Latest news with #Starbase

TechCrunch

19 hours ago

Business
TechCrunch

Is Starbase a modern company town?

Tech billionaires are no longer satisfied with sprawling corporate campuses or virtual town squares. Now they want to start their own cities in the physical world. Most recently, Starbase, Texas, has been incorporated and is now the official hometown to just under 300 SpaceX employees. These communities centered around one industry or company aren't new. Company towns have been around since before the industrial revolution to attract workers who had to uproot their lives and move to rural areas. While Starbase might not be identical to coal mining towns of yore, for the residents of the city, their lives will now completely center around SpaceX.

Texas Legislature gives new city of Starbase authority to shut down local beach for SpaceX launches

Yahoo

2 days ago

Business
Yahoo

Texas Legislature gives new city of Starbase authority to shut down local beach for SpaceX launches

Texas lawmakers agreed to give the new city of Starbase the authority to periodically close down a South Texas beach, giving more power to municipal officials with close ties to SpaceX over the objections of local activists trying to preserve access to the beach. After previous versions of the measure died earlier during the legislative session, a last-minute addition to a bill related to the Texas Space Commission successfully granted Starbase officials the authority to temporarily close down Boca Chica Beach for SpaceX launches. House Bill 5246 revises the power and duties of the Texas Space Commission and the Texas Aerospace Research and Space Economy Consortium. A conference committee report of the bill added a section that allows the Space Commission to coordinate with a city to temporarily close a highway or venue for public safety purposes. In South Texas, that will give the Starbase city commissioners the authority to approve those closures which would affect State Highway 4, a road that runs through Starbase and leads to the beach, as well as the beach itself. Rep. Greg Bonnen, a Republican from Friendswood who chaired the conference committee on the bill, said the bill would ensure Texas remained the gateway for the future in space exploration. "The future is being shaped right here in Texas,' Bonnen said. Defending the addition to the bill, Rep. Richard Peña Raymond, a Democrat from Laredo, argued that the city of Starbase would have a better idea of whether it is safe for people to be out on the beach in a similar way the Laredo manages their international bridges. However, Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, along with other Democrats, pushed back against the bill, noting that previous attempts to give Starbase this authority never made it to the House floor. Martinez Fischer also argued that the county commissioners were responsible for the beach and should get to make the call on when to shut it down. 'The question is who gets to make the call and who is in the best position to have the public interest in mind in closing a public beach?' Martinez Fischer said on the floor Sunday. 'I submit to you it's not the people in the company town that's effectively a wholly-owned subsidiary of SpaceX, and it's not the Space Commission.' Local organizations strongly opposed the measure, hosting phone banking events to urge lawmakers to vote against the bill. Their objections to the measure stemmed from concerns that the public would increasingly be shut off from Boca Chica Beach, which is affectionately known as the people's beach. It was once the most accessible beach before the Queen Isabella Causeway was built to connect Port Isabel to South Padre Island in 1954. Today, Boca Chica is beloved because it lacks the heavy commercialization of the beaches of South Padre Island. Additionally, the Esto'k Gna Tribal Nation, commonly known as the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, view the beach as part of their ancestral land. The tribal and environmental groups have also opposed the increasing space flight activity that SpaceX is conducting on the beach over fears that the company's rocket launches are damaging nearby wildlife and polluting the gulf waters. Despite their efforts, the Federal Aviation Administration gave SpaceX the green light to increase the number rocket launches from Boca Chica Beach from five to 25 times per year. This authorization came after the FAA found through an environmental assessment that there would be no significant environmental impacts. The FAA released a draft of the environmental assessment last year for public review and held public meetings in January. Critics from the environmental and indigenous groups argued that the FAA's review was not thorough and that the agency did not consult with the Carrizo/Comecrudo tribe. The move to allow Starbase to close the beach shifts that authority away from Cameron County, a power that the county inherited in 2013 just as SpaceX was about to begin their spaceflight activities there. Now that authority lies with Starbase, a new city whose residents and elected officials are either SpaceX employees or have ties to the company. The mayor and city commissioners held their first public meetings this week, appointing key staff, adopting city codes, and approving a financial plan to seek a loan from SpaceX to help fund the city through the end of the fiscal year. Reporting in the Rio Grande Valley is supported in part by the Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc. First round of TribFest speakers announced! Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd; U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-San Antonio; Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker; U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-California; and U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas are taking the stage Nov. 13–15 in Austin. Get your tickets today!

Elon Musk departs DOGE with a horrific legacy

Yahoo

3 days ago

Business
Yahoo

Elon Musk departs DOGE with a horrific legacy

Elon Musk's government service has supposedly come to an end, with the billionaire decamping to his company town of Starbase, Texas. Except there he was in the Oval Office on Friday, in a press availability alongside President Donald Trump. Sporting a black eye — given to him by his 5-year-old, he said — Musk grumbled about his time in the nation's capital. 'We became essentially the DOGE bogeyman,' Musk said. 'It just became a bit ridiculous.' That complaint echoed similar comments in his media tour preceding that appearance, as Musk whined about his DOGE stint not turning out quite as triumphantly as he had hoped. 'The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,' he told The Washington Post. 'DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything.' Not only that, 'People were burning Teslas. Why would you do that? That's really uncool.' In other words, his noble effort at reform was undone by the deep state, and all he got for it was a heap of criticism and slumping sales for his car company. Won't somebody pity the billionaire? Musk has teams of acolytes around him who will no doubt be eager to reassure him that if some people in Washington don't adore him, that just means they didn't deserve him in the first place. But in truth, Musk's feelings are irrelevant; what matters is the chaos he brought to the federal government that serves all of us, and the deaths he is at least partly responsible for around the world. The malignancy that is his Department of Government Efficiency project lives on, not only in the cadre of incompetents he has left behind in Washington, but in the spirit of gleeful destruction ever more firmly incorporated into Republican ideology. Musk's time in Washington was characterized by a toxic combination of ignorance, arrogance and malevolence. He didn't know how things worked, wasn't interested in learning and didn't care how many people he would hurt. All of it stemmed from his belief that not only is government incapable of doing anything right, almost everything it tries to do isn't worth doing anyway. So if he had an impression that an agency was bad — say, the U.S. Agency for International Development — what would be the point of learning its goals and methods? Just shut the whole thing down. The demise of USAID is one of the most horrific legacies of Musk's time in Washington. The abrupt cutoff of food aid to vulnerable people around the world 'has destabilized some of the most fragile locations in the world and thrown refugee camps further into unrest,' according to internal State Department documents obtained by ProPublica. The withdrawal of medical assistance — especially through PEPFAR, the spectacularly successful U.S. program that fights the spread of HIV in Africa — is already leading directly to people's deaths, almost certainly by the thousands. Some studies have concluded that hundreds of thousands of people either have died or will die because the U.S. government, at Musk's urging, has all but shut down its foreign humanitarian efforts. The experience of USAID was repeated in agency after agency, often at Musk's whims or to serve Musk's interest. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which used to protect Americans from financial scams, could cause problems for Musk's plans to add payment services to his social media platform X. But now CFPB staff have been sent home, and the agency has essentially ceased to function. We saw a pattern repeated over and over: Musk's DOGE staffers would descend on a government office, demand access to critical systems and start destroying programs they didn't bother to understand. Officials who stood up to them were fired. Contracts were canceled, offices were closed, and people who relied on services were abandoned. That damage can't easily be undone, and even if Musk and some his top lieutenants are gone, their underlings are still in the federal government. And while the shock of what DOGE was doing may have been appalling to most of us, to Republicans in both the executive branch and Congress, it was thrilling (though Republicans on Capitol Hill have been less thrilled about formalizing DOGE's cuts into law). They've now assimilated Musk's ethos as their own: break everything you can see, fire as many committed employees as possible, don't worry about consequences to people's lives, and if what you're doing is illegal, well, maybe the courts will sort that out later. And no, Musk was never going to cut $2 trillion from the budget; the fact that he thought he could just showed how clueless he was. But his contempt for the government and the public servants who work in it was obvious from the outset. He wanted indiscriminate destruction, and he got it. Now he claims to be peeved that the Republican megabill doesn't reduce the deficit, as though that was ever something the GOP cared about. If he's really concerned, perhaps he should use some of his billions to lobby for tax increases on the wealthy. For all his complaints, Musk is getting most of what he really wanted. His time in the government coincided with the Trump administration shutting down many investigations Musk faced over his labor and environmental practices. The administration is also moving to direct billions of dollars in funding meant for rural broadband to his satellite company, and Trump's new idea for a 'Golden Dome' missile defense system looks like a contracting gravy train with Musk's companies in the front car. So why isn't Musk happy? The answer isn't that he didn't succeed, because in most ways he did. What upsets him is this: He didn't just want to lay waste to the government and enrich himself. He wanted to do that and then have us thank him for it. Tell that to a mother watching her child die from malnourishment, or a skilled park ranger who got fired from their dream job, or someone in tornado alley who can't get updated weather forecasts, or AIDS patients who no longer have lifesaving medication. I'm sure they'll be very sympathetic. This article was originally published on

Elon Musk bemoans DOGE being a ‘whipping boy' as he reveals agency's new target

The Independent

6 days ago

Business
The Independent

Elon Musk bemoans DOGE being a ‘whipping boy' as he reveals agency's new target

Elon Musk bemoaned his Department of Government Efficiency becoming a 'whipping boy' for the Trump administration as he revealed the agency's next target in a new interview. Approximately 1,500 miles away from the White House on the factory floor of SpaceX's facility in Starbase, Texas, Musk issued a rare rebuke against President Donald Trump, arguing his federal government slashing force had become a scapegoat if 'something bad would happen.' 'DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything,' Musk told the Washington Post on Tuesday. 'So, like, something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it.' After bankrolling Trump's presidential campaign and being one of his closest allies during his first 100 days in office, the president's 'First Buddy' has significantly reduced his presence in frontline politics. Last month, Trump's Chief of Staff Susie Wiles revealed the world's richest man was no longer working from the White House. Despite a shift in attention, Musk stated that his work with DOGE is not yet complete. He said he plans to focus on a less-controversial task than dismantling federal agencies: improving the federal bureaucracy's computer systems. 'There's, like, so many situations where the computers are so broken,' he said. 'And this is just literally a thing that was brought to my attention.' Elon Musk issued a rare rebuke against President Trump and his adminsitration in an interview Tuesday (AP) Musk's perceived sway on the president and cuts enacted by DOGE, leading to more than 280,000 layoffs, did not come without costs. Tesla was caught in the political crosswinds, with the electric vehicle company's share prices plunging to historic lows and a spate of arson attacks erupting across the globe. 'People were burning Teslas,' Musk said. 'Why would you do that? That's really uncool.' Musk returned to Texas ahead of a test flight Tuesday of Starship, the world's most powerful rocket, which spun out of control once it reached space and broke apart as it returned to Earth. The tech billionaire also revealed a renewed focus away from D.C.: returning astronauts to the moon and sending people to Mars. 'I'm physically here. This is the focus, and especially around launch,' he said, sporting an 'Occupy Mars' t-shirt. 'Everything comes together at the moment of launch.' Musk described his 'maniacal sense of urgency' to propel the first humans onto the Red Planet. Musk's critcism against the Trump administration comes as his relationship with the president continues to unravel (AFP via Getty Images) 'I think the primary goal should be Mars,' he said. 'We could perhaps go back to the moon along the way. But the primary goal should be Mars, because that's really the next great leap beyond Apollo.' Earlier Tuesday, Musk sharply criticized Trump's 'one Big, Beautiful Bill' and argued it 'undermines' the work done by DOGE. Trump's showpiece tax bill is predicted to increase the federal deficit by more than $3.3 trillion over the next decade, contradicting Musk's efforts to reduce the U.S. national debt through cost-cutting measures drastically. 'I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,' he told CBS News.

SpaceX loses another Starship on test flight as Musk seeks to renew focus

Washington Post