up to 44 Starship landings per year. Landings would occur at pad 39A, atop a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean, or into the sea in expendable fashion. Starship landings could also happen in the Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean, with some missions aimed at post-splashdown recovery.

Next week, FAA officials will collect comments on Starship environmental impacts during four public meetings at two Brevard County locations:

Tuesday, Aug. 26: 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Astronauts Memorial Foundation Center for Space Education at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.

Thursday, Aug. 28: 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Radisson Resort at the Port, 8701 Astronaut Blvd., Cape Canaveral.

A virtual meeting will also occur from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Sept. 3. Comments can also be submitted online at regulations.gov.

The FAA's most conservative estimate projects 33 to 44 full-day closures and up to 33 half-day closures per year, totaling the equivalent of 60½ days. But scrubs and weather delays would increase those totals.

A judge in Cameron County, Texas, has ordered Boca Chica Beach and more than 14 miles of Boca Chica Boulevard to close from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. CST Sunday for Starship flight-testing activities and the launch attempt.

The Sierra Club, Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texasand environmental group SaveRGV are suing Texas officials for closing Boca Chica Beach for SpaceX operations, saying the closures are unconstitutional. In a March letter to Texas Senate officials, Sierra Club officials said they expect the case to advance all the way to the Texas Supreme Court.

Graphic shows the size (in height) of Elon Musk's SpaceX Starship in comparison to other rockets

Fully stacked, the two-stage Starship system (a 171-foot Starship atop a 232-foot Super Heavy Booster) stands 403 feet tall. In terms of scale in downtown Melbourne, that's like stacking Trinity Towers West (175 feet), Trinity Towers East (145 feet) and the Highline apartment complex (96 feet) on top of each other. Those three buildings total 416 feet in height.

During an Aug. 7 media roundtable, United Launch Alliance President and CEO Tory Bruno noted that Starship measures "much larger than a Saturn V."

"Starship is an interesting vehicle, in that it's not just another rocket on the range. It is of an unprecedented size," Bruno told reporters.

"The request that has been put in for the licenses (is) at a very, very high launch rate. So we are counting on the Space Force and the FAA to do a very thorough analysis of that, and how it will affect not just the ecological environment but also the launch environment," he said, citing operational impacts on other Eastern Range launch providers.

World's biggest rocket attracts Texas supporters

The obvious parallel to Starbase on Florida's Space Coast is Blue Origin's tremendous, ever-expanding New Glenn rocket factory, which sprawls off Space Commerce Way just south of the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.

Motorists can drive past and gawk at the complex of huge blue buildings across more than 230 acres. But Blue Origin's massive New Glenn rockets — which measure taller than a football field — are rarely visible outside the factory.

Neither is the company's launch tower. Blue Origin sends New Glenns into flight from Launch Complex 36, a $1 billion-plus rebuilt liftoff site shielded far from the public behind the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station security gates. By contrast, Starbase's nearest launch tower stands about ⅕-mile from a public beach.

"It is unprecedented," Alexandre Casset, a 24-year-old French engineering student pursing a doctorate degree, said of Starbase. "You can't do that with Blue Origin, ULA and all these companies. They don't allow people to go that close to the actual launch sites."

Casset, who dreams of working for SpaceX someday, and Yuen embody a comparitively small but growing space-centric community in nearby Brownsville and South Padre Island. Generations of residents are accustomed to spaceflight in the Cape Canaveral area, where missiles and rockets have taken flight since July 1950. Conversely, SpaceX's rapid, disruptive Texas growth has created tension among local residents, Yuen said, bumping his fists together.

Yuen has served as a South Texas SpaceX public ambassador. In March 2021, he and his family were introduced to the area while camping for 12 days in a Mercedes Sprinter van while waiting to watch a Starship prototype launch from Isla Blanca Park on South Padre Island.

That June, he and his wife, Helen, bought a rural 13-acre ranch located about 17 miles from Starbase. She coins the property "the landing pad" — current and future SpaceX engineers have stayed there, while hundreds of space enthusiasts have visited.

Yuen founded MSX Boca Chica as part of the "maker movement" that promotes do-it-yourself engineering and creativity. SpaceX engineers designed a rock-climbing wall inside his ranch warehouse, and equipment lies everywhere for welding, plasma cutting, 3D printing and electrical projects.

In April 2022, MSX Boca Chica organized a "Starbase Tailgate V1" rally alongside the rocket factory to show support for SpaceX from Rio Grande Valley residents. A couple hundred people attended the rally. Some wore chrome alien helmets with black visors. Others waved SpaceX flags and handwritten signs.

That 2022 event took place about ½-mile down Boca Chica Boulevard from Boca Chica Village. The village is now a newly incorporated, secretive SpaceX company town mostly inhabited by employees that was created in May via a 212-6 vote. This rapidly expanding housing area with tiny homes and travel trailers alongside Starfactory generated controversy with a plan to restrict public access via roadway gates.

FLORIDA TODAY sent messages seeking comment from SpaceX, Starbase's city administrator and city clerk, and its three elected officials: Mayor Bobby Peden (SpaceX's vice president of Texas Test and Launch), Commissioner Jordan Buss (SpaceX's senior director of environmental, health and safety) and Commissioner Jenna Petrzelka (who served as Space's manager of operations engineering at Starbase). No messages were returned.

Back at the MSX Boca Chica ranch, Casset has occupied a bed in a corner since July 2 while awaiting the next Starship launch. He flew to Texas from Europe, and he laughed while recalling the two rounds of questioning he received from international customs personnel at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport.

"I was specific. The first question they asked was, 'What will you do during these two months in the U.S.?' I said, 'I will watch a SpaceX launch in Brownsville.' And they said, 'Two months just to see a launch? That's weird.' They asked more and more questions," Casset said.

Elsewhere on the ranch, Yuen's 22-year-old son, Jax, helped craft a 30-foot-tall aluminum-tubing art installation that replicates the dimensions of a Starship nose cone. One of his personal highlights: Watching Mechazilla's chopsticks catch a Super Heavy booster for the first time in October 2024.

"It was pretty risky. And they did it. And had it gone wrong, then it would have destroyed the tower and there would be a major setback, maybe a year or something like that of progress. But they succeeded on their first try," Jax Yuen said.

"So history was made right here. And people all over the world were watching."

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Rick Nealeis a Space Reporter at FLORIDA TODAY. Contact Neale at [email protected]. Twitter/X:@RickNeale1

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This article originally appeared on Florida Today: SpaceX's Starbase offers glimpses of Cape Canaveral's Starship future