Hey everybody, welcome back to the Elon Musk Podcast.
This is a show where we discuss the critical Crossroads, The
Shape, SpaceX, Tesla X, The Boring Company, and Neuralink,
and I'm your host, Will Walden. If you want uninterrupted
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Some really interesting things are happening down at
Brownsville, Boca Chica Starbase, Texas area.
Now that's where SpaceX is building the world's largest
rocket, the Starship. It's around 400 feet tall and is
more powerful than any rocket that's ever flown.
Now they're building this rocket, and that's very
interesting. But there are things that are
happening behind the scenes that are almost as interesting as the
rocket itself. And it's kind of weird because
you don't really hear about this stuff that much, but it's one of
the most important aspects of delivering a rocket to space,
and that's the infrastructure. How do they build a rocket?
It's the machine that builds the machine, as Elon Musk would say.
And how do they do that? Well, they have to work with
local governments, and they have to work with the land that they
have to build the machines on. Now just recently, SpaceX and
the city of Brownsville that worked together came up with a
resolution to rename the Boca Chica area where Starbase is,
which is where they're building this giant rocket.
They want to rename it to Starbase.
Straight up Starbase Boca Chica. It will be known as Boca Chica
going forward. You know, if they want to
reference it, they can call it Boca Chica or they can just call
it Starbase. And this is from the Brownsville
texas.gov site, City passes resolution.
This happened last year, by the way, December 18th.
So City passes resolution in support of renaming area east of
Brownsville to Starbase. So the Starbase area about 20
miles away from Brownsville, it's about a 30 minute drive
ish. I've driven that hundreds of
times and it's known to most people in the Space Flight
community as Starbase and most people that are locally there,
they know it is Boca Chica. So it does take a little bit of
nudging from the local government and also the State of
Texas to rename this because there are things that happened
behind the scenes that we don't see because we see the rocket
all the time or we see this giant rocket.
But this is, it's important, trust me.
The notice is hereby given that a regular meeting of the board
of Cameron County Spaceport Development Corporation will be
conducted as authorized by the VTCA, Texas government code,
etcetera, etcetera. So basically what they're doing
approve a resolution in support of the United States Postal
Service mailing name which I know it's not cool like it's a
post office thing but the renaming the spaceport of
Starbase to actual Starbase, it's a postal code now so if you
have 1234 Starbase, that's your address now 1234 Boca Chica, the
mail will probably still get there they they pretty much know
what it is. There's not other things out
there. So it's either going to be
Starbase or Boca Chica. So that's interesting, this that
that is happening. But there's also a few other
things that are happening along the lines of the Starbase
facility itself. And The thing is massive.
You know, there's a a production facility that builds the Rockets
and then there's a launch facility down the road about a
mile ish that flies the Rockets. So what's in between there
though? There's just kind of Dead Space.
There's really not much. There's a couple streaming
platforms, a couple YouTube streamers that sit on the side
of the road and film. There's people that hang out
there on the side of the road and there's robot filmers all
over the place. So what does SpaceX need to do?
They need to get that land. They need to get that land they
make. They need to make sure that all
the land in between the production field facility and
the launch facility, they can use as much as possible, right?
So if they can do that, if they can do that, they can build more
parts of the machine that builds the machines.
That'll take us to Mars, right here.
State considers handing over Parkland to SpaceX.
Now, this is a big deal. This isn't just a let's hang out
and build a couple rockets here and there kind of thing.
This is a huge deal because this is going to, it's kind of kind
of set off some alarms for environmental advocates down
there. But also SpaceX is going to be
using this area to build the infrastructure that will be
building the Rockets even faster, though they already do.
And then they're going to have two launch pads there where the
rock, two rockets per day possibly could launch from
Starbase as it's been named now by the post office.
So they can do that now. So all of these little green
dots here, let me explain this to you.
All these little green dots right here, these are whoop,
these are places that are owned by the state right now.
Little plots of land, these little ones right here and this
one right here. So this right here, that's where
they launched the Rockets from. And this little arrow right here
that I just pointed to, this area right here is where they
launched the Rockets from to. This is towards Brownsville.
This way. If you go that way, it's towards
Brownsville. About 20 minutes.
Thirty minutes that way. But everything in between here,
little plots of land. The state owns that land, so
SpaceX can't use it for anything.
They can't build there. They'll get in major trouble if
they build there. All of those plots, they're
owned by the state. What are they from?
There are people that own lots of land there, little tiny lots
of land. I actually thought about buying
one of those lots because you could put up a Robo camera and
have a live stream of Starbase 24/7 if you have one of those
lots. So you could buy one of these
lots. There are lots over here as well
that you can, you know, put a camera in and you know, there's
there's other places over there that you can put a camera.
But one of these lots is something that I was interested
in. But it's kind of expensive to to
buy these lots, talk to a couple people.
It's very. It's a process.
Let's just say that it's a, it's a pretty big process, but SpaceX
would use this to move facilities over to these lots.
And as you can see, there are a few of them like this one right
here. These are all clustered
together. So they could build something
there. They could build something in
this cluster, something in this cluster, this butt's right up
against where they are right now, this cluster, etcetera.
So they can have little, little things, little pockets where
they could, I don't know, build fuel depots or something.
I don't know what they're going to do there.
Nobody really knows right now. They know they're going to
develop it if they if this passes and it has to go through
the government of Texas in order to pass, right.
So the government of Texas has to pass this.
They have to make sure that everything's up to code.
But this is what's going to happen.
SpaceX has all of this land up here, the Laguna land up here.
It's like 44 acres of land and all.
They wanted those little plots down there, all these little
green plots. And if they exchange these tiny
green plots for like, I think it's 44 acres, If you look up
here a little bit, it tells you how much it is.
But if they exchange that and they see that there's a value,
if the Laguna has more value than the Boca Chica area, then
the state, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, they may be
OK with this because if they can trade, this would be an even
traded. By the way SpaceX would trade
that giant chunk of land for those little plots throughout so
they can develop more things. So this is going to be an
ongoing story. This may not happen right away.
This is supposed to happen sometime a date adopted and
approved 25th of January 2024. And if they approve this, this
is going to be happening in the next few days that they approve
this land trade here with SpaceX and the government of Texas.
So if they can do this, it's 43 acres from Boca Chica SP, the
exchange tract. And then so that's what SpaceX
would be getting 43 acres they'd be giving of them giving the
state 477 acres near the Laguna, 477 acres.
So if you do the math, that's an exponentially huger amount of
numbers 43 compared to 477. I think the government of Texas
would be OK with them, you know, the Wildlife Refuge going back
to them. But it also depends.
There's so many other factors though.
Who's going to take care of this land now?
There Will they have to hire people to take care of this land
now the 477 acres. Was SpaceX taking care of this
land before? Were they paying for it?
And it is SpaceX just going to have that big cluster, like I
was saying before, like this cluster of land near Starbase.
That's it. That one strip of land, you
know, near the production facility, which is over here,
ish. And then all the way down to
here, they would have little spots and then they'd have all
of this to build the Rockets at. Hey, thank you so much for
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