Kathy Lueders hears the question often in her capacity as general manager of Starbase’s operations at Boca Chica Beach.

“When are we going to Mars?” Lueders said to an audience recently in Harlingen on the Texas State College campus. “I don’t know exactly when but I do know that one day out of the Rio Grande Valley there will be a Starship going to Mars.”

Lueders’ talk was titled “Space Talk with SpaceX” and was hosted by the Harlingen Economic Development Corporation. In her one-hour talk, Lueders touched on a range of subjects from going to the moon and Mars to more pressing everyday concerns like improving the condition of the state highway leading to the ever-growing Starbase complex. 

Lueders says what she called “Starbase Village” – a community of over 2,000 SpaceX employees and where another 1,000 contracted workers visit daily – is poised for significant expansion. A one-million-square-foot factory is under construction and will allow SpaceX to have much of what is needed onsite to build its nearly 500-foot-high Starship rockets. SpaceX plans to add a second launch pad site at Starbase. A large office building is going up to consolidate more of SpaceX’s staff and employees at Boca Chica. 

There will also be more housing, coffee shops, restaurants and even dog parks to flesh out what is essentially an emerging new city in southern Cameron County. The ultimate goal is to use a once remote beach as the site from which designs and spacecraft are manufactured to get man back on the moon and beyond – to Mars.

“It’s all to get us ready to start meeting the production and launch rates we need to reach our goals,” she said.

‘Gracefully Fail’

Lueders gave her Harlingen audience a bit of a history lesson.

She noted that SpaceX began building in Boca Chica almost a decade ago. It has gone through various iterations. What would become Starbase originally had relatively modest goals of being a site for research and testing. Its ambitions today are otherworldly with aspirations of space travel and the world’s tallest rocket launch tower looking out to the Gulf of Mexico.

SpaceX is a commercial space transportation and communications company. Its big picture aim, Lueders said, is to “get space transportation cost down to a reasonable goal,” meaning the reuse of rockets and components for more than one mission. SpaceX wants frequent launches and fast turnaround times with the capability to “return our hardware and being able to use it again,” Lueders said.

Getting to that objective means lots of testing and experimentation, and ultimately, more than a few failures. It runs counterintuitive to Lueders’ decades-long career at NASA, where she was an associate administrator. At NASA, failures were often seen as being a waste of government resources. At SpaceX, she says, the company seeks to ‘’gracefully fail.” Its employees are trained to learn and grow from mistakes and “move on to the next thing,” as shown from its first three rocket launches at Boca Chica.

“We’re trying to build something that hasn’t been done before,” Lueders said. “From each one of our orbital missions, we’ve used them to learn and do more than the last mission.”

Permanent Home

Starship’s three flight tests from Boca Chica all successfully launched and from there reached differing levels of success.

The first launch occurred on April 20, 2023 and reached an altitude of 24 miles before Starship broke up and disintegrated over the Gulf of Mexico. The second test occurred about seven months later on Nov. 18. All 39 engines of the rocket lit and there was successful separation of what SpaceX calls the super heavy booster and the spacecraft attached to it upon liftoff.

On March 14, the third launch got Starship to its first ascension to space before the spacecraft was lost during its re-entry to Earth. SpaceX is working diligently toward receiving the necessary Federal Aviation Administration approval for its fourth test launch. It hopes to do so by the end of June, Lueders said.

It wasn’t all talks of rockets and space during her talk to the Harlingen audience at TSTC. Lueders also spoke of how Starbase is working to incorporate its employees into community life. Group company activities have included beach cleanups and sea turtle rescues. Starbase employees have settled or previously lived in communities across Cameron County. Lueders says sufficient housing is a critical need for her employees, as is improving the roadway infrastructure leading to the complex.

“How do you prepare for this type of development that wasn’t there before?” she asked of the challenges facing local and state governments in coping with Starbase’s rapid growth. “Improving traffic flow and moving supplies efficiently are critical issues for us.”

All of that and more will need to be addressed. The permanence of SpaceX in the Valley is such that Lueders flatly stated, “Starbase is going to be the home of Starship.”