Towering hundreds of feet above the dunes of Boca Chica Beach, an American flag the size of a two-car garage ripples dramatically, hung from a crane beside a pair of launchpad towers built for the largest rockets ever constructed. In the fading sunlight, it’s a properly patriotic backdrop for the squat stage serving as the center of today’s Fourth of July celebrations.
A live rock band gives way to a young local singer with a surprisingly mature voice. After she belts out the national anthem and state representative Janie Lopez delivers an exhaustive opening prayer, the mayor of Starbase takes the stage.
Bobby Peden, who’s also a vice president at SpaceX, tells the crowd what it took to get the beach ready for today’s party. He shouts out Gulf Coast Contractors, the Harlingen firm run by the family of country singer Charley Crockett, who hails from the Rio Grande Valley. “They’ve been working relentlessly to clean this beach up,” Peden says. “They’ve been pulling out tires and parts of cars and chunks of wood.”
He doesn’t mention how dramatically SpaceX itself has transformed this area, 25 miles from Brownsville. What was once a scenic, remote haven for birds, turtles, and idiosyncratic human residents has been remade by the industrial powerhouse next door. Steel and concrete debris have been hurled onto the beach after launches and explosions.
Founded by Elon Musk, SpaceX arrived in Boca Chica in 2014, bought out nearly everyone in the existing village, and bulldozed properties to build its spaceport and rocket factory. Last year 220 residents of the community—most of them SpaceX employees—voted to incorporate as the City of Starbase. Thousands work here. I’ve been repeatedly told that everybody from members of the company’s kitchen staff to the executive suite have signed nondisclosure agreements.
Next to address the crowd is state Senator Adam Hinojosa. “There’s something especially meaningful about celebrating America’s birthday here at Starbase,” he says. “The same nation that crossed the Delaware, settled the frontier, and landed on the moon is once again reaching toward the stars.”
It’s hard not to agree with the sentiment that Starbase seems an apt spot for marking 250 years of the American experiment. The company town is cited both as the best and worst of our country. Observers look at what’s been done here and see what they want to: a dedicated team of engineers breaking their backs to chase a Martian dream, a financial speculation built on unproven claims, a renegade science hero trying to save the world, an unrestrained playground for the world’s richest man, or, on July 4 especially, the throbbing nerve center of American exceptionalism.
I arrived expecting a party mainly for Musk’s employees and their families, but I find that residents of nearby Brownsville have responded in droves to SpaceX’s invitation to its second annual July 4 event. In a post on X, Starbase will later thank “the thousands of attendees from across the Rio Grande Valley who joined us.”
A band performing in the shadow of SpaceX’s launchpads. Photograph by Michael Gonzalez 
The crowd gathered (and parked) on Boca Chica Beach. Photograph by Michael Gonzalez
Many of the company’s four thousand local workers live in Brownsville, so the distinction between “community” and “employee pool” is getting blurry. But while it’s possible that every arriving vehicle contains a SpaceXer and brood, it doesn’t seem like it when I talk with folks on the beach.
“This is much bigger than last year, and set up better,” says 33-year-old Brownsville resident Nikole Monk. Her hair is held back with a red, white, and blue bow, and her ears are adorned with vertical U-S-A earrings. “There are eight bathrooms, and we didn’t have any last year. Also, there are food vendors this time.”
Monk works in the children’s ministry of Brownsville’s First Baptist Church and only became interested in the company because several of the kids’ parents are employed at SpaceX. “We can launch to space from U.S. soil again because of them,” she says. “That’s a big deal.” She goes out of her way to add that SpaceX “does a lot for the community that you don’t hear about in the media.”
The company may need reservoirs of such goodwill when it comes to beach-loving locals as it ramps up flight testing here to meet internal and NASA deadlines. SpaceX has planned monthly launches of its orbital Starship rocket, which is racing to be the lander that ferries astronauts to the lunar surface during NASA’s first return trip to the moon, scheduled for 2028. (Not to mention the agency’s stated goal of beating China there.) Boca Chica will be closed not only for those liftoffs but also across the days of testing that precede them.
The state legislature gave Starbase the ability to close Texas Highway 4, the only way to the beach, but by law, the road must remain open on holidays. SpaceX has turned this restriction into a tradition. There’s little science fiction flavor to the celebration, onstage or off. There are no garish astro-themed outfits, handmade signs asking for rides to Mars, or dogs wearing alien-antenna headbands, as you’d find in the crowd at a SpaceX launch.
Darrell Waggerby runs boat tours on the Rio Grande.Photograph by Michael Gonzalez
Amid the frolicking families and pontificating politicians, I run across a shirtless Darrell Waggerby. He’s part of an oft-ignored subset of the Boca Chica community: the seekers, artists, and entrepreneurs who lurk in the shadows of the launchpads, drawn to the rockets but kept outside the gates. He gave me a Twisted Tea, which I drank while watching him trying to give slices of pizza to strangers and screaming “America, f— yeah!” to the few brave enough to wear flamboyantly patriotic outfits.
Last year Waggerby quit his job as a land surveyor in Oregon and moved to the Brownsville area, where he runs boat tours of Starbase along the Rio Grande. We discuss “the people of the beach,” those who come here without a direct affiliation with SpaceX. He puts them in broad categories: those who arrive already obsessed with spaceflight and those who think they’re going to meet or marry Elon Musk.
“There’s also the people that show up here because they are lost,” Waggerby continues. “They just keep driving, go as far south as they can, and find themselves on this beach. Then they meet people like us who are having a fantastic time, who are here for the rockets, for the future. And they kind of stick around.”
Others are not so smitten. Operations in South Texas have generated backlash against the company’s rapid expansion and explosive test methodology. SpaceX and Texas’s General Land Office have been the targets of a lawsuit over beach access by environmentalist groups and a Native American tribe. So far the company has prevailed in court. Musk’s foray into national politics, spending hundreds of millions to put Donald Trump back in the White House and then being granted carte blanche to dismantle entire federal agencies in a chainsaw-waving spectacle, has also turned many off to SpaceX.
Trying to blunt any local damage to the company’s reputation is John Dillon, who works in the communications department. Today he’s handing out merch emblazoned with the SpaceX logo, for which dozens of half-naked beachgoers, mostly families, are lined up. “You want a T-shirt? How about a hat?” he barks at passersby. “Come get ’em. They’re free.”
John Dillon of the SpaceX communications team handing out company merch. Photograph by Michael Gonzalez 
SpaceX vice president and Starbase Mayor Bobby Peden addressing the crowd ahead of the fireworks show. Photograph by Michael Gonzalez
Wearing a black cap with a white SpaceX logo, Dillon is in a good mood that doesn’t seem spoiled by the day’s oppressive weather (heat index of 110 degrees). The July 4 beach party represents a high-water mark in the company’s outreach efforts. Before Starbase’s birth, in 2025, there were no fireworks displays held here, so SpaceX and its town can take rightful credit for the event.
SpaceX has been on a low-level charm offensive in Brownsville of late. In June the company awarded ten $10,000 scholarships to students in the city’s schools. The recipients were chosen through an essay contest that asked, “If selected as a crew member on a Starship mission to the Moon, who would you bring with you and why?” Each winner also got a tour of the SpaceX factory.
The Musk Foundation has already routed $20 million to Cameron County schools and $10 million to Brownsville for downtown revitalization. In late June, SpaceX officials attended a ribbon cutting for improvements to Andy Bowie Park, on South Padre Island, for which the company contributed $2 million.
But these efforts sail over the heads of most residents, who may see benefits but experience no personal impact. A Fourth of July event is a relatively low-dollar investment for the company but a high-profile event for locals. Arrange for seaside fireworks and you’ve given their families a memory. Give one a free hat and you’ve recruited a public supporter.
At about 9 p.m., the fireworks start. By then I’m heat-worn and a touch maudlin. Being a social lamprey swimming alongside other people’s genuine experiences can make one feel isolated and grotesque. Or maybe I should blame the Twisted Tea.
I set up a folding chair alone in the sand and watch the arcs of rising missiles and artful explosions, admiring the size of the ordnance. But I’m envisioning the glare of the spacecraft that routinely leaves this beach under 17 million pounds of thrust, and the repeated bursting of 165-foot-tall prototypes in the air here. Counting myself among Waggerby’s category of the rocket-obsessed, that’s my kind of party.
Then the snatches of conversation filter over to me from a pair of twentysomething guys standing nearby. They’re watching the fireworks but not really paying attention. Instead, an awkward exchange is underway. They are both SpaceX employees, one older and querying the other about adjusting to life at Starbase.
Fireworks filling the July 4 sky above Boca Chica Beach—mild explosions compared to those resulting from SpaceX’s rocket launches here in recent years.Photograph by Michael Gonzalez
I only catch fragments of the conversation, between their head turns and the firework explosions. There are discussions of insatiable workload and inevitable burnout, and the advantages and frustrations of “working with the smartest people in the world.” The younger one wants to know how the other adjusted to life in Brownsville after starting at SpaceX’s former headquarters in Los Angeles. These are questions I’d love to put to employees myself, instead of eavesdropping, except that when I have, I’ve been reminded of those NDAs.
I hear the older one say clearly: “What did coming here do to your ideas about problem-solving?” What a weird thing to ask someone during a fireworks show, I think. It would sound stiff during a corporate performance evaluation.
The bloodless, efficient thought process they’re sharing sounds a little alien, the product of being immersed in an environment with those who all think the same way. Maybe the rest of us appear like muttering children to SpaceXers—never getting to the point, seldom adding anything of obvious value to a conversation.
But these two SpaceX employees are just talking shop. This may be a public space, per the Open Beaches Act, but somehow I’m the interloper. So are the Brownsville residents, even those related to employees. We’ll go home, and they’ll go back to business. It’s a nice party, but also a message, softly delivered. This is SpaceX’s beach now.
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