SpaceX is launching a new mission: making its Starbase site a new Texas city.
Billionaire Elon Musk‘s company on Thursday sent a letter to local officials requesting an election to turn what it calls Starbase—the South Texas site where SpaceX builds and launches its massive Starship rockets—into an incorporated city. Residents of the area known as Starbase submitted the petition, according to the company.
The area is on the southern tip of Texas at Boca Chica Beach, near the Mexican border. Earlier this year, Musk announced he was moving the headquarters of SpaceX and his social media company X from California to Texas.
“To continue growing the workforce necessary to rapidly develop and manufacture Starship, we need the ability to grow Starbase as a community. That is why we are requesting that Cameron County call an election to enable the incorporation of Starbase as the newest city in the Rio Grande Valley,” Kathryn Lueders, the general manager of Starbase, wrote in a letter to the county.
It’s not the first time turning Starbase into its own city has been floated. Musk proposed the idea in 2021 when he wrote a social media post that simply said, “Creating the city of Starbase, Texas.”
Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño Jr., the county’s top elected official, said despite the talks of incorporation in 2021, this was the first time a petition was officially filed.
“Our legal and elections administration will review the petition, see whether or not it complied with all of the statutory requirements and then we’ll go from there,” Treviño said on Thursday.
More than 3,400 full-time SpaceX employees and contractors work at the Starbase site, according to a local impact study issued by Trevino earlier this year.
SpaceX’s rapid expansion in the region has drawn pushback from some locals. Earlier this year, a group called Save RGV sued the company in July over allegations of environmental violations and dumping polluted water into the nearby bay. SpaceX said in response that a state review found no environmental risks and called the lawsuit “frivolous.”
—Valerie Gonzalez, Associated Press
Login to add comment
Other posts in this group
Ben Sweeny, the salesman-turned-comedian behind that online persona Corporate Sween, says that bosses should waterboard their employees.
“Some companies drown their employees with
As I write this, the most pleasing sound is washing over me—gentle waves ebbing and flowing onto the shore. Sadly, I’m not actually on some magnificent tropical beach. Instead, the sounds of the s
The relentless hype around AI makes it difficult to separate the signal from the
I don’t know about you, but I tend to think about my favorite tech tools as being split into two separate saucepans: the “classic” apps we’ve known and relied on for ages and then the newer “AI” a
The official White House social media account is under fire for posts that resemble something typically found on the internet forum 4chan.
A post shared on February 14, styled like a Val
