By Rachel Monroe
Esquire Magazine
"The schemes and dreams of developers to build on this beautiful and desolate area die hard, but die they always have.” —Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine, 1992
“We’ve got a lot of land with nobody around, and so if it blows up, it’s cool.” —Elon Musk, 2018
SpaceX is dismantling a remote beach community at the southernmost end of Texas, one house at a time. Some residents took its money. Others refuse to leave. Still others are sticking around to see what happens.
At the end of September, when tensions were at their peak, the residents of Boca Chica Village received a message from SpaceX. The private space company was publicly unveiling its new spacecraft here, at the southeastern tip of Texas, and they were invited.
The gesture came as a surprise. Earlier that month, homeowners in this tiny community of independent-minded retirees had received another letter from SpaceX, via FedEx. “Expansion of spaceflight activities,” it read, “will make it increasingly more challenging to minimize disruption.” Given the company’s ambitions—massive and, as the residents had come to learn, always shifting—SpaceX wanted to buy their homes.
As an incentive, it had offered three times the properties’ assessed values. As an incentive of a different kind, the letter had declared that the offer, which was final, would expire in two weeks. That deadline passed three days before the rocket unveiling. Of the residents who planned to attend, not one had accepted SpaceX’s offer.
Cheryl Stevens grew up in south Texas, the fourth generation of her family to play on Boca Chica Beach. If anywhere was safe from gentrification, she figured this was it. Kevin Cooley
The afternoon of the event, Mary, sixty-one, a wiry, practical woman who was arguably the rocket’s biggest fan in Boca Chica, painted her fingernails a sparkling silver and put on star-shaped earrings. Cheryl Stevens, fifty-nine, a former legal secretary with expressive hands and frizzled, graying hair, almost turned down the invitation—she’d been battling SpaceX for years—until she heard her neighbors were going.
She borrowed a friend’s elegant teal dress—then, after spotting a neighbor in shorts, changed into something more casual. About a dozen people gathered at the cozy, cluttered home of Terry and Bonnie Heaton, seventy and seventy-one, the community’s longest-tenured residents. Cars were already streaming in from the west, through the Border Patrol checkpoint, past the wildlife preserve and its nesting shorebirds.
At dusk, two SpaceX employees wearing effortful smiles herded the Boca Chicans into a van and drove them to the launch site. It was surreal to see Boca Chica so busy. A few years earlier, it had been a sleepy neighborhood of a few dozen houses on just two streets, the perfect counterpoint to the spring-break madness of South Padre Island, a few miles up the coast.
Sometimes during the slow summer season, the Heatons were the only people around. In the winter, the main source of excitement was the weekly game night over at the Averys’ house. Then SpaceX chief Elon Musk took an interest in the area and began building his new rocket prototype here. Now the mile-and-a-half drive to the launch site was lined with SpaceX enthusiasts and Musk hangers-on.
The 164-foot-tall spaceship, named Starship Mk1, loomed above the site, its stainless-steel hull gleaming in the floodlights. Mary asked if she could hug it. Her friend Gene Gore, a sunbaked surfboard builder from South Padre Island who was invited as a local SpaceX supporter, peeked inside the bulkhead and felt as though he’d entered the future.
Gene and the other SpaceX fans mingled with company executives and local politicians as the Boca Chicans were ushered over to a private, cordoned-off area. Their minders didn’t let the residents out of their sight.
To fread rest of article, click on link: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a30709877/elon-musk-space-x-boca-chica-residents/
At the end of September, when tensions were at their peak, the residents of Boca Chica Village received a message from SpaceX. The private space company was publicly unveiling its new spacecraft here, at the southeastern tip of Texas, and they were invited.
The gesture came as a surprise. Earlier that month, homeowners in this tiny community of independent-minded retirees had received another letter from SpaceX, via FedEx. “Expansion of spaceflight activities,” it read, “will make it increasingly more challenging to minimize disruption.” Given the company’s ambitions—massive and, as the residents had come to learn, always shifting—SpaceX wanted to buy their homes.
As an incentive, it had offered three times the properties’ assessed values. As an incentive of a different kind, the letter had declared that the offer, which was final, would expire in two weeks. That deadline passed three days before the rocket unveiling. Of the residents who planned to attend, not one had accepted SpaceX’s offer.
She borrowed a friend’s elegant teal dress—then, after spotting a neighbor in shorts, changed into something more casual. About a dozen people gathered at the cozy, cluttered home of Terry and Bonnie Heaton, seventy and seventy-one, the community’s longest-tenured residents. Cars were already streaming in from the west, through the Border Patrol checkpoint, past the wildlife preserve and its nesting shorebirds.
At dusk, two SpaceX employees wearing effortful smiles herded the Boca Chicans into a van and drove them to the launch site. It was surreal to see Boca Chica so busy. A few years earlier, it had been a sleepy neighborhood of a few dozen houses on just two streets, the perfect counterpoint to the spring-break madness of South Padre Island, a few miles up the coast.
Sometimes during the slow summer season, the Heatons were the only people around. In the winter, the main source of excitement was the weekly game night over at the Averys’ house. Then SpaceX chief Elon Musk took an interest in the area and began building his new rocket prototype here. Now the mile-and-a-half drive to the launch site was lined with SpaceX enthusiasts and Musk hangers-on.
The 164-foot-tall spaceship, named Starship Mk1, loomed above the site, its stainless-steel hull gleaming in the floodlights. Mary asked if she could hug it. Her friend Gene Gore, a sunbaked surfboard builder from South Padre Island who was invited as a local SpaceX supporter, peeked inside the bulkhead and felt as though he’d entered the future.
Gene and the other SpaceX fans mingled with company executives and local politicians as the Boca Chicans were ushered over to a private, cordoned-off area. Their minders didn’t let the residents out of their sight.
To fread rest of article, click on link: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a30709877/elon-musk-space-x-boca-chica-residents/
5 comments:
Now you know how the rest of us feel about these self serving politicans Welcome to the RGV after so many years living here completely unaware.
To Musk it means nothing. To the RGV residents it's OUR region.
Millionaires DONT care.
What in the hell is the state senator and county judge doing to fix hwy 4 went out the other day to see the Space X Complex and that road is a terrible mess.Their are dangerous pot holes out their., they had had more than 5yrs to fix that turd world road its a disgrace.
Elon Musk has more chance of getting Trump to stop telling lies, than sending a rocket to the moon, or growing weed on Boca Chica Beach.
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Haaayy porbresita gringita.
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