PAST AND FUTURE, BRUSH AND SAND
The fascination with tiny Texas town Boca Chica continues in the national press. We relayed last time the coverage the global tech press was giving to the fever of launch-prep work underway in the area by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, all preparations for his first launches of his prototype Starship spacecraft. Now, in a February piece in The Atlantic, author Marina Koren writes about the changes the SpaceX operation is having on the town of Boca Chica itself. Five years in since the rocket company first arrived in a big way, the company is now expanding its footprint, buying up houses too close to the rocket site, and warning others living in the area that things are about to get much noisier and that windows go from shaking during a launch to actually shattering. Not a big place to begin with, the Boca Chica community is unincorporated and there are only about 40 residential houses in the entire town—and no water pipes. Water is trucked in. Past and future all in one small stretch of Texas brushland and sand—and no one can now call it “sleepy.”
And hot off the press, the Los Angeles City Council has just approved SpaceX’s permit to build a manufacturing and research facility at the Port of Los Angeles.
No launches in LA, though—those are reserved for Texas. To be honest, I look forward to waking up on the nearby Padre Island beach some morning in the not-too-distant future, enjoying a warm cup of campfire coffee and watching one of these rockets burn through the morning sky.
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I was proud to see this recent 
