STRIKING A DEVIL'S BARGAIN WITH ELON MUSK AIN'T EASY

By Juan Montoya

I never believed Elon Musk and his local bought-and-paid political acolytes and the Sunshine Boys from the various development corporations when they came selling SpaceX.

The first time we heard them was in 2014 when hundreds of local residents gathered at the International Technology, Education and Commerce Center (ITECC) at the old Amigoland Mall to cheer on the coming of space-related industry and visions of launches to Mars from Boca Chica Beach were dancing in their heads.

The local Brownsville Economic Development Council waved the banner of billions in space-related industries and well-paying jobs to sweeten the deal. I remember Gilbert Salinas and Jason Hilts of the BEDC repeatedly going around the county saying that there would be more than 600 jobs paying at least $55,000 created, mostly for engineers and other high-tech and scientific-bent professions.

Our kids could dream of flying off into space from here, maybe even become some of the first settlers on the red planet.

"What do you see, Elon?" former mayor Tony Martinez said he asked Musk at the SpaceX groundbreaking on the beach.

"The future," Musk was said to have replied looking out over the placid waters off Boca Chica Beach.

"He (Musk) told me, 'Mr. Mayor, one day you're going to read in the history books that a man left Brownsville and went to Mars,' " Martinez says.

The picture, as painted by the BEDC boys and Musk himself was to test and launch the slimmer Falcon 9 rocket a dozen times a year to loft commercial satellites into orbit. But his plans expanded, or were shaded – not surprising for Musk, who also owns the electric car company, Tesla. 

Today, he's using the mudflats, wetlands, and dune acreage to build and test his Super Heavy -Starship prototype. And NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to build a Starship to build the rockets and test site to take astronauts to the moon.

The county spent millions to spruce up Isla Blanca Park and build an amphitheater to host the thousands of space fans who were supposed to come by to watch the dozen launches a year. Space-related tourism would flourish.  Local school districts would turn out astronauts and propulsion engineers by the scores, if not hundreds. Build it and they will come, went the mantra.

All this, of course did not happen. And it won't happen in the foreseeable future. In short, Musk and SpaceX came here under false pretenses. The dreams of space travel have been brought back to the ground and we know now for sure that the Starbase is nothing more than a rocket test site and that the actual space launches will be staged elsewhere, say Cape Canaveral, Georgia, Puerto Rico, or even off the Georgia cast.

Instead of the dozen annual launches and 600 jobs paying at least $55,000, Starbase employs nearly 1,700 people with a payroll of over $80 million. Still, this is nothing to sneezed at where before just a partially-abandoned retirement village of Chicago-native Polish residents lived without running water and using septic tanks in a pretentiously-named Koepernik Shores subdivision named  after the Polish astronomer.

I still resent the fact that everybody – except for a small cadre of environmentalists in Laguna Heights and retirement communities – embraced the fib of space travel from Boca Chica. State Senator Eddie Lucio and his clone, Eddie III, and then-State Rep. Rene Oliveira, bit into the fable and were willingly paid and bought to support SpaceX in the statehouse.  

But something funny has happened on the way to Mars from Boca Chica that has altered my perceptions of Musk and his SpaceX.

I know a local attorney who was trying to help a woman get a divorce from a marriage gone wrong and provide a more stable and emotionally-healthy environment for her kids. The catch was that she – a professional welder – couldn't find any local employment and had to travel to Houston, Corpus Christ, Ingleside, or even on refineries on the Gulf Coast in Louisiana. So she couldn't afford it.

When she left, the burden of the children's upbringing fell on their elderly grandmother. Just like her, other welders, mostly men, left the city to those places and their wives were left to rear the kids and keep them on the straight and narrow when they left for months on end.

Employment with SpaceX allowed the woman (and fathers) to stay home and have a direct influence on their families. The male welders stayed home to raise their kids and relieve the mother the onus of keeping them in school and provide discipline and direction to keep them off drugs and gang mischief.

This fact alone – the prevention of family breakups and the staving off of social pathology – makes it easier to swallow the past Musk and BEDC misrepresentations. No value can be placed on the preservation of a united family and the presence of both parents to guide the future generation. These families' economic uplifting allows them to purchase homes of their own, and upgrade their standard of living in some of the poorest communities in the country that dot the South Texas landscape. SpaceX – the beneficiary of federal grants – has to pay federal-level wages to its workers, something unheard of in this neck of the woods. Who used to pay welders $35 to $50 per hour locally before?

And during the pandemic, local vendors of everything from enchilada dinners to electronic components and hardware grabbed the SpaceX life preserver to stay in business. Local realtors saw property values rocket as SpaceX engineers and technicians flooded into town.

We do, however, pay a price on the trade-off in the closing of what used to be the most popular beach for low-income families, the destruction of the disappearing coastal habitat of wetlands and mud flats for endangered species, and the potential for – God forbid – an explosion at the Port of Brownsville or a nearby town. 

And the downside – the explosion of real estate prices – has also affected local residents with inflated property appraisals. Throw in putting up with pompous California transplants who look down on local residents as backwater rubes, and you can understand the resentment against SpaceX. 

But we knew all along that the Port of Brownsville was meant to be an industrial port and that gasoline and fuels, dangerous chemicals, and the steel and materials for the manufacturing centers in northern Mexico would traverse the channel. Now it's LNGs, an industry derided by some, but that – once they meet all the safety and environmental requirements of the federal and state governments – are coming. 

While past county commissioners were overtly pliant with Musk and SpaceX over the closing of access to Boca Chica whenever SpaceX required, they are promising a more rigorous approach to their dealings with Musk and our shoreline.

Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño Jr., says they should be more vigilant of the private space company.

"We probably weren't doing what we should have been, so I understand (the public's) concern and we're trying to do a better job going forward," Treviño says. "By the same token, we need them and want them to succeed."

It  seems like light years since that public FAA hearing at TSC's ITECC where a hungry community laid out the red carpet for Musk and SpaceX. A lot of water, no pun intended, has gone under the beach. But SpaceX is not going to be here forever. 

We should, as someone once said, take while the taking is good. But we should do this with our eyes wide open and questioning minds. Striking a balance is a difficult thing to achieve, but the future of our generations, and our coastal environment, depend on us. We don't have to follow Musk's more extreme political tendencies.

For now, however, we can lie with the devil until it suits us – and Musk – no longer.