BROWNSVILLE — The day before SpaceX’s first-ever Starship launch, Brownsville Mayor Juan “Trey” Mendez III was nearly an hour into his last state of the city speech before mentioning the private rocket company and its power to transform the region.
The mayor knows a bit about its impact. He’s held the city’s top office since 2019. He’s watched up close as Elon Musk’s private space company has strengthened its hold on the Brownsville area.
“They continue to have a several 100-million-dollar economic impact in our community and the entire region every year,” Mendez told the crowd gathered at the Brownsville Events Center. “The launch is an event that will forever change our world, opening up the possibility that we will one day visit other planets from just outside of Brownsville.”
ORBITAL DRAW: Tourists streaming into South Texas for a chance to see first-ever orbital launch of SpaceX Starship
Mendez, who hits his term limit next month, said SpaceX now employs about 1,700 workers at its Starbase launch site in Boca Chica, the unincorporated community about 25 miles east on the Gulf of Mexico. Apart from its launch site, the company does research and development and operates a booster-rocket assembly line and has other operations on its campus there.
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Natalie Lopez and her son, Elijah Curley, walk Tuesday, April 18, 2023, past SpaceX’s Starship and Super Heavy rocket system as it stands on the company’s Boca Chica launch facility. After aborting an attempted launch on Monday, the company has scheduled a second attempt as early as Thursday.
But the spectacle of the world’s biggest rocket roaring off its shoreline launch pad also helped fill cash registers and sales and hotel tax coffers as thousands converged on Brownsville, South Padre Island and Boca Chica to watch the launch of Starship — and its spectacular explosion four minutes into the flight. Theirs was a sprawling, pulsing party of nerds.
But despite the economic rewards SpaceX has conferred on the area, many residents and business owners hesitate. They can’t quite embrace Musk or his rocket company, and they’re not counting on either to make them rich.
As SpaceX fans flooded South Padre Island to watch the launch across the ship channel last week, Hershal Patel said his five hotels in the small resort town had been full throughout the weekend, his revenue surging about 60 percent. The island is about 5 miles from the Starbase launch site.
A mix of typical beachgoers and SpaceX followers rented all 850 of his rooms. Typically, he’d rack up numbers like that during Spring Break in March or Memorial Day weekend, not mid-April.
“Demand is through the roof,” said Patel, 35. “If it were the summer, the demand would be through the stratosphere — and Mars.”
It came back to earth Monday, though, when SpaceX scrubbed its first planned launch early Monday. His hotels’ occupancy dropped to 65 percent Tuesday, he said. But he expected space enthusiasts to be rushing back for the rescheduled launch later in the week.
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The launch rushes were a nice bonus, Patel said. Good to have but not yet enough to justify an expansion of his business; it’s just not bankable.
Though Musk, SpaceX CEO, has said he wants a steady succession of Starship launches, he’s also threatened to move them to Cape Canaveral. And other than sub-orbital tests of Starship a few years ago that drew far fewer fans, Thursday’s was the first-ever launch of the giant rocket.
“There were more people on the island than I’ve ever seen for the launch,” Patel said. “But it’s hard to make an investment of tens of millions of dollars without certainty that things will happen on a consistent basis.”
Ahead of last week’s launch, tourists had been traveling from across the United States and around the world to South Padre Island, said Cindy Trevino, marketing director for the South Padre Island Convention and Visitor’s Bureau.
“This, in turn, boosts our economic impact as they shop, dine and visit our local attractions,” she said Tuesday. “Since the launch was scrubbed, we have visitors occupying our hotels and visiting our local restaurants to hopefully stick around for the next few days to capture the launch.”
Despite the happy hotel, bar and restaurant owners, SpaceX barely seems to register as a presence here. There are no SpaceX-themed banners on the island’s streets and the shops aren’t stocking Starship T-shirts or other items for fans to buy as souvenirs.
Retailers say they don’t keep track of SpaceX operations and don’t have time to keep up with media reports or social media for the latest on the company’s ever-changing launch dates. They’re too busy serving their regular crowds of beachgoers.
And Trevino said the city did not have data on the economic impact of SpaceX operations.
But its impact was obvious last week.
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Natalie Lopez, a 38-year-old freelance photographer from Grand Rapids, Mich., brought her 17-year-old son, Elijah Curley, to the island last Sunday to witness the launch. She decided to rent a condo on the island after the launch scrubbed.
“Monday felt like I was at a sporting event,” Lopez said, describing how she joined thousands of SpaceX fans at South Padre Island’s Isla Blanca Park that early morning. She and her son had a direct view of Starship across the channel. “When it scrubbed, I felt like everyone just left a concert where the musician didn’t show up.”
They looked for SpaceX memorabilia on the island and found none. After giving up the hunt, they headed over to Boca Chica to visit the Starbase compound on a rainy Tuesday.
“This redeems the scrub,” said Curley, a high school junior who wants to become a SpaceX engineer. He gazed up at Starship from the sand dunes on the beach surrounding the launch pad. “This reusable rocket is a marvel in engineering.”
Mendez offered few specifics last week about the economic impacts on Brownsville, the border city the unemployment rate of which is among the highest in Texas and where nearly a quarter of its 187,000 residents live in poverty.
In his address a year ago, the mayor said the company spent about $430 million on operations in Cameron County in 2021 and was expected to add $855 million in economic output in 2022, including payroll and local purchases of goods and services.
The city’s top economic development official said she sees the impact firsthand.
“Creating jobs means SpaceX employees buying homes, shopping and keeping our talent in the community,” said Cori Peña, president and CEO of the Brownsville Community Improvement Corp. “Brownsville is embracing the culture of what tech is and what SpaceX brought here.”
During the mayor’s address, city council members noted in pre-recorded videos that Brownsville-South Padre Island International Airport recently picked up new direct flights to Los Angeles and Orlando, Fla. That means people could more easily travel between Brownsville and SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., as well as Florida’s Space Coast.
They also noted that SpaceX had leased a 46,000-square-foot warehouse at the airport to support its growing Starlink satellite program, yet another sign of the company’s investment in Brownsville.
“Let’s not forget, this is Brownsville, on the border, on the sea and beyond,” the mayor said in his closing statement.
An increasing number of area businesses are trying to capitalize on their proximity to Starship.
Since opening in 2021, the family-owned Hopper Haus bar and grill in Port Isabel, which is just across the bridge from South Padre Island, has become a hotspot for SpaceX engineers, fans and in-the-know YouTubers such as LabPadre and Everyday Astronaut.
People watch as the Super Heavy rocket pushes the Starship spacecraft on its inaugural flight test from Boca Chica on Thursday, April 20, 2023, as seen from Isla Blanca Park in South Padre Island.
Co-owner Ernie Zavaleta, 53, said the brewery’s name is a reference to SpaceX’s Starhopper test vehicle and its cocktail menu features “The Elondo,” which contains vodka, gin or rum, Fresca and Topo Chico.
Over the weekend ahead of Monday’s attempted launch, the establishment was drawing SpaceX fans from China, Germany, England, Australia and across the U.S. The activity tripled its usual weekend business.
“It’ll probably be our best month since we’ve opened,” Zavaleta said.
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Hopper Haus has a “three-legged business approach” that includes reeling in the steady local base, seasonal tourists and wintering Texans, he said.
It also serves an increasing number of SpaceX employees — “young guys in their 20s and 30s who bring in their laptops and drink IPAs” — who talk space jargon at the bar and on the patio near the bay. “We’ll get the inside scoop, so that’s increasing my interest in SpaceX,” Zavaleta said.
SpaceX is a fourth economic element in Hopper Haus’ three-legged approach — a bonus.
But the owners also weigh Musk’s warning from last year that the company might use Florida, not South Texas, for most launches. For now, the owners are optimistic that Musk will continue launching Starships from here and they’re considering construction of a viewing deck to better see the launches from about 5 miles away.
“I’m not going to be the one that doubts Elon,” Zavaleta said. “Can we count on this? I’ve got a (contractor’s price) quote on a deck.”
A half-hour drive west in Brownsville, Rebecca Rodriguez, 44, is also banking on SpaceX keeping its launches in South Texas.
She also saw a jump in business over the past week at her Space Dog Station, which opened in 2021. Set near the border crossing, the stand itself features paintings of an astronaut, Tejano icon Selena and sells Tex-Mex styled hot dogs to locals and tourists — many of whom learned about the business from YouTubers after SpaceX operations.
“We thought it would be a good idea to integrate ‘space’ into our business,” Rodriguez said. “A lot of people love our concept. Lots of people come from out of town and make sure to stop at Space Dog.”
Erik J. Larson, the 51-year-old author of “The Myth of Artificial Intelligence,” drove down from Central Texas in hopes of seeing SpaceX’s second attempt to launch Starship. He met with Bill Anderson, a 60-year-old fellow computer scientist from Flagstaff, Ariz., at the Starbase launch site. The friends marveled at the company’s Starship prototypes, which are displayed in what SpaceX calls its Rocket Garden, before heading back to their respective hotel rooms on South Padre Island and in Harlingen.
“We wanted to see the launch and experience it,” Larson said ahead of Thursday’s launch. “But I’ll have to go if they don’t launch because I’ll run out of money.”
Back on South Padre, Patel said he’s been talking with other hotel owners about whether they can capitalize on SpaceX’s fluctuating launch times and what happens if Musk ultimately moves most launches to Florida — leaving Starbase mainly as a development and production site.
“The Starship launch here is a big, big, big plus,” he said. “But if that whole business disappeared tomorrow, we’ll be fine.”
eric.killelea@express-news.net
Eric Killelea is a technology reporter, covering Space X and area cybersecurity, cloud-computing and IT companies. Before moving to Texas, he worked for local newspapers and freelanced for The New York Times in Minnesota, New Mexico, North Dakota and Montana. He is from New Jersey. Email Eric at Eric.Killelea@express-news.net.