A modest refuge for a few dozen birders and retirees, Boca Chica Village sits at the confluence of white-sand beach, dunes and marshes. When Musk sniffed around the area nearly a decade ago in search of a launch site for SpaceX, local officials and then-Texas Governor Rick Perry lured him with more than $30 million in incentives. Breaking ground on the site in 2014, Musk cited multiple goals: to save humanity by colonizing Mars and to bring prosperity to South Texas by making it the next Cape Canaveral.
Residents, some of whom live just 100 yards from the launch site, worried that political leaders could sacrifice their village to Musk’s galactic dream. “We just kept hoping he would run out of money,” said Cheryl Stevens, 60, who bought her bungalow in 2005 and rented it for $100 a night to birdwatchers.
In the fall of 2018, Boca Chica residents began to notice a flurry of activity. Giant satellite dish antennae were brought in to build a ground tracking station for spacecraft. Welders and generators worked around the clock. Rocket modules towered above the site. As the site expanded, SpaceX also began buying up Boca Chica’s three dozen modest homes.
Musk eventually revealed his new plan in filings with the Federal Aviation Administration. Although SpaceX still had its eyes on Mars, according to the filing, the site would also be used for testing in preparation for putting thousands of satellites into space and building a global broadband network called Starlink.
The building activity began a few months after the site was named an opportunity zone. It’s unclear whether those two events were linked. Even so, any capital gains that Musk deployed through his SpaceX would be eligible for the opportunity zone breaks — the millions of dollars that SpaceX has spent to build hangars and launch pads, the cost of completing a luxury resort for space tourists now envisioned at the site, and the payments to buy locals out of their homes.
Musk, who served on two of Trump's business advisory councils early in the administration, has publicly courted and won subsidies for previous projects. SpaceX declined to respond to emails and telephone calls requesting comment about the project.
The area around Boca Chica is a natural choice for development incentives. Twenty miles to the west is one of the poorest U.S. cities, Brownsville, with a downtown area spurned by investors.
Ron Garza, who was executive director of the Lower Rio Grande Valley Development Council, said that Governor Greg Abbott’s administration gave local officials only 48 hours to suggest which of the dozens of census tracts around Brownsville were most needy. Garza said many of the officials wanted dense downtown areas to be chosen so that more residents might benefit.
Abbott and his economic development office declined to discuss why they selected Boca Chica over other blighted areas in Brownsville or whether they discussed the issue with SpaceX or its lobbyists.
As the SpaceX site grew, it became clear that it could not coexist with Boca Chica. Test launches that began in 2019 occasionally shattered windows. One launch started brushfires that burned through 100 acres of a nearby wildlife refuge. The road from Brownsville was shut down for launch days, leaving locals stranded and shutting Brownsville residents’ public beach access.