Elon Musk is working on SpaceX's Mars rocket ship in Texas while other top executives flock to Davos. A local thinks the CEO is using an historic home as a crash pad â take a look inside.
Making it cheap to get humans and their stuff to and from space is no easy undertaking. But Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, is rushing to do just that at the southern tip of Texas.
Musk is so engrossed by the project, in fact, that his Twitter feed suggests he is skipping most of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, to which top executives typically flock. The SpaceX CEO is also crashing in a historic A-frame home to catch what rest he can between long slogs of work, according to at least one local resident.
Musk has been working late on an unprecedented rocket system called Starship. If realized, the final vehicle would be made of steel, stand 387 feet tall, and be fully reusable. Since most rockets today fall into the ocean after one use, Starship's reusability positions it to replace all other systems by slashing the cost of launching to space by more than 90%.
According to Musk, Starship would be even cheaper to operate per flight than SpaceX's own partly reusable Falcon 9 rockets. Where Falcon 9 costs the company tens of millions of dollars to fly up to 25 tons of payload, Starship might cost just $2 million to launch up to 100 tons, Musk said in November.
Such a system could deploy hundreds of SpaceX's next-generation Starlink internet satellites, heave gigantic telescopes into space for NASA, and ferry dozens of passengers into orbit at once. But Musk's big "aspirational" goals for Starship include sending the first cargo to Mars in 2022, launching the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and a crew of artists around the moon in 2023, and rocketing the first crewed mission to Mars in 2024.
"I think we could potentially see people fly next year," Musk said in September while unveiling a Starship prototype in Boca Chica, Texas, where SpaceX is building out a private launch site and basing its development program.
Musk now travels to South Texas at least monthly, according to social-media posts by Musk and others, for hands-on work toward launching the first Starship prototype, which he said might fly as soon as February or March.
During a visit in late December, Musk tweeted he was "up all night" working on the "most difficult part" of Starship's steel structure: the domed ends of 30-foot-wide propellant tanks. (Such a dome failed during a pressurization test weeks earlier, sending it flying hundreds of feet into the air and across a state highway.)
People who live in the area â and whom SpaceX is trying to buy out â find it hard to ignore Musk's presence, given his heavy security detail and onlookers who flock to their remote and formerly sleepy retiree-age beach community.
At least one resident, whose identity Business Insider has verified but who asked not to be named because of ongoing property-sale negotiations with SpaceX, said Musk almost certainly now crashes in an A-frame-style house that SpaceX recently acquired.
"It's perfect," the resident said, adding that the house is not only the nicest of about 30 homes in the area but also the only place that's "secluded and security-controlled."
Here's a look inside the home, which also has a special historic significance to the Boca Chica area.
