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The evolution of Elon Musk’s services in South Texas has not been as initially announced to local authorities.
By Eric Lipton
When Elon Musk first established a new domain base of operations in South Texas, he promised that SpaceX would have a small ecological footprint and that the surrounding domain would “remain intact. “
A decade later, the truth is different. A New York Times investigation shows how SpaceX’s ferocious expansion into the region has drastically altered the fragile landscape and threatened the habitat that the U. S. government is tasked with protecting there.
More repercussions are likely to be in South Texas and other places where SpaceX is expanding. Musk has said he hopes to one day launch his Starships, the largest rocket ever made, a thousand times a year.
SpaceX executives declined repeated requests for comment. But Gary Henry, who until this year was an adviser to SpaceX on the Pentagon’s launch programs, said the company is aware of concerns about SpaceX’s environmental impact and is committed to addressing them.
Here are 4 takeaways from our survey:
Rocket launch sites in the United States, such as Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and Kennedy Space Center in Florida, are generally huge, secure facilities spanning tens of thousands of acres.
Musk didn’t aim to buy that much land when he was looking at the domain near Brownsville, Texas. Instead, he was looking to buy a small piece of land in the middle of a public lot, which the team in question called a “no-cover period. “He believed that surrounding state parks and federal wildlife preserves would serve as weed buffers.
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