Opinion Starbase is now a city

Everything’s bigger in Texas, including dreams of interplanetary colonisation. And now, thanks to a 212-6 vote, Elon Musk’s Starbase, home to his SpaceX rocket company, is officially more than a whimsical Twitter musing: It is a legally recognised city in south Texas. The facility and launch site of SpaceX’s rocket programme in Boca Chica is contracted to the Department of US Defence and NASA. Its tiny population, mostly made up of SpaceX staff and their families, makes the electoral outcome entirely unsurprising. But that doesn’t mean that the victory is any less welcome for the US President’s billionaire best friend. If anything, it is the salve he might have been craving, given the dwindling Tesla profits and his recent dip in popularity on the back of DOGE excesses.

Tesla trucks rolling down freshly paved roads, children in academies for “little astronauts”, Starlink internet connections and reusable rockets launching just beyond the backyard fence might well be Musk’s idea of a techno utopia — he’d floated the proposal of a township in 2021 first. But he is, of course, not the first one to have dreamt it up. In India, for instance, in 1912, Jamshedji Tata laid the foundations of Asia’s largest steel plant around a village called Sakchi. The industrial city that flourished around it came to be known as Jamshedpur after him, now the largest city in the state of Jharkhand. Modinagar, a township in UP set up by Gujarmal Modi of Modi Industries, came up in 1933.

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The question is whether Musk can trade in the thrill of spectacle for the steadier challenge of community building. There are already murmurs from locals about beach closures and environmental impact, early signs that not everyone shares his vision of a Mars-on-Earth. If Musk can’t balance ambition with responsibility, then Starbase might become just another monument to a rich man’s whim. The world doesn’t need another poor little rich boy with a new toy — it needs visionaries who stick around to clean up after the fireworks.