To that end, the founder of SpaceX has mustered about 1,000 workers to a remote, beachy, and muddy strip of land at the southeastern tip of Texas called Boca Chica.

SpaceX's goal is to rapidly develop a fully reusable steel rocket system called Starship that — if the idea pans out as Musk envisions — could slash the cost of sending anything to space, including people, by 100- to 10,000-fold.

Providing a stark contrast to the next-generation rocket facility, however, is a small community of retiree-age people who live or overwinter adjacent to SpaceX, some of whom bought homes in the area decades before the aerospace company existed (and they don't much care for the occasional explosion of prototypes).

At that time, SpaceX workers descended upon Boca Chica to develop the company's land into a rudimentary launch pad and construct the first Starship spaceship prototype, called Starhopper, to test out a brand-new Raptor rocket engine.

This above before-and-and after animation shows how much the launch zone of SpaceX's facility — which is where it fuels, test-fires, and sometimes flies prototypes — has morphed over time.

("Super Heavy" is a fully reusable booster that'd fly a Starship spaceship on top a good way toward orbit before landing back at the launch pad for refueling an reuse in subsequent Starship launches.).

As Musk told Ars Technica in March, the goal is to develop processes and build out factory space that can crank out one flight-ready Starship per week in Boca Chica.

His email almost immediately followed the successful launch of its first astronauts aboard a long-awaited Crew Dragon spaceship, which SpaceX designed and built with NASA's help.

The property was sold to SpaceX in early 2020, and it's a model home for a planned community of the 1960s and 1970s called Kopernik Shores.

There is currently no municipal water line to Boca Chica, so SpaceX (and residents) have it delivered by truck and stored in cisterns.

As Business Insider first reported in September 2019, SpaceX earned FAA approval to change its original (and now very dated) plans for the site: from a commercial satellite launch facility into an experimental Mars-rocket development site and spaceport