Elon Musk’s Starbase wants to expand in south Texas

South Texas Landowners Face a 7,100-Acre Question as Starbase Pushes to Grow

Ecorescuezone.com – The Gulf Coast town of Starbase, Texas, has asked its residents to weigh whether to swallow roughly 7,100 acres of adjacent state and private land — a move that would dramatically reshape the coastal landscape near Boca Chica Beach and intensify the rocket-launch operations already underway there. The newly chartered municipality, established in 2025, framed the annexation as a step toward better coordinating with federal and state agencies, including the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. For the landowners whose parcels sit within the proposed boundary, the question is less about coordination and more about control.

A City Built Around a Rocket Program

Starbase did not emerge from organic settlement growth. It was chartered in part to give SpaceX’s rapidly expanding workforce a municipal framework and to unlock the manufacturing capacity needed for an ambitious launch schedule. In April 2025, the Federal Aviation Administration granted SpaceX permission to scale up operations at its Boca Chica Launch Site, authorizing up to 25 annual Starship/Super Heavy orbital launches, up to 25 annual Starship landings, up to 25 annual Super Heavy landings, and ongoing vehicle upgrades. Those figures sit squarely within Elon Musk’s publicly stated roadmap: build a launch complex capable of sending humans back to the Moon and, ultimately, to Mars.

The existing SpaceX footprint already includes launch pads, fabrication halls, and test ranges. During launch windows, Starbase exercises road-access control over a nearby public beach and a nature reserve, effectively closing coastal corridors to the general public. An annexation that folds thousands more acres into city limits would extend that administrative reach considerably.

Residents Push Back

Bekah Hinojosa, co-founder of the South Texas Environmental Justice Center, drives Highway 4 toward Boca Chica Beach on a sweltering August afternoon. In the opposite lane, eighteen-wheelers and gleaming Cybertrucks streak past. She describes a landscape in constant flux.

“This road is always under construction. SpaceX is rapidly colonizing and changing the entire landscape of Boca Chica.”

Hinojosa turns off the highway onto a dirt track bordered by dense vegetation, pointing out parcels belonging to private owners who have no desire to be absorbed into the municipality.

“We’re on beautiful pristine land owned by a property owner who doesn’t wanna get sucked up into Elon Musk’s city of Starbase.”

Among those landowners is Barbara Buckner, 56, whose grandmother escaped the Holocaust in Poland, resettled in Chicago, and eventually purchased acreage in south Texas. Buckner frames the annexation as a conflict of interest made structural: the mayor of Starbase, Robert “Bobby” Peden, and one of the city’s two commissioners both hold positions at SpaceX. Peden did not respond to repeated interview requests.

“How can you be supporting residents when you work for SpaceX?”

Buckner sees the current proposal as a first tranche in a longer sequence.

“I think they’ll keep trying to expand.”

Gerold Podraza, an 83-year-old landowner in the affected zone, voices a broader anxiety about concentrated economic power shaping municipal decisions.

“It just represents that the people who have money are able to do things that they, shouldn’t be allowed to do. The only reason why that’s happening is because they have leverage with politicians, and they can influence politicians to make judgments that are not good for the community that they represent.”

An Environmental Record That Raises Stakes

The expansion debate lands against a backdrop of prior regulatory trouble. In 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency determined that SpaceX had violated the Clean Water Act after discharging tens of thousands of gallons of industrial wastewater into the surrounding area. Hinojosa says she has returned to the site multiple times after launch events to catalog debris, including metal fragments scattered across the terrain.

“I’ve come out here several times after a SpaceX launch to document all of the debris. I have photos of metal shrapnel blown up into this area that we’re on.”

SpaceX did not respond to questions about the environmental footprint of its launch operations. For residents already living within the blast radius of rocket exhaust and spent hardware, the prospect of 25-plus additional orbital launches per year — each accompanied by landings and vehicle upgrades — sharpens the environmental calculus considerably.

County Officials See Limited Leverage

Sofia Benavides, the Cameron County Commissioner representing the district where Starbase sits, says the state’s annexation statutes give the city a clear legal pathway and leave the county little room to intervene.

“There’s nothing that we can do to stop it.”

That assessment underscores a structural reality: once a municipality is chartered, its growth tools — annexation, zoning, road authority — operate under state law, and neighboring counties have limited veto power over the process.

What Happens Next

Starbase set an August 18 deadline for potentially affected landowners to submit signatures indicating whether they support or oppose the annexation. If the city determines it has gathered the requisite threshold, it is obligated to convene two public hearings before any final vote. The outcome will determine whether the municipality’s boundary swells by more than seven thousand acres of Gulf Coast terrain, folding private ranches, state-managed land, and sensitive coastal habitat into a jurisdiction whose primary economic engine is a private rocket company.

For the residents of Cameron County’s southern reaches, the vote will not merely redraw a municipal map. It will decide how much of the remaining undeveloped coastline answers to a city whose leadership overlaps with the very enterprise seeking to launch spacecraft into orbit from their doorstep.