Starbase City: Elon Musk’s SpaceX Gets Its Own Municipality In Texas, Complete With A Familiar Mayor

Musk has been vocal in the past about his desire to turn the SpaceX base of operations into a fully-fledged city, after the firm first began buying up land there in 2012.

“Starbase is home to the development and production of SpaceX’s Starship, a project designed to fundamentally alter humanity’s access to space. We are investing billions in infrastructure and generating hundreds of millions in income and taxes for local businesses and government, all with the goal of making South Texas the Gateway to Mars,” SpaceX said in a letter to county judge Eddie Treviño in December.

“SpaceX is proud to play a major role in the South Texas and Cameron County communities, which are home to thousands of our employees, with several hundred living at Starbase. To continue growing the workforce necessary to rapidly develop and manufacture Starship, we need the ability to grow Starbase as a community. That is why we are requesting that Cameron County call an election to enable the incorporation of Starbase as the newest city in the Rio Grande Valley.”

Some 283 residents, mostly employed by SpaceX, were eligible to vote in an election on Saturday, May 3, determining whether the area would be granted city status, as well as electing commissioners and a mayor for it. Of those, 216 voted in favor of the new Starbase City, with six voting against. In the same election SpaceX Vice President Bobby Peden was elected Mayor, while senior director of environmental health and safety for SpaceX, Jordan Buss, and former SpaceX operations engineering manager Jenna Petrzelka were elected as commissioners. All ran unopposed.

Starbase City will become a Type C city, a category of municipality home to fewer than 5,000 people, per the BBC. With this status, officials will be able to levy a local property tax of up to 1.5 percent, among other powers.

While employees of the firm voted overwhelmingly in favor of the move, residents of the surrounding area have concerns. A bill currently going through Texas may grant the city the power to close a local highway during launches, limiting access to Boca Chica Beach and Boca Chica State Park. The company has not operated there without issue, and was fined $150,000 by the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality after dumping wastewater, though SpaceX maintains that the fines were due to “disagreements over paperwork”.

Like a lot of the rest of the world, the area has had its fair share of SpaceX debris raining down on it during “uncontrolled disassemblies” or “rocket explosions”.

“Impacts from the launch include numerous large concrete chunks, stainless steel sheets, metal, and other objects hurled thousands of feet away along with a plume cloud of pulverized concrete that deposited material up to 6.5 miles northwest of the pad site,” the US Fish and Wildlife Service said to CNBC in 2023, following an explosion which set a 1.4-hectare (3.5-acre) area of Boca Chica State Park land on fire, adding that they, “documented approximately 385 acres of debris on SpaceX’s facility and at Boca Chica State Park, which is leased by the Service and managed as a component of the Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge.”

Environmental groups have concerns around how the company has already operated in the area, prior to being made a city, largely centering on the effect to the immediate area, its turtles, and hundreds of bird species. Musk has often cited regulation, as well as politics, as a reason to move operations to Texas. Now he has his own city, and a certain amount of control over what he does with it. With the upcoming bill aimed at allowing SpaceX to control access to nearby beaches and national parks, his city could soon be at odds with the surrounding area.