Before Musk arrived in 2014, Boca Chica was home to some of the most unspoiled beaches in Texas, along with a wide variety of threatened and endangered species and a modest community of some forty homes. He is-on some days, depending on Tesla’s stock price-the world’s richest man, and he warps time and space around him like a bowling ball on a trampoline. There is perhaps no place where his weight is felt more than in Boca Chica, the unincorporated bayside community just north of where the Rio Grande trickles into the Gulf of Mexico. He has an army of passionate fans and an army of passionate detractors, both of which he enjoys juicing up.
Securities and Exchange Commission investigations, and a defamation case brought by the hero of the 2018 Thai cave rescue, whom Musk baselessly called a pedophile-from which he only emerges stronger. In the past decade, he has been at the center of a succession of stories-exploding rockets, spontaneously combusting Teslas, U.S. Musk has never been to space, but he seems curiously unbounded by the laws of gravity.
Now, NASA expects him to have the rocket ready to touch down on the lunar surface with astronauts on board within the next few years. In September 2019, for example, he predicted that the Starship would be flying earthlings into orbit by the end of 2020. Still, Musk has a history of overpromising. On May 5 the Starship finally had a soft landing-though a fire, successfully extinguished, broke out on the landing pad. SpaceX expects failures, and it hopes to learn from them. Elon Musk, the company’s brilliant and eccentric founder and CEO-and since December 2020, a resident, at least for tax purposes, of Austin-has long described the Starship tests as an iterative process. Oh, the humanity!Ī little more than two weeks after the last catastrophic failure, NASA officials-those dinosaurs at the federal space program-announced a $2.9 billion contract with SpaceX to use a variant of the Starship as the landing vehicle for NASA’s future missions to the moon. “Flying debris and pieces of Starship there’s stuff smoking on the ground in front of the camera!” said the host of a privately run livestream, one of many catering to the company’s fans, its lens pointed at the landing pad in the town of Boca Chica as steel chunks rained down with frightening velocity. “Looks like we’ve had another exciting test,” announced the sheepish narrator on SpaceX’s official livestream. On March 30, the fourth test didn’t even make it back to the pad: near the apogee of its flight, it blew up with a calamitous boom, spreading shrapnel more than five miles afield. The next, on March 3, appeared to land mostly intact but exploded eight minutes later. The second test, in February, crunched too. The rocket climbed some 41,000 feet, halted as it was supposed to, and returned to its landing pad-much too rapidly. The first proper test of the Starship, the (aspirationally) reusable rocket offered by the SpaceX corporation and launched from the southern tip of the Lone Star State, took place on December 9, 2020. Perhaps in the distant future historians in far-flung corners of the solar system will note that the twenty-first-century Texas space program did not get off to a particularly strong start.
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