Ready, set, launch.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is trying to make its South Texas launch site into a new, fully incorporated city.
In a letter sent Thursday to local officials, the company called for a local election to turn Starbase, the company’s main location for testing, building, and deploying rockets, into an incorporated city.
The site is situated at Boca Chica Beach near the Mexican border.
“SpaceX is proud to play a major role in the South Texas and Cameron County communities, which are home to thousands of our employees, with several hundred living at Starbase,” Kathryn Lueders, the general manager of Starbase, wrote in the letter to Cameron County. “To continue growing the workforce necessary to rapidly develop and manufacture Starship, we need the ability to grow Starbase as a community.”
Lueders proceeded to lay out the company’s reasoning for the drastic move, citing SpaceX’s involvement in running a number of civic functions for the 3,400 full-time SpaceX employees and contractors that were found to be working at the Starbase site, according to a local impact study issued by local officials earlier this year.
“Incorporating Starbase will streamline processes required to build the amenities necessary to make the area a world class place to live — for the hundreds already calling it home, as well as for prospective workers eager to help build humanity’s future in space,” she continued. “As you know, through agreements with the County, SpaceX currently performs several civil functions…including management of the roads, utilities, and the provision of schooling and medical care for the residents.
“Incorporation would move the management of some of these functions to a more appropriate public body,” Leuders added.
Musk also announced that he would be moving SpaceX and social platform X’s headquarters from California to Texas earlier this year.
In a post on X Thursday, Musk celebrated the petition’s release writing: “SpaceX HQ will now officially be in the city of Starbase, Texas!”
It’s not the first time the company has talked about taking the leap toward incorporation, however—Musk fired off a tweet in 2021 that said: “Creating the city of Starbase, Texas.”
But despite the provocative statement, Cameron County’s top elected official, Judge Eddie Treviño Jr., confirmed to the Associated Press that Thursday’s letter was the first the county had heard from the company about incorporating a new community.
“Our legal and elections administration will review the petition, see whether or not it complied with all of the statutory requirements and then we’ll go from there,” Treviño told the AP.
