Space X’s Mars Mission Gets a Boost From Accelerated Launches at Texas Colony

One small step for SpaceX; one giant leap for Elon Musk’s fever dreams.

Musk’s space company is getting a boost to fulfill its long-publicized mission to Mars. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Tuesday approved SpaceX’s request to quintuple annual Starship launches out of its home base at the southern tip of Texas, which, as of Saturday, has its own city — a testing site, perhaps, before eventual Mars colonization.

Company Towns

Starbase, the city Musk built around SpaceX, was added onto the Texas map through a near-unanimous local vote, reportedly made up of mostly employees and their families. The first mayor will be SpaceX vice president Bobby Peden, who ran unopposed.

Call it a company town, a patch of 1.6 square miles close to Mexico’s border. An official request written in December by General Manager Kathryn Lueders said that the incorporation would drive workforce growth, enabling the development and manufacturing of the company’s Starship. A Texas bill granting Starbase control over Boca Chica beach, which it could close on weekdays to accommodate the stepped-up number of launches that were just greenlit, has been revived.

Musk’s Texas takeover is not limited to Starbase. He’s also building up Snailbrook, a new settlement in Bastrop County, 35 miles east of Austin, Texas, that is also part of a broader vision to integrate work and life for Tesla, Boring, and SpaceX workers. The idea is hardly new. Company towns have existed for as long as there have been very ambitious men:

• Hershey, Penn., is the town it is today because the Hershey chocolate company founder needed milk, or an area known for its dairy farms. Fordlandia was established in the Brazilian rainforest because Henry Ford needed rubber for auto production, and was eventually abandoned due to a series of technical and cultural failures.
• Celebration, Fla., a suburb of Orlando near the amusement parks, was founded by the Disney company and envisioned to be a sanctuary, free of crime and drugs. It has since been divested.

More recent efforts include Meta’s Willow Village or “Zucktown” in California, and Google’s San Francisco Bay Project, which has stalled after the company ended an agreement with its development partner to review its options. One of the bigger problems with company towns is their link to commerce. Detroit, for example, has been a difficult city to revive following the decline of auto manufacturing. And Washington, D.C., might suffer a similar fate.

Bully for SpaceX: The company’s business prospects look good. The White House’s 2026 budget proposal would top up funding for Mars-related projects by $1 billion. There’s also NASA’s latest pivot to Mars. The surprise development looks auspicious for the only rocket maker with preexisting plans to land on the red planet.