When Elon Musk first looked at South Texas for his new space operations base, he promised that SpaceX would have a small, environmentally friendly footprint and that the surrounding area would be “left behind”.
A decade later, the reality is far different. An investigation by The New York Times shows how SpaceX’s wild growth in the region is dramatically changing the fragile landscape and threatening the habitat the US government is charged with protecting there.
More repercussions are likely to come, in South Texas and in other places where SpaceX is expanding. Mr Musk has said he hopes to one day launch Starships – the largest rocket ever produced – a thousand times a year.
Executives from SpaceX declined repeated requests for comment. But Gary Henry, who until this year served as SpaceX’s adviser on the Pentagon’s launch program, said the company is aware of concerns about SpaceX’s environmental impact and is committed to addressing them.
Here are four takeaways from our investigation:
Musk uses the preserved land as a buffer for SpaceX operations
Rocket launch sites in the US, such as the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, are typically very large and secure facilities with tens of thousands of acres in area.
Mr. Musk didn’t intend to buy anything like that amount of land when he looked at the area near Brownsville, Texas. Instead, they want to buy a small piece of property in the middle of public land — what the team calls the “doughnut hole.” He thinks the surrounding state parks and federal wildlife preserves will act as natural buffers.
But there was a wrinkle in the plan. There are several inhabited houses in the Village of Boca Chica, next to the planned launch site, and there are frequent visitors to the state park. These people must be evacuated every time they launch.
More importantly, the planned launch site is adjacent to one of the most important migratory bird habitats in North America. And nearby Boca Chica beach is a breeding ground for Kemp’s ridleys, the world’s most endangered sea turtle species.
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 small. The development will bring the area several hundred jobs through an investment of around $50 million.
Company officials also told the Federal Aviation Administration, SpaceX’s chief regulator, that it plans to launch Falcon rockets from the region. Falcons are the company’s workhorse, primarily used to launch satellites into space.
Mr. Musk is working on a very different plan. Investments in SpaceX operations, including rocket manufacturing facilities, currently total $3 billion. A second launchpad is under construction. The growth of the industry has caused a lot of congestion along the small two-lane road to Boca Chica where 3,400 SpaceX employees and contract workers now work with hovercraft.
SpaceX has also begun testing Starship, a smaller rocket version of the largest Falcon and nearly four times the weight. As test flights began for Starship, Mr Musk hailed the progress as a step towards sending manned spacecraft to Mars. The FAA did not initially anticipate an operation of this scale or a rocket of this power.
Officials with the US National Park Service have also become frustrated with SpaceX’s failed promises. The company agreed to certain conditions to limit its impact on the Palmito Ranch Battlefield, the site of the last Civil War battle. But one retired park service official told The Times that SpaceX violated some of those agreements. “We were misled,” said the official, Mark Spier.
The common land around the Starbase has been hammered
In April 2023, SpaceX conducted the first full-scale test launch of the Starship. But the rocket fails, and its self-destruct mechanism eventually causes it to explode. Sheets of steel, chunks of concrete and shrapnel were thrown thousands of feet into the air, then slammed into bird habitat as well as nearby state parks and beaches. One piece of concrete was found 2,680 feet from the launch site — well outside the zone where the FAA thought damage might have occurred.
This is not the first or the last time that the protected area is covered with debris. On at least 19 occasions since 2019, SpaceX tests of rockets or Starship prototypes have caused fires, leaks, explosions or other problems related to the development of Mr. Musk’s complex in Boca Chica, called Starbase.
Even the hovercraft that employees use to commute creates what officials at the US Fish and Wildlife Service described in a letter to SpaceX as a new danger to “globally important shorebird areas.”
The environment took a back seat to SpaceX and America’s ambitions
Mr. Musk exploited the limitations and competing missions of various agencies best prepared to check Starbase expansion.
Those responsible for protecting the cultural and natural resources of the region – especially officials from the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service – repeatedly lost out to more powerful agencies, including the FAA, whose goals are intertwined with Mr. Musk.
The United States has relied heavily on SpaceX to launch defense and commercial satellites into space. The Department of Defense and NASA both plan to fly cargo aboard the new Starship. NASA has a $2.9 billion contract to use a rocket to land astronauts on the moon for the first time in more than 50 years.
The FAA is tasked with promoting safe space travel. And despite having to conduct an environmental study of SpaceX’s operations, the agency admits that protecting the environment is not a top priority.
“Blowing debris into a state park or national land is not what we’re supposed to do, but the bottom line is that nobody got hurt, nobody got hurt,” said Kevin Coleman, the top FAA official who oversees space launch licensing. “We certainly don’t want people to feel like they’re being bulldozed. But it’s a very important operation that SpaceX is doing there. It’s very important to our civilian space program.
