Elon Musk might like to talk about building a city of the future on Mars, but he’s building a city of the past down in Texas. On Thursday, Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX filed paperwork to turn Starbase, its launch site located in Southern Texas, into a company town. SpaceX and its employees, currently stationed down around Brownsville, Texas submitted a petition to Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño seeking approval for Starbase to be incorporated as a new city.
In typical Muskian fashion, the CEO tweeted that “SpaceX HQ will now officially be in the city of Starbase, Texas,” which is not how petitions work, you don’t just immediately get the thing you asked for. But this effort has been in the cards before SpaceX even broke ground down near the Southern border. Musk first pitched the idea of the city of Starbase in 2021.
Since then, more than 3,400 SpaceX employees and contractors have set up shop around the base, according to a June report from Judge Treviño’s office. And the company has steadily been creating the conveniences of a town to keep the occupants around. Earlier this year, SpaceX announced plans to open a $15 million shopping center and restaurant. In the petition, Starbase General Manager Kathryn Lueders argued that incorporating would make it easier for SpaceX to perform “civic functions” including “management of the roads, utilities, and the provision of schooling and medical care for the residents.”
Of course, if you ask the people who monitor SpaceX’s wannabe city, those civic functions are not exactly being performed, to begin with. Earlier this year, NPR reported that SpaceX has ignored environmental regulations in order to move forward with launch plans.
Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) have determined that SpaceX has violated the Clean Water Act. Both agencies levied fines totaling more than $150,000 against the company in September. The company got slaps on the wrist from both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for flouting rules protecting local waters. Currently, the company is pushing to increase its launch frequency while bypassing a full environmental review, which seems like the kind of thing a company that has repeatedly violated environmental protections would want to do.
And there’s more than just environmental damage being done by SpaceX’s growing company town. There is social pollution, too. The New York Times reported earlier this year that residents of nearby Brownsville are basically inundated with Musk propaganda—everything from murals to the increasing influence of the billionaire’s money in their local politics.
This is not even Musk’s first foray into company towns—a model that sees its roots in anti-labor organization and corporatist fascism. Farther north in Texas, near the outskirts of Austin, SpaceX operates Snailbrook, a city incorporated in 2021 and pitched as a sort of utopia for SpaceX and Boring Company employees.
Snailbrook has not exactly reached that aspiration unless your idea of a utopia is a billionaire dumping wastewater into local rivers and ignoring any and all concerns raised by Texas locals and city planners, in which case they’re nailing it. Sherwood News described the city as a “rushed job with unfinished walls and a broken-down playground” made up of “an uninsulated bodega, a smaller-than-planned school, and about 15 trailers, rather than the 110 originally planned homes.”
Surely, Starbase will be different…right?