The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and SpaceX agreed to a land swap earlier this year in the southernmost reaches of the state: The department would give 43 acres of Boca Chica Beach State Park to Elon Musk’s rocket company, in exchange for 477 acres of land near the Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge.
Publicly, the deal appeared to be done. But in September, SpaceX informed TPWD that the company is “no longer interested” in pursuing the agreement.
Sana Pashankar, space reporter for Bloomberg, spoke to the Texas Standard about the deal’s dissolution.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Why did Space X pull out of this agreement? Is it clear?
Sana Pashankar: It’s not really clear. Space X is a very secretive private company, so we don’t know exactly why they pulled out of the deal. And the company actually did not respond to a request for comment when we asked why.
The only thing we do know for certain is that they were planning to use the land to expand their operational facilities at Boca Chica, according to government files. So, I mean, maybe the company figured out a different way to go about that, but it’s still not exactly clear.
Say more about why the company wanted these 43 acres of Boca Chica Beach in the first place. On the face of it, this seemed like something of a lopsided deal, 43 acres in exchange for 477 acres.
Yeah, totally. So the 43 acres would be around their existing facilities at Boca Chica. And, you know, Elon Musk is on the pursuit to create Starbase, which is his testing site for the Starship Moon and Mars rocket. And so I think just expanding their facilities around there would have been key to creating the city of Starbase, as he calls it.
And so I think that it would have just served as a way to, you know, ramp up production of the rocket. I mean, their goal is eventually to stage multiple flights of Starship in a day. So I think for them, the location was probably more important than the actual amount of acres.
But again, they’re very secretive, so we don’t know exactly what they were using the 43 acres for.
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You know, when I first heard about this deal, I wondered if SpaceX might be trying to build itself a buffer around its existing launch facility because there’s been so much pushback over the environmental impacts and fires and that sort of thing that have been caused by some of the more catastrophic test launches.
I mean, that’s definitely something that we had also considered. Again, it’s more speculation than anything. But, in 2023, in the debut launch of Starship, they had actually set on fire area of the state park.
It wasn’t the exact same area that they were looking to get from the land swap deal. But you’re right, there have been environmental impacts in the same state park in which they are looking to pursue more land in this land swap deal that they backed out of.
So I don’t think it’s completely out there to say. But again, we never know for sure.
Well, what have you heard from folks in the Brownsville area about the deal being called off? Because this would have meant an additional almost 500 acres of land near that wildlife refuge.
Speaker 2 Yeah. So, honestly, a lot of the local community organizers that I spoke with were actually opposed to the deal because they were saying that the 43 acres of Boca Chica State Park was sacred for the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe, which is an Indigenous tribe who says that those are ancestral lands.
So actually, you would assume that this is more of a win because there were actually some local community organizers who sued the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for pursuing this deal.
But even though this is a win and they were opposing the agreement – you know, they would go to the public agency meetings and speak against it –they’re not jumping for joy just yet, because many of them think that, you know, this doesn’t necessarily mean Elon Musk’s Starbase dreams are dead just because of this one curious move.
Has Texas Parks and Wildlife had anything to say about this development?
While I was initially reporting, they kind of refused to speak with me because of pending litigation, and that is the lawsuit that I mentioned from the local community organizers. And I haven’t heard anything from the department following that.
But I think I’ve been seeing some in follow-up reporting to our original article that mySanAntonio reported that the department responded that they’ll continue to identify and develop new state parks for wildlife conservation and recreation. So we’ll just see.
