A few years ago, Boca Chica, Texas, was a forgettable little village at the point where the United States, Mexico and the ocean all meet. Now, its home to the worlds only private spaceport and the most ambitious project of maybe the most ambitious private company on the planet.

At its Boca Chica test site, Elon Musks SpaceX builds, launches and tries to land prototypes of its Starship, the vessel that the company hopes will transport people to the moon and to Mars and that could get you from New York to Shanghai in 40 minutes. If Musks ambitions are realized, Boca Chica wont be an unknown beach spot outside Brownsville for much longer. Itll be the gateway to Mars.

That could transform the area. At present, its hard to find statistics that flatter Brownsville. In the ZIP code that includes SpaceXs launch site, 36% of residents live below the federal poverty line, compared with 10.5% nationally. Median household income is $30,100, half the national figure, and 43% of residents didnt finish high school.

Early signs suggest, however, that SpaceX is making an impact. The company says it employs 3,000 people at the South Texas site, and hotels in South Padre, a few miles to the north, now do a steady trade in space tourism. Musk recently announced plans to donate $20 million to the areas schools and $10 million to downtown revitalization in Brownsville. Local leaders hope Brownsville will become Americas third space city, after Houston and Cape Canaveral, and perhaps one day overtake them in importance.

SpaceX is ramping up operations. The firm has bought two former oil rigs, which it will convert into offshore launch pads in Brownsvilles port, and it plans to drill for natural gas next door to the Boca Chica launch pad to create its own supply of rocket fuel and power. The launch site is expanding rapidly, and the company intends to turn Boca Chica into a 21st-century spaceport and develop SpaceXs first resort from inception to development. The company has a steady revenue source, and it plans to use that money to maintain its lead on the rest of the field. As SpaceX achieves breakthroughs at its Boca Chica site, its hard to see how the effects wont be felt in the local economy.

SpaceX is another good-news story for the Texas economy. Migration from California to Texas has entered warp speed in the last year or so because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Austin topped the list of cities that Americans moved to in 2020. According to census data, 687,000 Californians moved to the Lone Star State in the decade before the pandemic. Some of the most storied names in California tech, including Oracle and Hewlett-Packard Enterprises, have also moved their headquarters to Texas.

Commenting on what he called the tidal wave of businesses heading to Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott said, Cost of business means a lot. No income tax means a lot, but also the freedom to operate without the heavy hand of regulation means a lot.

Perhaps the most high-profile California transplant? Elon Musk, who announced his move late last year.

Texas pull factors are nothing new. It has had lower taxes, fewer rules, cheaper housing and other enticements for quite some time. What has changed is a progressive creep in California policymaking that treats free enterprise with ever more suspicion and, for all the West Coasts supposed emphasis on open-mindedness, fosters an increasingly intolerant intellectual and cultural climate. The California-versus-Texas debate is emblematic of the limitlessly ambitious, genuinely transformative form of innovation that these days feels a lot more Texan than Californian.

In The Decadent Society, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat ties the concept behind his books title, which he defines as a kind of cultural, economic and political stagnation that has plagued America for a generation, to a lack of extraterrestrial ambition. Where space once inspired awe, most Americans have, for decades, been decidedly indifferent toward the final frontier. Perhaps the progress being made by SpaceX, as well as the renewed interest in space travel more generally, is a sign that this is about to change.

Peter Thiel, a tech maverick like Musk, once famously complained that we wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters. But late in 2020, he told Forbes that COVID-19 was a giant watershed moment and that the pandemic year should be thought of as the first year of the 21st century. This is the year in which the new economy is actually replacing the old economy. Could it be that the 2010s were an underwhelming prelude to a roaring 2020s, built on real-world technological innovation?

If Thiel is right and an era of dynamism is just around the corner, men like Musk and companies like SpaceX will likely be at the heart of it. And, just as important, places like Brownsville, unlikely corners of the country with less to lose than Silicon Valley, could be the sites of a technological and industrial revolution.

Oliver Wiseman is an editor at The Critic. This piece was adapted for The Dallas Morning News from an essay that originally ran at City Journal.

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A tiny Texas town might be the gateway to Mars - The Dallas Morning News