ON THE MORNING of April 20, the world’s largest rocket blasted off from Starbase, the SpaceX launch facility in Boca Chica, near the southernmost tip of Texas. Dubbed Starship, the 397-foot craft was expected to reach a cruising altitude of 792,000 feet and circumnavigate the globe in 90 minutes, traveling at near-orbital speeds.
But from the start, things didn’t go as planned. The liftoff excavated a gaping crater in the launchpad, hurling debris thousands of feet and igniting a three-and-a-half-acre fire. Things worsened from there: Shortly into the flight, Starship’s booster failed to detach, and the rocket tumbled back toward Earth, finally exploding above the Gulf of Mexico.
As Starship transformed into a fireball, a jubilant crowd of SpaceX employees at the company’s California headquarters erupted into applause and popped a champagne bottle, as a table of three SpaceX engineers livestreamed the launch like a sporting event. “What an exciting morning. Oh my gosh. We had a successful liftoff,” one of them said after the rocket went down in flames. “Today was amazing.”
The mood in the communities surrounding Starbase was less joyous. The blast shook buildings and shattered the window of a local gym. Particles fell from the sky, coating cars, houses, and schools. “It felt like an earthquake,” says Sharon Almaguer, who was home in Port Isabel, the small city across the bay from the launchpad. “My 80-year-old mother was terrified.”
Almaguer’s fear turned to anger as the shaking subsided and the rain cleansed her home of launch debris. Not only did it seem that Elon Musk and his company were forgoing basic safety precautions, evading environmental regulations, and obstructing their beach rights as he pursued his quest for interplanetary space travel, but she and her fellow Texans were subsidizing him in the process.
A decade earlier, wearing a dark suit and fiddling with his microphone, Musk had appeared before the state legislature’s House Committee on Appropriations to ask for “any support Texas can offer” to bring a SpaceX facility to their state. And he implied he might take his business elsewhere if the financial perks weren’t enticing enough. “We are looking at other potential launch locations,” he said.
That visit was one of several rendezvous between Musk, his lobbyists, and Texas officials
