The dream of tech billionaire and aide to U.S. President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, to show the SpaceX spaceport within the southern state of Texas right into a metropolis turned a actuality on Saturday, when voters overwhelmingly supported turning his “Starbase” into a brand new municipality.
The poll, which additionally named a senior SpaceX consultant as its mayor with 100% of the early vote, was by no means actually doubtful.
Most of the 283 eligible voters had been SpaceX staff on the web site on Boca Chica Bay bordering Mexico, or had connections to the corporate, whose billionaire chief has lengthy eyed a human mission to Mars.
“Starbase, Texas,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X, “Is now a real city!”
His publish got here after polls closed and unofficial outcomes printed by Cameron County confirmed an unambiguous 97.7% backing for the mission.
Musk himself is registered to vote, Cameron County Election Coordinator Remi Garza instructed Agence France-Presse (AFP), however the South African-born embattled 53-year-old had but to solid his poll when the early voting interval closed on April 29.
Official paperwork present that just about 500 individuals reside across the base in Cameron County, on land owned primarily by SpaceX or its staff.
The change permits Starbase to regulate constructing and allowing and keep away from different regulatory hurdles, whereas amassing taxes and writing native regulation.
The vote got here at a tough time for Musk, who is predicted to cut back his position because the unofficial head of Trump’s cost-cutting “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) to as an alternative focus extra on his troubled automobile firm, Tesla.
The early voting additionally confirmed as mayor Bobby Peden, who’s vp of testing and launches at SpaceX, in line with LinkedIn. He was the one identify on the poll.
The Texas base launched in 2019 and is a key testing web site for the corporate’s rocket launches.
Not everybody had been upbeat in regards to the prospect of a SpaceX city.
Bekah Hinojosa, co-founder of the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, earlier voiced concern over the environmental impression, warning of extra “destruction.”
“They would attempt more illegal dumping, they would build up their dangerous rocket operations and cause more seismic activity, cause our homes to shake and that they would destroy more of the wildlife habitat in the region,” she instructed AFP earlier than election day.
Environmental considerations
It was Musk himself who proposed the identify Starbase in a social media publish throughout a go to to the ability 4 years in the past.
Then, final December, the overall supervisor of SpaceX, Kathryn Lueders, appealed to native authorities to grant the positioning metropolis standing.
Lueders argued in her letter that SpaceX already maintained infrastructure there, like roads, schooling providers and medical care.
She promised that creating the brand new metropolis wouldn’t undermine SpaceX’s efforts to mitigate the bottom’s environmental impression.
SpaceX didn’t reply to an AFP request for remark.
The hub overlooks the Gulf of Mexico – renamed the Gulf of America by Trump – and there may be controversy over entry to Boca Chica Beach.
A Texas House State Affairs committee rejected a invoice this week by Republican lawmakers that will have given coastal cities with spaceports management over seashore entry.
The activist Hinojosa mentioned SpaceX has restricted entry to Boca Chica Beach for a few years and instructed AFP she apprehensive the vote might minimize entry totally to a seashore “our families have been going to for generations.”
The Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas, descendants of an Indigenous tribe within the space, has additionally complained.
In 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency and Texas authorities discovered that SpaceX was chargeable for repeated spills and the discharge of pollution into Texas waterways.
In response to studies that its rockets had induced injury to wild fowl nests, Musk quipped on social media: “To make up for this heinous crime, I will refrain from having omelette for a week.”
Source: www.dailysabah.com