SpaceX’s attack on a fragile habitat: Four insights from our investigation

When Elon Musk first envisioned South Texas as a site for a new space base, he promised that SpaceX would leave a small, environmentally friendly footprint and that the surrounding area would remain “untouched.”

A decade later, the reality is very different. A New York Times investigation shows how SpaceX’s rapid growth in the region has dramatically altered the fragile landscape and threatened the habitat the U.S. government is supposed to protect there.

There will likely be further impact in South Texas and other places where SpaceX is expanding. Musk has said he hopes to one day launch his Starships – the largest rocket ever built – a thousand times a year.

SpaceX executives declined repeated requests for comment, but Gary Henry, who until this year served as a SpaceX adviser on the Pentagon’s launch programs, said the company is aware of concerns about SpaceX’s environmental impact and is committed to addressing them.

Here are four findings from our research:

Musk used nature reserves as a buffer for SpaceX operations

Rocket launch sites in the United States, such as Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and Kennedy Space Center in Florida, are typically huge, secure facilities covering tens of thousands of acres of land.

When Musk looked at the area near Brownsville, Texas, he had no intention of buying up anywhere near that much land. Instead, he wanted to buy a tiny piece of land in the middle of public lands—what the team involved called the “donut hole.” He figured the surrounding state parks and federal conservation areas would serve as natural buffers.

But there was a catch to this plan. In Boca Chica Village, which is adjacent to the planned launch site, there were several inhabited houses and the state park was visited by many visitors. These people had to be evacuated during each planned launch.

Even more worrying, the proposed launch site is right next to one of the most important migratory bird habitats in North America. And the nearby Boca Chica beach serves as a breeding ground for Atlantic ridley turtles, the most endangered sea turtle species in the world.

Musk and SpaceX initially told local authorities that the company’s impact on the region would be minimal, and that the development would bring several hundred jobs to the region through an investment of about $50 million.

Company officials also told the Federal Aviation Administration, SpaceX’s top regulator, that they planned to launch their Falcon rockets from the area. The Falcons are the company’s workhorses and are used primarily to carry satellites into space.

Musk has implemented a very different plan. Investments in SpaceX operations, including a rocket manufacturing facility, now total $3 billion. A second launch pad is under construction. Industrial growth has led to such severe traffic jams on the tiny two-lane road to Boca Chica that some of the now 3,400 SpaceX employees and contract workers ride hovercraft to work.

SpaceX has also begun testing Starship, a rocket that dwarfs the largest version of the Falcon and weighs nearly four times as much. When test flights for Starship began, Mr. Musk hailed the progress as a step toward a manned space shuttle to Mars. The FAA had not initially expected operations of this scale or a rocket of this power.

Officials at the U.S. National Park Service have also been frustrated by SpaceX’s broken promises. The company agreed to certain conditions to limit its impact on the nearby Palmito Ranch battlefield, site of the last fighting in the Civil War. But a now-retired park service official told the Times that SpaceX had violated several of those agreements. “We were misled,” said the official, Mark Spier.

In April 2023, SpaceX conducted its first large-scale test launch of a Starship. But the rocket malfunctioned and a self-destruct mechanism eventually caused it to explode. Steel plates, chunks of concrete and shrapnel were thrown thousands of feet into the air and then struck the bird habitat and the nearby state park and beach. One piece of concrete was found 2,680 feet from the launch site – well outside the zone where the FAA had suspected damage.

This was neither the first nor the last time the protected areas were pelted with debris. Since 2019, SpaceX tests of Starship rockets or prototypes have resulted in fires, leaks, explosions or other problems related to the rapid growth of Musk’s complex in Boca Chica, which he calls Starbase, at least 19 times.

Even the hovercraft that employees use to commute to work posed a new threat to a “globally important area for shorebirds,” as U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials described in a letter to SpaceX.

The environment lagged behind the ambitions of SpaceX and America

Mr. Musk took advantage of the limitations and competing missions of the various agencies to put the greatest brakes on Starbase’s expansion.

Those charged with protecting the region’s cultural and natural resources – particularly officials from the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service – have repeatedly lost out to more powerful agencies, including the FAA, whose goals are closely aligned with Musk’s.

The US already relies heavily on SpaceX to launch its defence and commercial satellites into space. Both the US Department of Defense and NASA intend to carry cargo aboard the new spacecraft. NASA has a $2.9 billion contract to use the rocket to land astronauts on the moon for the first time in over 50 years.

The FAA is responsible for ensuring the safety of space travel, and while it is required to conduct an environmental study of SpaceX’s activities, the agency acknowledges that protecting the environment is not its top priority.

“We didn’t mandate that debris be blown into state parks or onto state lands, but the bottom line is that nobody was hurt,” said Kevin Coleman, the top FAA official who oversees space launch authorizations. “We certainly don’t want people to feel like they’re being steamrolled. But it’s a really important operation that SpaceX is doing down there. It’s really important to our civilian space program.”