In service to the squillionaire class, Elon Musk continues his colonial mission to space while poisoning sacred and environmentally sensitive lands with in-air ‘rapid unscheduled disassemblies’ and ocean flops.
Pete Howson
Rocket man Elon Musk always unveils his visions for us with a bang. Despite being inevitably delayed, his announcements for a killer truck, Dogecoin Ponzi-scheme, or TV remotes wired directly into our brains, are never sloppy. Last month, on ‘May the fourth,’ SpaceX released plans for their Polaris Dawn ‘Skywalker’ spacewalk missions for squillionaires. The announcement included a display of their new Hollywood-inspired designer space suits.
It’s probably no coincidence SpaceX planned to launch and bring home their Starship—the biggest flying object ever built—on June 6. On the same day in 1985, Russian cosmonauts launched what NASA historian David Portree described as “the most impressive feat in space history.” The mission to rescue Russia’s Salyut-7 space station was later made into a Hollywood blockbuster. While the Soviets ‘scienced the shit’ out of their space machines to keep them doing whatever space machines do, Musk has a different plan.
Building rockets taller than the Statue of Liberty, filling them with liquid methane, before blowing them up (or dropping them in the sea) one after the other, might seem wasteful. But it’s Musk’s money, right?
Squillionaire space fantasies come with huge costs for the rest of us. When Starships experience a so-called ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’, toxic particulates rain down on people’s homes. Debris breaks windows. The first two tests caused fires across Boca Chica Park, home to endangered birds and ocelots.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Boca Chica is a poor location for blowing things up. But Starbase continues to expand. Musk is building a huge production facility, dubbed ‘Starfactory,’ covering a million square feet, for building Starship components.
Eating into Boca Chica Park, the company is also working on a second launch pad for Starships.
In March, dozens of Rio Grande Valley residents drove six hours to attend a public comment meeting in Austin, hosted by Texas Parks and Wildlife commissioners. After listening to resident’s concerns over a controversial land-swap deal for nearly four hours, the commissioners voted unanimously in favor. The deal allows SpaceX to grab 43 acres of state park land—sensitive algal flats for shorebirds—in return for hundreds of acres of lesser-value scrubland.
Local resident Sadie Hernandez summed things up: “Clearly [the commissioners] who are interested in this land-swap aren’t interested in the people here. They just want the validation and the fantasy that they’re rubbing shoulders with Elon Musk.”
For the Carrizo-Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, the mouth of the Rio Grande at Boca Chica Beach is one their most sacred sites, now being sacrificed. “We’re being squeezed from all angles,” one Carrizo-Comecrudo representative tells me.
“There’s the border wall, a huge LNG export facility, the huge Rio Bravo Pipeline. And now SpaceX. We never gave our consent to any of this. It’s genocide of our people and our lands.»
In response to the squeeze, the Carrizo-Comecrudo are continuing their strategy of buying up land to stymie development. The tribe plans to use the land so far purchased to set up a school.
“We’re trying to protect our language, just as we’re trying to protect our land,” says Juan Mancias, the tribal chair. But he acknowledges their fight could be in vain. The developers could claim eminent domain and occupy the tribe’s ancestral lands.
It’s not only local people treated with contempt. SpaceX promised to attract development, and bring prosperity with secure high-tech jobs to a poor and underemployed area.
According to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), though, SpaceX has forced sacked workers to sign illegal severance agreements and gag orders. Meanwhile, a Reuters review of Texas property records shows that SpaceX and its contractors can be far slower to pay builders and suppliers than they are to break ground. Unpaid bills have led many construction-industry businesses to bring legal claims against SpaceX just to get compensated.
Thanks in part to Musk’s visions, the cost of space travel has dropped considerably. A seat on a SpaceX rocket and an eight-day stay on the International Space Station (ISS) now only costs $82 million.
Musk predicts his one-way tickets to Mars will cost somewhere between $500,000 to $1 million, a price at which he thinks “it’s highly likely that there will be a self-sustaining Martian colony.” For the poors, Musk has launched an indentured labor package where workers take out a loan to pay for their tickets.
There might be plenty of good reasons to put things in space (and preferably bring them back). But Musk’s fantasies of going where few have gone before, are impacting the survivability of people and wildlife on Earth.
I must admit I watched the Starship launch today with excitement. My four-year-old was even more thrilled when it plopped in the sea. The excitement fades when you look at the death in its wake, or see the Indigenous tribes robbed of their customary land. Unpaid taxes from billionaires that—were there some greater oversight over how the super-rich amuse themselves—could have been spent on any of the many crises we’re facing on our ailing planet.
We can ‘science the shit’ out of our limited resources with sustainable space technologies. We can discover new worlds. But let’s not let SpaceX destroy our own in the process.
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Peter Howson is a technology writer, researcher, and assistant professor in international development. He is the author of Let Them Eat Crypto: The Blockchain Scame That’s Ruining the World, available now from Pluto Press and your local book shop. Follow him on X at @PeterJHowson.
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