The vast majority of the people vote to turn the base into a local government.
The Texas community in the southern US, home to SpaceX for technology billionaire Elon Musk, will be renamed Starbase after residents (almost all employees) support the move to formally organize the city.
On Saturday, 212 of the nearly 300 residents eligible to vote were in favor of the changes at the Bocacica Bay site, adjacent to Mexico, with just six to just six.
Bobby Peden, vice president of testing and launch on SpaceX, has also been confirmed as mayor. He was the only name on the vote.
Official documents show that nearly 500 people live around a Cameron County base, which is primarily on land owned by SpaceX or its employees.
“Starbase, Texas,” Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he owns. “It’s a real city now!”
The vote has come at a difficult time for Musk, a leading donor to US President Donald Trump and a supporter of European far-right groups. The South African-born entrepreneur is expected to reduce his role as the so-called informal head of government efficiency and instead focus more on Tesla, the troubled electric car company.
It was Musk who proposed the name Starbase in a social media post during a visit to the facility – a key test location for the company’s rocket launch four years ago. Then last December, the general manager of SpaceX Kathryn Lueders appealed to local governments to grant local government status to the site.
Although the vote on Saturday was unquestionable, the change allows Starbase to collect taxes and write local laws while controlling, allowing and avoiding other regulatory hurdles.
However, not everyone is cheerful about the outlook for SpaceX town.
Bekah Hinojosa, co-founder of the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, has expressed concern about environmental impacts and warned of more “destroy.”
“They will attempt to dump more illegally, build dangerous rocket operations, cause more seismic activity, shake our homes, and destroy more wildlife habitats in the area,” she told AFP news agency before the election.
Several reports from 2024 stated that SpaceX rockets damaged wild bird nests. In response, Musk had said on social media at the time: “To make up for this heinous crime, I will refrain from eating omelets for a week.”
Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency and Texas officials also discovered that SpaceX was responsible for repeated spills and the release of contaminants into Texas waterways.
In a letter in December, Lueders claimed that SpaceX is already maintaining infrastructure on the site, including roads, educational services and healthcare.
She promised that the creation of a new city would not undermine the company’s efforts to mitigate the environmental impact of the base.
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