SpaceX Looks to Build a Resort at Boca Chica
Having driven out most residents of Boca Chica Village, SpaceX is now looking to develop a resort adjacent to its Starship launch and test facility in Texas.
“Boca Chica Village is our latest launch site dedicated to Starship, our next generation launch vehicle. SpaceX is committed to developing this town into a 21st century Spaceport. We are looking for a talented Resort Development Manager to oversee the development of SpaceX’s first resort from inception to completion,” the advertisement said.
The announcement is below.
Resort Development Manager
Brownsville, TX, United States
SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not. Today SpaceX is actively developing the technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal of enabling human life on Mars.
RESORT DEVELOPMENT MANAGER
SpaceX is committed to developing revolutionary space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets. Boca Chica Village is our latest launch site dedicated to Starship, our next generation launch vehicle. SpaceX is committed to developing this town into a 21st century Spaceport. We are looking for a talented Resort Development Manager to oversee the development of SpaceX’s first resort from inception to completion.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Manage the design, architecture and construction of the project.
- Provide the final cost and schedule for the project and implement cost controls.
- Obtain all city, county, governmental approvals and coordinate all of the field work, act in the capacity of a project superintendent.
- Coordinate and confirm the project specifications with the user and maintain the quality and workmanship of the project.
- Expedite and resolve issues that may occur during construction and track all project changes.
- Complete the project closeout package including the generation of the punch list, “as built” plans, O&M booklets, city approved plans and inspection cards.
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:
- Bachelor’s degree.
- 5+ years experience in construction project management.
PREFERRED SKILLS:
- Experience bringing teams and processes from development to production.
- Excellent concentration and attention to detail with outstanding work efficiency and accuracy.
- Strong leadership skills.
- Experience working for high end brand luxury development.
- Experience developing in areas with no previous infrastructure.
- Safety training and/or safety certifications.
- Experience monitoring, tracking and continually improving total cost equation.
- Able to adapt to constant changing work assignments and fast paced work environment.
ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS:
- Willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed.
- Able to travel for short and extended trips as needed (up to 10% travel).
ITAR REQUIREMENTS:
- To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) you must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.
32 responses to “SpaceX Looks to Build a Resort at Boca Chica”
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If someone paying more than the market rate for a property is being driven out than I hope I get driven out. ?
These were vacation/retirement residences. You need that sort of payment to have any hope of finding anything comparable.
SpaceX weren’t very good neighbors. Hey, we’re doing a test at between 8 p.m. and midnight and if it fails the windows in your house could be broken. Please go outside when you hear the warning signal. It would best if you evacuate the area entirely, actually.
Oh, that will be true for the next five days because we don’t know when we’ll actually test. We’re shutting down the beach, too. I know we told the FAA the beach would only be closed maybe 12 times per year. But, we’re going to Mars, dammit.
Trust me. I live next to a spaceport with a substantial rocket test area.
Yeah…I feel bad for the Boca Chica folks. But, living in a trailer park, I can tell you that having new neighbors move in next to you with constantly barking dogs or loud music and/or TV playing at all hours can make your life just as miserable as SX did.
And without offering to buy you out at price well above the appraisal value of your trailer because of it.
Yeah. Beam me to Boca Chica, Scotty.
Yes, according to this article Elon Musk is offering the residents three times the appraised value, which is probably far higher that what they bought the property for. Sweet deal!
https://www.brownsvillehera…
Flying high: SpaceX plans for luxury resort
Steve Clark – August 12, 2020
“The Hawthorne, Calif.-based company has offered owners three times the appraised value of their properties in order to convince them to move.”
I know you are not familiar with South Texas not having travelled here (I have even before SpaceX) but there are a number of similar areas along the Gulf coast with properties available.You could even get a Condo in South Padre for around $200,000 so the amount they reportedly received was very good for the area.
BTW do you know the original version of Boca Chica, Kopernik Shores, was seriously damaged by Hurricane Beulah? It’s why most of the buildings in Boca Chica don’t have potable water even today, the water system was never rebuilt. And only a few folks actually live there. Here are some notes on it from before the SpaceX era.
http://www.texasescapes.com…
https://tshaonline.org/hand…
Industrial and infrastructure projects constantly displace residential developments, this in no difference. Indeed, the number of those impacted by SpaceX at Boca Chica are far less than with most infrastructure projects. And they made out far better than when the government uses eminent domain to buy homes out.
Bait and switch. Told FAA and residents one thing, then did another that made living there miserable. Now they’ve appropriated the name — Boca Chica Village — and will use it for their resort.
The houses had external water tanks. I’ve seen them on Google Street Views.
What if you don’t want to go from a house to some condo?
Than you just buy a house which is usually much cheaper. Check out home prices at Port Mansfield just up the coast. Yes the Boca Chica houses have water tanks and you have to pay for trucks to fill those tanks up which is expensive.
Yes, Elon would have been better off locating it at the old Matagorda launch site, more room and better launch corridors to use.
As for bait and switch. Wasn’t Mojave only a simple airport at one time? And then folks started to be endangered by Scaled Composites testing launch vehicles.
Now now Douglas, the poor need to make way for the rich and powerful. It’s bad when a government does it, but it’s good when private enterprise does it. Or …. whatever you call SpaceX given all the government money it lives on …. Whatever. Those people were in the way. They should just go someplace else.
The best you could hope for was if they banded together, hired a high priced law firm to represent them and extract a price out of SpaceX far out of proportion to normal market value. The property means far more to SpaceX than it does to the residents in monetary terms. If they played their cards right, they might have had a hope of getting SpaceX to pay what the property meant to SpaceX. That’s really all you can hope for.
That would be a dangerous game as there are only a couple dozen owners of vacation homes and maybe 4-6 who actually live there. By contrast SpaceX is creating hundreds if not thousands of jobs in one of the poorest regions of the state. The county judges, who have lots of power in Texas, could take the land by eminent domain and only pay the owners the appraised value which is less that what Elon Musk is reportedly offering them.
And folks that own a second vacation house wouldn’t be considered that poor by locals in relation to the workers who would be working at facility. The use of eminent domain of course would be the socialist approach that big corporations would have used. Something would expect the Chinese to do. But Elon Musk is actually trying to do right by them.
Listen to the freedom loving, respecting member of American society who’s supposed to be the guardian of the concept of private property school me, the socialist as he would call me, on how the government can take land from private property owners and hand it over to a corporation to further enrich themselves. Who than goes further to admonish me not to use the legal methods of negotiations to extract better terms for the lesser party. Well, you’re right Prof Matula, but look in the mirror at yourself as you enjoy your smug victory.
Again you confuse ideology with the real world analysis. Governments use eminent domain all the time for infrastructure projects. The China socialist economic model you praise so often does it without any second thoughts “for the public good” when an American corporation wants a factory site
Which is why Elon Musk choosing not to ask Cameron County to do so and instead making very generous offers while negotiating with the residents should be praised and not characterize as “driving them off” returning to the topic of this thread.
You confuse my admitting they’re winning with praising. You know what pisses me off? When American business men get that treatment in China, then bring the practice back here, and are successful. Up until 2005 use of eminent domain to clear land of pesky land owners so a corporation can make more money at the expense of the owner. I don’t praise the Chinese hybrid of state power and capitalism, I fear it. But the people who are bringing it here are the very people you put forward as the paragon of our society. And they have this great deal to offer us all. Accept a slow drip of use of state power to enrich corporate enterprises here, or they’ll simply go someplace else where they can get what they want. Every time people like me want to sue state power to blunt that process, people like you cry libertarian freedom of markets. Before 2005 Musk would have been thrown in jail for going to Cameron County to muscle those pesky land owners out of their homes the way Doug described.
As a compromise to the process I’d propose that anyone forced out of their land by eminant domain to make room for a profit making enterprise have some legal way to obtain risk free shares of the profits that emanate from the enterprise associated with the property taken. There needs to be a deterrent to a commercial enterprise using the legal system to force people off their land in the name of economic development. Corporations are not elected to office, and they don’t exist for the public good. There’s not even a pretense.
It’s not new, communities have been using eminent domain to encourage economic development for many decades. In the early 1960’s the county use eminent domain to buy my grandparents farm so they could build a shopping center next to the new interstate highway. It was actually a good thing as they were too old to keep farming and were able to get a nice house in town with it.
Gee, when you talk about China you sound just like President Trump.?
You know he also breathes oxygen, and likes big macs. I do too. Doesn’t mean he has my vote. The actions he’s taking are at the periphery of the problem. I do actually like the actions he says he’s going to take against the IT contracts of the TVA. But I’d bet lunch he does not go thru with it.
This admin’s actions with regards to China are almost nothing. What rally needs to be done is levying fines against corporations that are unsuccessful at defending themselves against intellectual property theft, treating foreign government assistance as taxable income, and holding individuals of the corporate board financially liable to damages done to the US economy by the actions of their ventures overseas and the effects of the theft of their enterprise. If they can’t effectively defend themselves against theft in a nation they want to operate in, holding them liable for their losses is the only way to deter them from going in.
I agree with your compromise idea except for the little “risk free” part you threw in there. There’s always risk, and a “share” means you share in the risk as well as the potential rewards.
But shares in addition to an above market value payout (to compensate for moving expenses, time and money spent searching for an equivalent place, the disruption of one’s life, the very real stress one would be put through, etc.) might be a good compromise
Don’t forget eminent domain gives the displaced no choice in the matter. It’s silly to ask the displaced to share the risk of the enterprise on a basis of force. Because of that force, it’s too much to ask them to shoulder risk on behalf of the shareholders who are going to benefit greatly from the forced sacrifice of the displaced.
i don’t forget at all. Eminent domain sucks. But, giving someone a share in an enterprise means that they become a shareholder. The enterprise can grow tremendously, grow slightly, stagnate, slowly bleed or spectacularly fail – a shareholder gets a share of that. In your above post, you assume that “the shareholders…are going to benefit greatly”, but such outcome is in no way guaranteed – the preexisting shareholders may well have bought themselves a money pit, or a time bomb.
Anyway, since the former property owners would be given the shares (as part of their compensation for losing their property), they don’t really risk any additional loses. Even if the share value falls from where it was when they obtained it, they don’t have to actually pay anything or have any money taken away from them. They just have less additional compensation beyond their above-market-value cash payout for their property (in our scenario).
The only way I can see off the top of my head that they would face the possibility of actual losses (i.e., actually have to pay out money) would be if the shares were shares in a partnership without liability protection. In such case, it could be a condition that the property-buying partnership form a corporation (of which a portion of shares would be given) prior to the property sellers signing over the deeds to their properties. Perhaps this is what you meant by “risk free shares” in your initial post
Keep in mind that only about 6 people (2-3 households) actually live there. Most of the homes in Boca Chica are vacation homes only occupied occasionally by folks living in Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, etc., hence the dislocation costs are very minimal for most of them.
And why do you expect Elon Musk, who has already gone far beyond what is expected, to do more? How about the folks in your community that were and will be displaced by government infrastructure projects and commercial ventures? Why aren’t you speaking up for them? Why aren’t you demanding the local government give them a percentage of the revenue generated by those projects forever?
Really, this is just more billionaire bashing by Doug. Remember, if it wasn’t for those “billionaire” entrepreneurs we would still be living in homes with mud floors writing with a burnt stick on a slab of wood. The technology of modern life didn’t come from the government which only started funding research in a big way after WWII to support the military in the Cold War, but from individual inventors and entrepreneurs.
Calm down, man
Prof. M. isn’t the one who’s overheated here.
The process you describe was pioneered by Democratic mayors looking to kiss up to big corporate donors while conducting their ceaseless war on small businesses and ordinary citizens who had better uses for their money than paying baksheesh to local office-holding crooks who define “public good” as whatever puts the most money in their pockets.
Kelo vs. City of New London was one of the worst U.S. Supreme Court decisions since Dred Scott vs. Sandford and Plessy vs. Ferguson. It was a 5-4 decision and the majority were Justices Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer – all a lot closer to you, politically, than to me or Prof. M.
And, as Prof. M. repeatedly points out, while Elon could have used local government and eminent domain as a cudgel, he didn’t.
You bring up some good points, specifically the point that holding out would have been a dangerous game, but count me in among those who say eminent domain sucks, and the threat of it is bullshit
Yes, it does, which is why Elon Musk should be praised for not using it as most corporations would but instead making them very generous offers for their land.
Yes, the houses have water tanks. Tom M. just explained why that is. Maybe the now mostly departed former full-time residents of BocaChica Village – all dozen or so of them – could pass along the name of their water tank contractor to the remaining residents of Flint, MI?
At least one of those BCV residents – Boca Chica Gal – who may well be the last such still actually resident there, has become a behind-the-camera media star.
I don’t agree with “driven out”. “Intruded upon and settled with” would be accurate.
As for the resort being a bad thing, well, the word “resort” is a bit grating, but I’d guess it’s basically the same thing as like an airport development project, but private, and for space travel instead of air travel.
But an airport has to have all their concessions and transportation links/services and hotel rooms, rental cars, Club member lounges, bars, restaurants, attractive areas to walk through or take a rest, viewing areas with views of the runways – possibly additional attractions (I know of one airport with an indoor skating rink, for example). It’s all a way to extract additional money for the people that made the investment/took the financial risk to build the airport, but it’s also a way to provide things that people actually want. Additionally, it’s a way to provide local jobs and expand the local tax base – yeah, it’s common stuff. This is how big projects get built anymore. A football stadium isn’t just a bunch of stands around a field anymore – it’s an entire operation designed to extract additional money from vistors in various ways, but it also provides an entire “experience” (lol) with various goods and services available that people actually want as well as jobs for the local area.
I imagine it’ll be somewhat like what Virgin Galactic has set up at Spaceport America in New Mexico, but without asking the state and local governments to pay for it
Bought out at a big profit would be even more accurate. Those folks are making a nice ROI on their real estate investments, no need to shed any tears over it. They could have lost their investments in a single hurricane and be begging the government for help rebuilding. They came out of this deal good.
If a cat 5 comes through there will not be much left.
Not even cat 5, a cat 2 would be enough. The land is only 3ft above sea level. The community and resort that was there in the 1960’s was wiped out by a Hurricane and eventually one will wipe out what is there again, which is why 90% of the homes are only used as vacation homes. It is also why he should have built on the old Matagorda airfield launch site.
Georgia’s Camden County spaceport is long-delayed because we’ve observed that the FAA’s dual mandate exposes the public to abuses by commercial operators. The FAA cannot be counted on to protect preexisting conditions like residences, National Parks, and sensitive, even rare, accessible wild places. All of those things are important, especially when alternative non-invasive sites are available.
SpaceX simply chose the location where their costs were lowest and the politicians hungriest. In Georgia, we protect places like Boca Chica and Little Cumberland Island because the Georgia Constitution prohibits the use of eminent domain for commercial benefit. The FAA ignored that when they entertained the first-time-ever launches over resident US private property and residences, campers, and a national historic site. Camden citizens have had to remind the FAA that we’re their responsibility, too.
Boca Chica is very very different than Little Cumberland Island. It has a long history of commercial development (you see the old foundations when you visit it) which gets destroyed by Hurricanes every generation or two. Then someone tries a new commercial venture, like SpaceX, which eventually gets blown away when the next big hurricane, or the next Rio Grande river flood, or hurricane storm surge, reshapes it. The land actually worth protecting along the Texas coast is further up north and is already protected by South Padre National Seashore and the King Ranch.
Here is an interesting story about it from 2001. Boca Chica Village was basically a ghost town then not having been rebuilt since the last hurricane. The current residents moved in after this visit.
https://www.texasmonthly.co…
A generation from now, after another big hurricane or two, there will be little evidence of SpaceX having been there, except for a few more eroding foundations, unless Elon decides to build a huge sea wall around it.
That is why the folks proposing the South Texas Spaceport, who I knew, were planning to build it up the coast in Willacy County. Unlike Elon Musk they were familiar with the area.