Tag: rockets

Residents of Musk’s Texas space city rip billionaire for destroying quiet beach town

Residents of Elon Musk’s “space city” in southeastern Texas blasted the SpaceX CEO’s treatment of them as he transformed their quiet beach town into his grand Starbase vision, a report said.

Boca Chica was a small, seaside village at the mouth of the Rio Grande on the Mexican border with just a few streets before SpaceX moved in, promising to turn the town into a terrestrial terminus for space travelers.

The company broke ground on its launch facility in 2014 and started testing rockets there in 2019. As work on the project progressed, SpaceX gradually bought up most of Boca Chica’s three dozen homes, though a few homeowners held out, according to reports. 

“Creating the city of Starbase, Texas,” Musk tweeted in March 2021. “From thence to Mars. And hence, the stars.”  Starbase, he added, “would encompass an “area much larger than Boca Chica.”


SpaceX reportedly bought out the homes of numerous residents of Boca Chica, where Musk built his SpaceX rocket launch facility.
REUTERS

“It was a little neighborhood, and Elon Musk came and took it over,” Mary Helen Flores,  a teacher from nearby Brownsville, told The Sunday Times. “He renamed it Starbase without asking anyone. He just announced it on Twitter.”

Maria Pointer, who used to live in “the last house in Texas” before the border, told the paper that her home is now being used by SpaceX to store medical supplies.

She could still point out her old home, as it stands, juxtaposed to Starbase’s massive rocket assembly towers. 

In 2012, Musk received bids from states and territories that wanted to host a new SpaceX base, with Florida and Puerto Rico being the two leading candidates before Musk settled on Boca Chica after meeting with Texas officials, according to The Sunday Times.


SpaceX ignites 31 out of 33 raptor engines during a Starship booster static fire test Thursday, Feb. 9, 2023,
SpaceX ignites 31 out of 33 raptor engines during a Starship booster static fire test at Starbase on Feb. 9.
AP

“He picked Texas because it’s a dirty red state where no one’s going to care what he does in a poor border town,” Flores told the paper.

Flores said she “knew when I saw them putting the launchpad right behind the dune line that it was going to be a disaster for our beach.”

 “He has destroyed a pristine paradise in the name of saving animals? Come on,” she said, dismissing the world’s richest man as “just a delusional billionaire.”

 “They are destroying an ecosystem that has been there for hundreds of years,” Flores added.

She said she’s seen several fires and “a lot of sea turtle deaths,” following repeated launches and multiple explosions at the site.


Musk has defended the Boca Chica site as necessary for the future of humankind.
AFP via Getty Images

Earlier this month, SpaceX fired up 31 of 33 heavy booster engines on the world’s largest rocket ever built at Starbase.

Musk, whose plans to expand Starbase have reportedly been put on hold, has defended the site as necessary for the survival of humankind.

“Something could go wrong on Earth,” he said at an event on the Starbase launchpad last year, according to The Sunday Times. 

“We are life’s guardians,” he said. “The creatures that we love, they can’t build spaceships but we can bring them with us.”


A spectator watches a SpaceX test launch near Boca Chica with binoculars earlier this month.
AP

In March 2021, Musk claimed that Starbase’s population will “grow by several thousand people over the next year or two” as the company — headquartered in Hawthorne, California — expands its workforce.

To sweeten the deal for prospective residents and local officials, Musk pledged to donate $20 million to schools in Cameron County, which is home to the Boca Chica.

He also said he’d give $10 million toward “downtown revitalization” in Brownsville, where about 29 percent of the population lives in poverty.



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Russia claims deadly attack, but Kyiv denies anyone killed

The Russian military claimed Sunday to have carried out deadly missile strikes on barracks used by Ukrainian troops in retaliation for the deaths of dozens of Russian soldiers in a rocket attack a week ago. Ukrainian officials denied there were any casualties.

The Russian Defense Ministry said its missiles hit two temporary bases housing 1,300 Ukrainian troops in Kramatorsk, in the eastern Donetsk region, killing 600 of them. Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said the strikes were retaliation for Ukraine’s attack in Makiivka, in which at least 89 Russian soldiers died.

Serhii Cherevatyi, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s forces in the east, told The Associated Press that Russian strikes on Kramatorsk damaged only civilian infrastructure, adding: “The armed forces of Ukraine weren’t affected.”

The Donetsk regional administration said seven Russian missiles hit Kramatorsk and two more hit Kostyantynivka, without causing any casualties. It said an educational institution, an industrial facility and garages were damaged in Kramatorsk, and an industrial zone was hit in Kostyantynivka.

Kramatorsk Mayor Oleksandr Honcharenko said two school buildings and eight apartment houses were hit overnight. Photos he posted showed no indication that it had been an attack on the scale claimed by the Russians or that anyone had been in the buildings when they were struck.

The Russian Defense Ministry said its missiles hit two temporary bases housing 1,300 Ukrainian troops in Kramatorsk.
Reuters

“The world saw again these days that Russia lies even when it draws attention to the situation at the front with its own statements,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly video address.

“Russian shelling of Kherson with incendiary ammunition right after Christmas. The strikes on Kramatorsk and other cities of the Donbas — aimed right at civilian sites and right when Moscow was reporting the supposed ‘silence’ of its army.”

Russia had declared a 36-hour cease-fire timed to coincide with Orthodox Christmas celebrations on Saturday. Ukraine denounced the pause as a ploy.

Ukraine’s attack in Makiivka was one of the deadliest attacks on the Russian forces since the war began.
AP

Russia said the attack on Kramatorsk was in retaliation for the Ukrainian rockets that destroyed a facility in Makiivka, also in the eastern Donetsk region, where Russian soldiers were gathered in the early hours of Jan. 1. It was one of the deadliest attacks on the Kremlin’s forces since the war began more than 10 months ago.

Also on Sunday, the Ukrainian military claimed to have hit a residential hall of a medical university in Rubizhne, a town in the Russian-occupied eastern Luhansk region, killing 14 Russian soldiers housed there. The number of wounded was unknown, it said.

Elsewhere in the east, Donetsk Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said one person was killed in strikes on Bakhmut, and eight others were wounded. The battles for Bakhmut and the nearby town of Soledar remained among the bloodiest on the front, Zelensky said.

In the northeastern Kharkiv region, the town of Merefa was hit during the night, killing one person, and two other settlements in the region were shelled, Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said.

Russia and Ukraine exchanged prisoners Sunday, swapping 50 on each side, according to Konashenkov, the spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, and Andriy Yermak, head of the Ukrainian president’s office.

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NASA’s Bill Nelson talks Artemis I test flight before launch

It’s not exactly the most ringing endorsement of NASA.

The head of the space agency warned Sunday that a test flight of the unmanned moon rocket Artemis I might not go according to plan as NASA readied for its launch Monday.

“You can expect in a test flight that everything is not going to go as you expect it to. That’s part of a test flight,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson insisted to NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“That’s part of, for example, developing aircraft. That’s why you have a test pilot,’’ he said.

“But we’re pretty confident about this,” Nelson added.

Nelson explained that during a test launch “everything is not going to go as you expect it to.”
AP Photo/John Raoux

Nelson’s comments come at a crucial juncture for the space agency. If the moon rocket is successful during its six-week flight into lunar orbit, it could lead to astronauts returning to the moon in a few years.

“This time we’re going back, we’re going to live there, we’re going to learn there,’’ he said of men on the moon.

“We’re going to develop new technologies, all of this so we can go to Mars with humans.”
Nelson said the goal is to develop ways to live on other worlds.

“They may be floating worlds, they may be the surface of Mars,” Nelson said. “But this is just part of our push outward, our quest to explore, to find out what’s out there in this universe.”

The Artemis 3 Orion crew module that could be used to eventually land on the moon if the Artemis I is successful.
Photo by Pat Benic/UPI/Shutterstock

Three test dummies will be strapped in for the Artemis I mission, which NASA is forging ahead with the take-off Monday despite a series of lightning strikes at the launch pad.

“This first flight is a test. We test it, we stress it,” Nelson told host Chuck Todd. “We make this rocket and the spacecraft do things that we would never do with a human crew.

“The main purpose of the flight is to test the heat shield because you can’t test that in a lab. So if the heat shield survives and does what it is expected to do, it’s a successful test.”

Meanwhile, Nelson, a former US senator from Florida, insisted that despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “inexcusable” invasion of Ukraine, NASA’s cooperation with Russia at the International Space Station “doesn’t miss a beat,” including with continued crew exchanges.

“Despite the horrors that are going on in Ukraine, the professionalism, the relationship between the astronauts and the cosmonauts on board the International Space Station, as well as our two mission controls, one in Houston, one in Moscow, it doesn’t miss a beat,” Nelson said.

Weighing in on NASA’s race with China to the south pole of the moon, Nelson added that he doesn’t want the Chinese to arrive first and then claim the territory belongs only to them.

“That’s what I’ve said all along, that we’re in a space race. And we want to get to the south pole of the moon where the resources are, where we think water is,” Nelson said.

“If there’s water, there’s rocket fuel. And we don’t want China suddenly getting there and saying, ‘This is our exclusive territory.’ ”

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