When Elon Musk first eyed South Texas for a new space operations base, he promised SpaceX would have a small, Environmental friendly footprint and that the surrounding area will “remain untouched”.
A decade later, the reality is very different. An investigation by the New York Times shows how SpaceX’s rampant development in the region has dramatically altered the fragile landscape and threatened the habitat the US government is tasked with protecting there.
More repercussions are likely to come, in South Texas and other places where SpaceX is expanding. Mr Musk has said he hopes to one day launch his Starships – the largest rocket ever built – a thousand times a year.
SpaceX officials declined repeated requests for comment. But Gary Henry, who until this year served as SpaceX’s adviser on the Pentagon’s launch programs, said the company was aware of concerns about SpaceX’s environmental impact and was committed to addressing them.
Here are four takeaways from our research:
Musk used preserved lands as storage space for SpaceX operations
US rocket launch sites, such as Vandenberg Space Base in California and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, are typically huge, secure facilities with tens of thousands of acres within their boundaries.
Mr. Musk had no intention of buying anything like that when he looked at the area near Brownsville, Texas. Instead, he wanted to buy a tiny piece of property in the middle of public land — what the group involved referred to as a “doughnut hole.” He thought the surrounding state parks and federal wildlife refuges would serve as natural buffers.
But there was a wrinkle to this plan. There were many inhabited homes in the village of Boca Chica, adjacent to the planned launch site, and there were frequent visitors to the state park. These people would have to be evacuated whenever a launch was planned.
More troubling, the planned launch site was adjacent to one of the most important migratory bird habitats in North America. And nearby Boca Chica Beach serves as a breeding ground for Kemp’s ridleys, the world the most endangered species of sea turtle.
Musk misled officials about his plans for the region
Mr. Musk and SpaceX initially told local officials that the company’s footprint in the region would be modest. The development will bring a few hundred jobs to the area through an investment of about $50 million.
Company officials also told the Federal Aviation Administration, SpaceX’s chief regulator, that they planned to launch their Falcon rockets from the area. The Falcons are the company’s workhorses, primarily used to launch satellites into space.
Mr. Musk executed a completely different plan. Investment in SpaceX operations, including a rocket manufacturing facility, now totals $3 billion. A second launch site is under construction. Industrial development has caused so much congestion along the tiny two-lane road to Boca Chica that some of SpaceX’s now 3,400 employees and contractors get to work by hovercraft.
SpaceX also began testing the Starship, a rocket that dwarfs the larger version The Hawk and weighs almost four times as much. As test flights for Starship began, Mr Musk hailed the progress as a step towards sending manned spaceflight to Mars. The FAA initially did not expect operations of this scale or a rocket of this power.
US National Park Service officials were also frustrated with SpaceX’s failed promises. The company agreed to certain conditions to limit the impact on the neighboring Palmito Ranch battlefield, the site of the last battle of the Civil War. But a park service official, who has since retired, told the Times that SpaceX violated several of those agreements. “We were being misled,” the official said. Mark Spierhe said.
The public lands around the Starbase have been forged
In April 2023, SpaceX conducted the first test launch of a full-scale Starship. But the rocket malfunctioned and a self-destruct mechanism eventually caused it to explode. Sheets of steel, chunks of concrete and shrapnel were hurled thousands of feet into the air and then hit bird habitat as well as a nearby state park and beach. A piece of concrete was found 2,680 feet from the launch site — well outside the zone where the FAA had thought damage could occur.
It was neither the first nor the last time that protected areas were destroyed by debris. On at least 19 occasions since 2019, SpaceX’s tests of Starship rockets or prototypes have caused fires, leaksexplosions or other problems associated with the rapid development of Mr. Musk’s compound in Boca Chica, which he calls Starbase.
Even the hovercraft that workers use to commute created what US Fish and Wildlife officials described in a letter to SpaceX as new threats to a “globally important shorebird area”.
The environment took a backseat to SpaceX and America’s ambitions
Mr. Musk took advantage of the constraints and competing missions of the various agencies most willing to be a check on Starbase expansion.
Those tasked with protecting the region’s cultural and natural resources — particularly officials from the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service — have repeatedly lost out to more powerful agencies, including the FAA, whose goals are intertwined with those of Mr. Mask.
The United States already depends heavily on SpaceX to launch its defense and commercial satellites into space. The Department of Defense and NASA plan to launch cargo aboard the new Starship. NASA has a $2.9 billion contract to use the rocket to land astronauts on the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years.
The FAA is charged with promoting safe space travel. And while it is required to do an environmental study of SpaceX’s operations, the agency acknowledges that protecting the environment is not its top priority.
“Blowing debris into state parks or national land is not what we prescribed, but the bottom line is that no one was hurt, no one was hurt,” said Kevin Coleman, the FAA’s top official who oversees space launch permits. “We certainly don’t want people to feel like they’re being bulldozed. But it’s a really important business that SpaceX is conducting down there. It’s really important to our civilian space program.”
