The last time SpaceX launched a rocket in South Texas, charter boat captain Eddie Reyes was bobbing in a pontoon boat less than 2 miles from the pad with a group of paying passengers. A blast of flames erupted and shockwaves rattled the boat as the rocket climbed into the sky.
The arrival of SpaceX has brought good business to Reyes and his family. Since the establishment of Starbase, Elon Musk's company town, his charter boat business has picked up as space fans flock to the area for a glimpse of launches. Reyes' nephew works at SpaceX as a welder and drives a Tesla Cybertruck.
But the same rockets Reyes sees lifting his family's fortunes are also shaking his mother's home. Shockwaves from launches are cracking the ceiling, loosening window seals and sinking the foundation. She is among dozens of residents now suing Musk's company for damage.
"You can't stop progress," Reyes said.
Many people in the Rio Grande Valley region surrounding Starbase — the company town centred on SpaceX's rocket operations — have arrived at a similar conclusion. They are willing to ride the wave of Musk's interplanetary ambitions and accept the consequences that come with it.
While SpaceX's rapid expansion is bringing jobs, visitors and global attention, it is also fuelling lawsuits, environmental concerns and a growing divide among the region's 1.4 million residents. Following SpaceX's record-setting $1.75 trillion IPO on Friday, which will raise $75 billion partly to scale Starship from intermittent test launches to potentially weekly flights, the pressures facing residents around Starbase are set to intensify.
"This company is literally shaking the earth," said Tino Villarreal, a city commissioner in Brownsville, the city of 185,000 people bordering Starbase. "By the amount of workforce it wants to produce, by the actual wavelengths that are shaking our soil."
SpaceX declined to comment for this story.
The competing realities of Starbase were underscored ahead of a Starship launch last month when contract worker Jose Bautista, 25, suffered a fatal fall at a nearby SpaceX facility, an episode first reported by the San Antonio Express-News. He was the latest SpaceX worker to die or suffer serious injuries as the company pushes ahead with Musk's plans to colonise Mars.
On TikTok, a video posted by local policy researcher Etienne Rosas demanding the company take accountability generated thousands of likes. A cousin of Bautista thanked him in the comments, writing that the family needed prayers.
Others defended SpaceX, arguing the company was not responsible for the death. One commenter suggested Bautista, even in death, would recognise the incident as an accident.
"Projects of magnitude like the Hoover Dam for example always claim many lives and the project continues. It's the American way," the commenter wrote.
The person did not respond to Reuters' request for comment.
A spokesperson for the City of Starbase declined to comment. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is investigating the incident, also declined to comment. A representative for Bautista's family declined comment.
The Cameron County Sheriff's Office referred Reuters' requests for comment to SpaceX.
The company has yet to publicly acknowledge Bautista's death.
When construction began at the Starbase site in 2014, Boca Chica was a small cluster of homes along the Mexico border and a popular beach destination for Brownsville residents.
Today, two launch towers rise nearly 500 feet above the beach, alongside expanding neighbourhoods of Airstream trailers, tiny homes and newly built mansions.
SpaceX hopes one day to manufacture components for as many as 1,000 Starships at Starfactory, a 1 million-square-foot manufacturing facility, and the Gigabay, a 380-foot-tall structure used to assemble the rockets.
The town has its oddities. SpaceX employee Bobby Peden was elected mayor last year soon after the town was incorporated. Starbase is establishing its own police force and has discussed opening a municipal court, where Peden would serve as interim judge.
At the local school, Ad Astra, young children are taught to work "with numbers into the thousands — far beyond kindergarten standards", according to the school's website. The local bar, Astropub, is open only to SpaceX employees.
"When I showed up, we had one street with houses, we were building rockets in tents, and we didn't have water or a sewer system," said Kathryn Leuders, Starbase's former general manager before incorporation.
Now, she said, families are being raised in a community that also has "a launchpad in its backyard".
"It's a really cool thing," Leuders said.
Like the Mars colony depicted in a massive mural on the side of Gigabay, the town serves as a potential model for future interplanetary settlements.
On a recent evening before a Starship launch, employees streamed from Starbase buildings on bicycles while convoys of Cybertrucks lined the highway to Brownsville, passing sculptures of Musk and a sign reading: "Mars Embassy. Future Location."
"I've been to NASA, and you don't get anywhere near something like this," said Nicholas Poindexter, a pest-control worker and space enthusiast who travelled from Indiana to watch a Starship launch.
"Last time I was here I thought, holy cow, you could throw a rock and hit" a rocket, he said.
Many local officials have welcomed Starbase as a boost to one of the poorest regions in the United States.
An impact report produced by the Greater Brownsville Economic Development Corporation in March said Starbase has created 5,000 jobs and generated $100 million in tourism revenue over the past year.
Wearing a SpaceX Starship T-shirt, Villarreal pointed to new restaurants serving the increasingly affluent workforce amid boarded-up storefronts and run-down homes.
"Musk has moved at the speed of light, and I think that's helped Brownsville also really move a lot faster in our growth and development," Villarreal said. "It's injected a steroid into Brownsville."
Some Rio Grande Valley residents initially welcomed SpaceX.
Maria Pointer had lived in the region for nearly two decades when she sold her home to SpaceX in 2020 after meeting Musk.
"We were excited," she said. "I really felt, at the time, that we deserved the moon as the gas station to wherever all the Elons of the world wanted to go in interstellar space."
Over time, Pointer said, she became less optimistic and found the town less welcoming.
In April, she visited Starfactory with an Italian television crew to film an interview beneath a giant "X" near the building's entrance, where her former kitchen once stood.
A security guard approached and told them to leave.
"It was very military," she said.
Residents of neighbouring communities including Laguna Vista, Port Isabel and South Padre Island allege that Starship launches have damaged their homes, according to a class-action lawsuit filed against SpaceX in April.
One plaintiff, who declined to be identified on her attorney's advice, showed Reuters her home in Port Isabel.
Cabinets sit unevenly, doors no longer close properly, and chipboard covers warped flooring she said was damaged by mould after a shower pipe burst following a rocket launch.
She estimates foundation repairs alone would cost about $100,000, more than half the value of the house.
"They're wanting to get to Mars," she said. "But what about us that are here? I'm here now. And nobody is thinking about us."