Elon Musk PHOTO: RYAN COLLERD / AFP / Profimedia
The city will initially host some of the employees of SpaceX, Musk’s space company. Now it is small, but the tycoon has big plans in the southern part of the United States.
The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla and SpaceX, is developing a new project. It is about Starbase, a city that Musk wants to build on the southern border of the United States with Mexico, where there is also the headquarters of SpaceX, Musk’s company that deals with the design of satellites and rockets.
Compliant The New York TimesAlthough Musk has long planned to create a city, he had to go through the bureaucratic process, which says that the establishment of a new city must meet certain requirements, in this case it is a number of residents who already live there and a citizen support. .
To finalize the legal aspect, SpaceX employees have already settled in the territory where the city will be and began to collect signatures to present a petition to the authorities.
The document mentions some details related to the city of Musk, including the name of the future mayor, in the person of Gunnar Milburn, the head of the security department of SpaceX. It is mentioned that the city initially has about 500 residents, of which 219 are permanent residents. The size of the city will be about 3.6 square kilometers.
For comparison, this means that it will be slightly larger than the city of Darabani in Botoșani, the second smallest city in Romania. At the same time, the locality will be able to establish its emergency and emergency institutions, namely the police and firefighters.
In a letter accompanying the petition, the person in charge of the Starbase project, Kathryn Lueders, conveys that SpaceX needs the opportunity to develop as a community because it already provides employees, due to its isolated location, medical services and schooling for employees and their families.
It is assumed that even Elon Musk lives, with his employees, in the buildings built near the base of SpaceX. Although he is not among the signatories of the petition, he voted in the presidential elections in November in a hall of the region.
Alan Bojorquez, a lawyer who advises people who plan to establish cities in the state of Texas, said that it is a unique situation because it is the first time that he has worked for a company that wants to build a city for employees.
Controversies around the new city
An investigation of those from USA Today shows that opinion is divided on the location of SpaceX’s headquarters.
Criticism comes in particular from the area of ​​environmental activists, who fear that with the installation of President Donald Trump in the White House, the space transportation industry will develop.
In the Trump administration, Elon Musk will take over the leadership of an institution that deals with the restructuring of the government.
Activists, including Bekah Hinojosa, co-founder of an environmental organization in the region where SpaceX is based and where Musk’s city is supposed to be built, say that Trump’s close relationship with the founder of SpaceX is one of the reasons why Musk is not not responsible for the damage it causes to the environment in South Texas, where he wants to build Starbase.
