HIGH-HANDED MUSK TACTICS DRIVE OUT BOCA CHICA VILLAGE

By Dave Mosher

From Business Insider

This story is the first in a Business Insider series about SpaceX in South Texas called "Last Town Before Mars."

The pathway to Mars is a Grand Canyon, or even a Valles Marineris, or engineering hurdles.

But in tech-entrepreneur Elon Musk's quest to settle the red planet with a million people, neither he nor SpaceX, the rocket company he founded, likely anticipated a very earthbound and pernicious human challenge: a village of retiree-age homeowners.

For SpaceX to establish permanent cities on Mars, as Musk hopes to do, off-world colonists will need advanced life-support systems, habitats able to block out worrisome radiation, and other crucial technologies that don't yet exist. Martians will also require a powerful, reliable, affordable, and as-yet hypothetical rocket ship to get supplies and themselves to and from the planet.

Creating an interplanetary human-transport system is the most urgent piece of the Martian puzzle to solve, according to Musk, because it would spur experts beyond SpaceX's walls to solve the other core challenges of getting to, and surviving, on Mars.

SpaceX, of course, is well on its way toward developing such a rocket system, and it's called Starship.
The company has built, tested, and begun to mass-manufacture Starship's car-sized rocket engines, called Raptors; used three of them to successfully launch, hover, and land a stubby steel prototype called Starhopper; and now hopes to fly a 16-story test rocket ship nearly 12.5 miles (20 kilometers) into the South Texas sky, according to an experimental license application submitted by SpaceX to federal regulators this week.

The finished 39-story launch system is designed to include a 22-story rocket booster, called Super Heavy, and be fully reusable, unlike any rocket today. Work toward that dream is progressing rapidly in a region of Cameron County that locals call Boca Chica.

Yet standing in the company's way is a hamlet called Boca Chica Village and its 30 or so homes.

Boca Chica is a remote, bucolic, and beachy strip of land at the southern tip of Texas. SpaceX began seriously considering the region for a commercial launch site in 2011, according to former Cameron County officials interviewed by Business Insider.

The site would be private, allowing SpaceX to move faster and with far less hassle than at its government-leased launch sites in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Boca Chica is also near the Port of Brownsville, which would permit the delivery of large quantities of propellant and supersized rocket parts.

Just east of the site is the Gulf of Mexico, which gives SpaceX a relatively clear range over which to safely launch rockets. And being close to the equator, the company could use Earth's rotational momentum to save a little fuel and provide extra assurance that a satellite or other payload would reach orbit.

What's more, Carlos Cascos, the former judge of Cameron County, previously told Business Insider that Musk viewed the Brownsville area, which is among the US's poorest regions, as a kind of "genesis project" for boosting economic opportunity.

So starting in May 2012, a subsidiary of SpaceX began acquiring abandoned properties on the cheap. By July 2014, the company gained approval from local, state, and federal authorities to proceed with a spaceport, and in September of that year, Musk, then-Gov. Rick Perry, and others ceremoniously plunged shovels into Boca Chica dirt.

The original plan was to fly smaller Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. But by late 2018 — and following the explosive loss of two missions — SpaceX decided to focus solely on Starship.

"We've got a lot of land with nobody around, and so if it blows up, it's cool," Musk said about the yet-to-be-built Elon Musk, center, breaks ground on SpaceX's launch site in Boca Chica, Texas, with Congressman Filemon Vela, left, and then Texas Gov. Rick Perry, on September 22, 2014.

Except there were, and still are, people around. Many didn't take kindly to Musk's off-the-cuff remark, especially with the company building a launchpad 1.5 miles from the village's easternmost house.

"He ought to put one of these in his backyard himself within a mile and a half of his house and launch it, and if it blows up, it would be really cool. Wouldn't it?" Keith Bloomer, whose family has lived in Boca Chica Village for nearly five decades, told the local CBS affiliate KTHV after Musk's statement. 

(SpaceX responded at the time by saying that "Texas is home to hundreds of SpaceX employees and their families," and the "notion that SpaceX would do anything to endanger them or any of our neighbors is simply not true.")

Seventeen months later, on September 12, 2019, SpaceX offered to buy out every homeowner in the area around its spaceport site for three times the value of a base appraisal for their properties.

"Elon really did not want — and I totally agree — did not want a situation where one individual might fare better or worse, financially, than their neighbor by virtue that they were a better or weaker negotiator. That did not feel right," David Finlay, SpaceX's senior director of finance, told residents in January.

The company, in a letter mailed to all residents by Jones Lang LaSalle, or JLL, a US commercial real-estate firm with offices in Houston, ostensibly gave residents two weeks to decide.

"When SpaceX first identified Cameron County as a potential spaceport location, we did not anticipate that local residents would experience significant disruption from our presence," the letter read.

"However, it has become clear that expansion of spaceflight activities as well as compliance with Federal Aviation Administration and other public safety regulations will make it increasingly more challenging to minimize disruption to residents of the Village."

At the time, many villagers told Business Insider they planned to reject the deal.

To read rest of article, click on link: URL: https://www.businessinsider.com/boca-chica-texas-residents-selling-homes-spacex-starship-2020-2