The Mythologies of Musk

Living in the Rio Grande Valley in the mid-70s was similar to being in another country. The cultural distinctions were often blurry between the two nations and the river was mostly a legal demarcation. We were just married, though, and found our time there to be filled with adventure, which was the only curative for my aching ambitions to succeed as a journalist. Getting noticed down on the remote Texas-Mexico border was a task for which I was not prepared, but I needed a job.

We did go to the beach, though. Our only time to see an ocean previously had come when we made a college trip to Florida with friends. Suddenly, we were living a short drive from the Gulf of Mexico, and wanted to go explore the shorelines of South Padre Island. We asked at work, and our new friends, about any good spot to just unroll our sleeping bags on the sand and stare at the stars and listen to the ocean.

“Go to Boca Chica,” was the recurrent answer. “Nobody is ever there. Just fishermen, sometimes. But not at night.”

We picked up the narrow two-lane, Highway 4, east of Brownsville, and drove along the stretch of sand between the Rio Grande and South Bay, which opens up to the Gulf. We stopped and I tried to throw a rock across into Mexico; close, but not that close. The road ended at the water and there was soft sand from the low dune line all the way to the tidal reaches. No one present and the only noise we heard was the wind and the sounding sea. The sun, laying down long light at the end of the day, was behind us, and set the white caps to orange and gold colors.

In 2024, the spot where we slept that night, is now occupied by giant rocket ships.

Elon Musk, with a taxpayer assist, has built his Starbase at Boca Chica and has made it the launch site for his SpaceX rockets. What was once referred to by valley residents as, “the people’s beach,” encircled by a federal wildlife refuge and a state park that serves as home to hundreds of unique species, is threatened by giant rockets, excessive use of potable water, and potential destruction of the fragile coastal environment. The spot is also sacred to the extant Carrizo Comecredo Tribe, which had occupied the delta region of the Rio Grande for centuries before first contact with European settlers. Eleven different endangered species, including the North American Ocelot and the Kemps Ridley Sea Turtle, live in the protected wetlands of Boca Chica.

Resistance to Musk’s expansion has had little success for local environmental and wildlife groups in the Rio Grande Valley. They are fighting against their own tax dollars, too, which exacerbates the sense of futility. Just since 2003, SpaceX has received $16.1 billion in contracts from the federal government, a deal which included $440 million to build a crew-carrying space capsule for NASA’s next trip to the moon. Texas taxpayers, too, got out their checkbook in 2013 when the Legislature appropriated $15 million to the Spaceport Trust Fund.

According to the Texas Legislature’s interim report from the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Economic Development in 2016, “SpaceX received an additional $5 million from the Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation, $4.4 million from the Emerging Technology Fund, $2.3 million from the Texas Enterprise Fund, $2.3 million from its Enterprise Zone Designation, and $360,000 from the Texas Skills Development Fund. The SpaceX project received an additional incentive in the form of a Chapter 313 appraisal limitation for 10 years for the project from Port Isabel ISD, which began in 2015. The Chapter 313 agreement provides that, for 10 years, SpaceX will only pay school district maintenance and operations property taxes on $20 million dollars worth of its property value, rather than its full value.”

What chance does a Kemps Ridley turtle or an ocelot have against such an array of resources?

Two test rocket launches have already done significant damage to the environment. About 70 acres of land were reportedly scorched in the Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge during a test launch in September of 2022 and the attempted launch of the Starship and Super Heavy rocket in April of last year resulted in an explosion that sent flaming debris across the wetlands and raining down on private property. No one knows what the impact might have been because there has been no environmental assessment subsequent to the blast. In fact, SpaceX has never undergone a full environmental impact study (EIS) as required by federal law, and after the explosion on the pad, was allowed to do its own damage survey and recommendations for risk mitigation. The company has also been sued by the group SaveRGV for excessive use of potable water during a drought. An estimated 180,000 gallons of water are used by SpaceX each time a rocket is launched and there have been 18 such events since July of 2023. According to the pleadings in the lawsuit, the polluted water is then dumped into the bay.

Musk seems to be conducting a thoroughgoing job of messing up this planet on his way to Mars. Without a full environmental impact study conducted by the EPA, there is no precise way of knowing the extent of damage to the ecologically sensitive wetlands around Boca Chica, or how any harm might be mitigated. Musk’s increasing influence with the President-elect is also likely to stop such a study from being performed by third party scientists. The odds of slowing down Musk also will probably decrease if his latest petition to Cameron County gets approval. His Starbase General Manager Kathryn Lueders wrote commissioners asking for a vote in the county to approve incorporation for Boca Chica and Starbase, Texas to become a city. This, of course, allows Musk and his consorts to raise taxes, pave their own roads, and, hell, maybe just issue hunting permits for the ocelot and turn the national wildlife refuge into a parking lot.

The county judge, Eddie Trevino, who is likely to push for the vote, claims in a study he conducted that Starbase employs 3400 people, full time and contractors, at Boca Chica. Although some of those people surely live in nearby Brownsville, the significant economic impact promised to the city by SpaceX is mostly non-existent. The city still has one of the highest poverty rates in the country at 26.1 percent and the national average is 12.5, and 47% of the city’s children live in economic desperation, the highest such rate in Texas. The population of 189,000 is 95 percent Hispanic. These income numbers were supposed to turn in a better direction with the advent of SpaceX’s development but after nearly ten years presence at Boca Chica, nothing has changed for the poor of Brownsville.

Their plight is almost certain to worsen, and the cause will be directly connected to Musk, who now is a co-head of a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for the new president. Medicaid requirements are likely to be toughened to save money, which will harm the poorest taxpayers, and programs like SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, can be expected to endure cuts. Every one of those 47 percent impoverished children in Brownsville qualify for the federal school lunch program, too, almost certainly another DOGE target. In his early comments, Musk has not talked about cutting military spending or increasing corporate taxes to fund social safety programs.

The ironies and hypocrisies unfolding with this taxpayer-funded billionaire are almost too great to categorize and enumerate. A man charged with reducing government spending could not have launched his electric car company without a $465 million dollar subsidy from the Obama administration and he has been the recipient of billions in federal government contracts. Just the money saved from tax rebates provided by Texas include a $16 million dollar deal for his lithium refining plant in Robstown and $60 million in tax rebates and abatements for his Tesla factory in Austin. In Reno, Nevada, he got a $330 million dollar kickback to expand his battery plant. The billionaire who wants to reduce government spending would not be a billionaire without government spending on his pet projects and companies.

Whatever happens at Boca Chica, it will never return to being a drift of sand and water where people quietly fished and camped and marveled at the natural world. And that loss is not worth the funding of one man’s fanciful dream of traveling to Mars.